29: The Power of Food, Forgiveness, and Tapping: Unlocking the Secrets to Sustainable Wellness with Marcella Friel

Marcella Friel explores how Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can be used to reduce food cravings and break patterns of emotional eating effectively. Through tapping on various points on the body, Marcella will help you reprogram your relationship to food and free yourself from restrictive and unhealthy eating patterns. She is passionate about helping health-conscious women love and forgive themselves, their food, and their figure - so join her now and discover a new way of understanding and managing your relationship with food.

In this episode we cover:

• Tired of diets and food cravings? Let's get to the root of the problem.

• The importance of forgiving yourself, and how to reduce food cravings in minutes.

• Discover the power of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

Summary:

Are you struggling with food cravings? If so, you are not alone.

According to Marcella Friel, transformational mentor and creator of the Women’s Food and Forgiveness Academy, food cravings can be driven by a variety of emotions and core issues, such as difficulty relating to emotions, fear of feeling overwhelmed, and conditioning to be nice. Marcella is adamant that these struggles with food are not the fault of the individual, and instead can be attributed to a broken down food system, eating rituals, and lifestyle.

Marcella introduced a tapping exercise to help reduce food cravings. This exercise involves tapping on various points on the body while repeating affirmations. The tapping points include the side of the hand, the top of the head, the inside of the eyebrow, the side of the eye, the collarbone point, under the arm, and the template of the eye. After the exercise, Marcella recommends vigorously shaking out the hands and drinking water to help the body process the experience.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), also known as tapping, is a form of emotional acupuncture that helps to calm the fight or flight response in the brain and can help to reduce food cravings in minutes with no willpower. Marcella suggests that after the tapping exercise, the food cravings may be reduced and the food may even taste unpleasant.

Marcella’s last tip for the audience is to be mindful of their food choices and to give themselves better than junk food. Marcella also encourages people to forgive themselves for their struggles with food, as well as download her free PDF download called the Root Causes Questionnaire. This toolkit is designed to help individuals use EFT Tapping to uncover and release the hidden issues that are driving food behaviors.

Marcella’s mission is to help health conscious women love and forgive themselves, their food, and their figure. With her help, you too can reclaim your soul from restrictive dieting and achieve greater love and acceptance of your body.

Mentioned In This Episode

• Where you can find Marcella: Website

• Marcella's gift: Root Causes Questionnaire

• Don't forget to join our wait list for the next HobbyScool online learning summit. Our summits are free to attend and you can be the first to know when the next summit launches by getting on the wait list here.

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Transcript:

[0:00:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Marcella Friel. Marcella is a transformational mentor who helps health conscious women like you love and forgive yourself, your food, and your figure. Marcella, thank you so much for joining me. I am very excited to jump into this topic with you. With you today we're going to be talking about eliminating food cravings in minutes and with no willpower, and that just sounds just like me. I am so excited to chat with you, but before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you and how you help people?

[0:00:49] Marcella Friel: Well, thank you so much for inviting me on the podcast. Destini. So, as you said, my name is Marcella Freel, and yeah, I help women heal the emotional roots of yoyo dieting, binge eating, sugar addiction, and chronic body shaming. And my main program is the Women's Food and Forgiveness Academy, which is an online transformational mentorship program where we work with archetypes of feminine power, the maiden in the springtime, the mother in the summer, the Queen in the fall, and the crown in the winter. And we draw on archetypal, wisdom and wisdom from various spiritual traditions along with basic good holistic, nutrition information, ayurveda time tested, fad proof self care skills to help them and basically reclaim their soul from restrictive dieting. And the results that women have gotten from the Academy and the work that I've been privileged to do has led women to really greater love and acceptance of their body, regardless of what the scale says.

[0:02:06] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah, and I love that that they love themselves no matter what they're seeing on the scale. And that is so very powerful. So let me jump right in and the first question I have for you and we're going to go back to that Willpower comment. Why doesn't Willpower work, especially when it comes to food cravings?

