Introduction For many years, I was sure that losing weight was the answer to all my problems. Once I could fit into that dress or those jeans, I''d be happy, my career would take off, and I''d start dating. But only after I''d lost the weight. Only when I no longer looked like . this. Until then, I''d continue to panic every time someone took my picture, strategically placing my hands over the parts I hated. Or cropping the picture so only my face showed if my hands weren''t big enough to cover those parts. Until then, I''d cancel plans.

I''d shrink emotionally so people wouldn''t notice how big I felt physically. I''d continue to buy books on weight loss, exercise equipment, and diet food. One day I''d be happy, but not today, not until I lost this weight. Does this sound familiar? Losing weight has become a cultural obsession, made apparent by the fact that weight loss has grown into a billion-dollar industry. My guess is that if you picked up this book, it probably isn''t the first time you''ve paid for something to help you lose weight. Why does nothing seem to work? Why, when you have such a strong desire to lose weight, do your many attempts to shed the weight for good fall short? There''s clearly something missing, some hidden key to having a body you can feel proud of--but what is it? Is it exercising more, or doing a certain kind of exercise? Should you eat all carbs, or none at all? Vegan? High protein? In a world that''s constantly overwhelming you with contradictory information, what will finally make the difference in your quest to lose weight? It can be summed up in two words: your emotions. Your emotions control your beliefs about yourself, your weight, and your worth. They also control your actions.

Have you ever made a plan to eat healthy only to find yourself halfway through a box of cookies, thinking, Did I really do this . again? Your emotions are the driving force behind every action you take. You may know exactly what you "should" be doing, but you''re not doing it because your emotions sidetrack you. Emotions such as anger, fear, resentment, and guilt that are hijacking your best intentions are also impacting you on a deep biological level. Talking about this is an essential conversation that we''re not having. We hear so much about food and exercise, but what about the overproduction of cortisol, known as the "stress hormone," that is directly linked to abdominal obesity? The research is out there, but we''ve been conditioned to believe that weight loss is only about eating the right foods and exercising more. If we don''t succeed, we blame our genes--or worse, we believe that there''s something inherently broken about us. During many years of yo-yo dieting and unsuccessful attempts to keep the weight off, I, too, felt broken.

I masked it with my smile and my desire to please everyone around me, but behind closed doors I was crumpling up clean paper towels and placing them in the garbage to cover the wrappers of the multiple candy bars I''d just eaten. Like so many women who feel ashamed of their bodies and their weight, I was a closet emotional eater. It started when I was young. I remember my first solo binge so clearly. I was only seven, and I was faced with an entire plate covered rim to rim with chocolate chip cookies. I sat on the downstairs couch and ate the entire thing while listening closely to make sure no one was walking down the stairs. Even when I was that young, I already had the belief that what I was doing was shameful. That plate of cookies was the beginning of a years-long love/hate affair with chocolate and other sugary, and occasionally salty, treats.

For me the cravings were very real physical sensations that quickly overwhelmed my ability to reason with myself, or remember how sick I had felt last time. They came on suddenly and felt like a physical need that I had to fulfill. As that habit followed me into puberty, I found myself gaining weight, and then panicking and making desperate attempts to lose it. For brief periods of time, I devoted my every waking hour to dieting and extreme exercise. Starving myself and working out were my punishments for being fat. After losing a few pounds, I began to relax. Then, as if suffering from amnesia, I turned back to food. I''ve been so good.

I deserve this! I told myself. I''m so stressed out, let me just eat this one thing, I said to myself. Before long, I found myself looking at my reflection in the mirror, feeling defeated and heartbroken, overwhelmed by hatred, disappointment, and anger. As Einstein so famously said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Simply put, I was insane. My diets were insane. Belittling myself, shaming myself, and using guilt in an attempt to help me "get my act together" were all insane. Fortunately, in 2004 my oldest brother, Nick Ortner, introduced me to tapping, also called EFT tapping, a stress relief technique that involves tapping on acupressure points.

Tapping would eventually bring an end to the insanity that had ruled my weight loss and body confidence journey up to that point. To be quite frank, though, when I was first introduced to it, it was tapping itself that seemed insane to me. The first time Nick showed me what tapping was, I was so sure he was playing a practical joke on me that I refused to play along. When I finally gave in and tried it, I was shocked by how quickly I got results. After just ten minutes of tapping, a sinus cold I had at the time, which had been so severe that it had kept me in bed for two full days, disappeared. I remember being shocked that after tapping I could breathe through my nose again. It seemed like a mini miracle; after I tapped through my physical symptoms--and then through my stress and frustration that my career seemed to be going nowhere--my sinus cold symptoms vanished. It was the first time I realized how severely I had been underestimating the impact of emotions and stress on the body.

A couple of years later, Nick and I, along with his close friend, Nick Polizzi, began making our documentary film, The Tapping Solution, which shows real people''s results with tapping. The making of the documentary was not only a big risk financially, it also continuously tested the strength of our dream. With zero film experience or outside funding, the only way we could move forward was to deal with our own anxiety and limiting beliefs around what was possible. It may sound cliché, but we were only able to create a film about tapping because we used tapping personally every step of the way. What is tapping exactly? Stay with me. Although I was making strides in other areas of my life with tapping, during those early years, I never, ever used tapping on the one challenge that had controlled my entire life and happiness since childhood--my weight and body image. My struggle with weight was a huge part of who I thought I was, but it was also something I felt ashamed of and was always trying to hide. Even when I''d lost the weight after weeks of extreme dieting and exercise, I''d obsess all day long about my weight and what I had or hadn''t eaten.

Even during my "skinny" phases, I had no peace, no happiness. My obsession with my weight, I later realized, had blinded me from seeing what was going on beneath the surface. Like so many of the women I now teach and coach, I had been conditioned to believe that losing weight was about willpower. For years I was convinced that I had entered this world without the willpower I was sure skinny people must have. Even after years of studying personal development, rarely, if ever, did I think about how my emotions might be impacting my struggle with weight. Then, in 2008, something happened that forced me to stop the madness and take a serious look at the pain beneath my weight. While attending a conference one day, I was approached by a woman who recognized me and immediately began raving about my work. By this point, the movie had come out and thousands of people had heard my interviews online.

It was one of the first times I''d met a fan in person, so I was thrilled to hear such positive feedback. After showering me with praise, though, she made a comment that hit me like a bomb. "You''re bigger than I thought," she said as she looked me up and down. And just like that, I went from feeling elated and excited to hopeless and deflated. It was one of many, many times over the years that people had commented on my weight, and finally I had to admit that I needed a new approach. Her judgment hurt me so deeply because I was constantly judging myself. It was time to take a deeper look at my relationship with my body and my weight, not to please others but to finally address the pain I''d been hiding behind my weight. When I returned home after that conference, I began piecing together what I''d learned from the hundreds of tapping experts, personal development gurus, and psychiatrists and psychologists I''d interviewed, and I began applying it to myself.

Before I started using tapping to create a new weight loss experience for myself, I made just a couple of rules: I wasn''t allowed to diet or punish myself with extreme exercise. Neither had worked for me in the past, and I couldn''t let myself go down that road again. Also, I could no longer use my weight as an excuse not to be happy or go for what I wanted in life. That hadn''t worked, either. I began to look at my relationship with my body, food, and exercise as well as sexual intimacy, pleasure, and perfection, and I realized that I wasn''t broken. I just had layers of beliefs that made life f.