[0:02:33] Marcella Friel: Yeah, it's a great question. Destini. So, Willpower, well, let's just talk about food cravings to begin with. So, food cravings are connected to the fight or flight response. So if you've ever had that feeling of panic, like, I have to have this food right now, like, you have a craving for chocolate, you have a craving for something salty, you have a craving for ice cream at 10:00 at night, or whatever it is. And it's a really panic driven feeling that is linked to the fight or flight response in your brain. And sometimes Willpower can work. One of the things I like to say to my women is sit on your hands until the feeling passes, because if you're sitting on your hands, there's not a whole lot you can do. But as a kind of way of relating to emotional eating altogether, having to summon that willpower like over and over and over again, it can be really exhausting. So there is a tool that I use that I'll tell you about in a little bit called Emotional Freedom techniques that actually helps to calm that fight or flight response and calm that panic down so that even within five minutes you can go from I must have this popcorn right now, to oh, what popcorn? I could care less about it. Yeah. So the exercise that I want to lead you through, I've done this with women in person, I've done it in retreat settings and I always am sure to bring a trash bag because we just end up throwing a lot of the stuff in the trash.

[0:04:25] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about this tool, the one that you have for the Emotional Freedom technique.

[0:04:32] Marcella Friel: So EFT, some of your audience might have heard of this tool, EFT, emotional Freedom Techniques. It's also called tapping and essentially it's a form of emotional acupuncture that we can do on ourselves. So again, if you think about food cravings being connected to the fight or flight response, what we do when we're tapping is we fingertip tap on points that are at or near the ends of certain acupuncture meridians while we're recollecting a stressful situation. And what the tapping does is it sends a little kind of a circuit breaker back into the limbic system of the brain where the stress kind of originates from. So it helps to calm down that kind of limbic smoke alarm fight or flight response. And something that's really important, I think, for our audience to know, just in general, is that the limbic system of the brain where the trauma is stored and where that fight or flight kind of emanates from, it's our mid brain and it's older than language. And this is why we can go to talk therapy. We can talk, talk, talk for years and years and years. We can understand intellectually why we struggle with food cravings and why we struggle with emotional eating. We can know all that. But unless we go back into these deeper recesses of the brain which are older than language, we really won't make any progress. I guess you think of the saying talk is cheap. It's kind of like that. So the tapping is a pretty simple self help tool, very easy to learn and this is a great little tool to have in your toolkit. When you feel, for example, you're sitting at an office meeting and the plate of donuts comes around and you're kind of sitting there and you feel bored and like, oh, here comes the donuts and they look really good and I'd love to have a donut.

[0:06:47] Marcella Friel: But you know that if you have that donut, if you have one, it's going to lead to the whole tray. Or you don't want to have when you have that kind of conflicting emotion response about the donuts again, that panic, that fight or flight, the tapping is a tool that you can use to just help calm all that down so that you can make a wiser food choice in that moment.

[0:07:13] Dr. Destini Copp: And that is such a powerful tip. I personally had never heard of emotional freedom techniques, so I'm definitely learning something here. So let me jump into the next question. And it's related to emotional eating. So what are some of the core issues or things that people are feeling that can drive that emotional eating?

[0:07:35] Marcella Friel: Well, yeah, when we eat from a place of emotions, those emotions can run the gamut. Certainly boredom going to the fridge every two minutes when you're feeling bored. Eating anger is a huge one for the women that I work with. And then even excitement, excitement and happiness can be a cause for eating. Like, hey, I'm going to celebrate, okay, I'm going to have a piece of cake. But if you look, Destini, and all those emotions, they're all coming from some kind of imbalance. And some of the core issues here, one of them can be difficulty just relating to emotions altogether, just having trouble feeling anything. As one of my clients said to me once, if I feel anything, I will feel everything. So there can be a fear that any emotion that I feel is going to completely overwhelm me. And that can be the case, for example, with like grief or anger or sadness sometimes in terms of core issues, if in our family of origin, for example, we were told, like, be a good girl, don't make waves, I think just as women altogether, we have this conditioning to be nice. And one of the things I say to the women in my women's forgiveness Academy is, please don't be nice, but you can be kind. Being kind is very different than being nice. But if we've been raised to be nice girls and good girls and don't make waves, then emotional territory altogether can become threatening, dangerous. Maybe somebody disapproved of us because we raised our voice or spoke up or what have you. So then if you think about it, those emotions have to go somewhere.

[0:09:45] Marcella Friel: They have to go somewhere. So what do we do? We go to the cupboard, we go to the fridge, we go to the store and buy the crunchy stuff in the big bags. So one of the things we work on in the academy, we certainly work on food cravings, and then we also go back and we look, okay, so what were those messages that you got about being angry or how happy can you be and still be a member of your tribe? And we'll use this tool of tapping to help to go back into those early experiences and undo them and then redo them how we would like them to be and then imprint that going forward so that we actually can change core beliefs at their root.

[0:10:40] Dr. Destini Copp: And it sounds like a lot of these either cravings or issues that kind of lead us to go into that emotional eating or a lot of it is just mental.

[0:10:54] Marcella Friel: Mental is certainly part of it, but I think it's also I think there can be a physiological component to it. So, you know, if you've ever felt triggered by something, right, somebody says something that triggers you or they give you a look that triggers you, you might not like it mentally, but then maybe your stomach goes into a knot, your throat closes up, you break into a sweat, your temples start pulsing. There can be a very strong physiological response that's been sort of programmed into the system based on whatever associative memory is connected with that experience. Yeah, for sure.

[0:11:36] Dr. Destini Copp: So now I want to talk a little bit about the tapping. Would you be willing to guide us through some tapping right now?

[0:11:47] Marcella Friel: Sure, absolutely. Let's see if we can eliminate your food cravings in minutes with no willpower. How about that?

[0:11:54] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah, I would love for that to happen. I'm actually hungry right now. So they are.

[0:12:00] Marcella Friel: There you go. Okay, so here, let's do this. I want to invite you, Destini, and let's invite everyone who's listening to this podcast to just think for a moment about a particular food that might be difficult for you to say no to, that you might feel a very strong craving. So one of mine I will confess. Actually, I'll tell you about one of mine. Well, I'll tell you about one of mine. Okay. White cheddar cheese popcorn. And the more like holistic the ingredients, it's like, oh, well, this is just corn and powdered cheddar cheese or whatever. So think about a food. Do you have one, Destini? Is there one for you?

[0:12:48] Dr. Destini Copp: I'm definitely a salty person, so chips would be on my list for sure.

[0:12:54] Marcella Friel: Okay, so, like tortilla chips, potato chips?

[0:12:56] Dr. Destini Copp: Yes, absolutely. I could pass on the sweets every single day, but the salty snacks is my weakness.

[0:13:05] Marcella Friel: Okay, so think about your favorite bag of chips. So, like, is it blue corn tortilla chips? Is it white corn tortilla chips? Is it, like sour cream and onion potato chips?

[0:13:16] Dr. Destini Copp: I'll be honest, I kind of like them all.

[0:13:20] Marcella Friel: Yeah, I know. Me too. Okay, well, just pick one just for the purposes of doing this exercise and everybody else too. Maybe yours is a can of Pringles or something or a milky Way bar or whatever, whatever it is. So just think about that for a moment. And I'll invite everybody to just really, as much as you can, just visualize that food and imagine that bag in front of you. And just imagine you're opening the bag and you're smelling that food and you're looking at the chips in the bag or the popcorn in my case. And for me, as I'm describing this, my mouth is starting to water.

[0:14:07] Dr. Destini Copp: So I'm not the only one.

[0:14:10] Marcella Friel: No. The cravings are actually hardwired into our system, and that's a whole other conversation. How strong would your craving be in this moment, Destini? Is there a craving that feels strong here.

[0:14:25] Dr. Destini Copp: Yes. Because I truly am hungry too. So I'm having troubles, like disconnecting from the hunger versus just the food cravings. Does that make sense?

[0:14:37] Marcella Friel: Yes, it does. And you know, when I do this in live events or I do this in my online programs, I will actually have women sit with that food in front of them, and I do it like, right before lunch when we're hungry. I do torture people with this. So it's only for a few minutes, though. So how strong would you say the craving is, on a scale of one to ten? With ten being the strongest, I would.

[0:15:02] Dr. Destini Copp: Say probably an eight or a nine. It's definitely up there.

[0:15:07] Marcella Friel: Good. Okay. We want it up there. That's what we want. Mine, I think I would say, is about a six. And everybody else who's listening, just if you can get a number and if it's higher than five, that's usually what we want to work with. Okay, so what I'm going to invite you to do, everybody listening, and Destini, you can follow along here is just say as I say and do as I do and just repeat after me. And if my words don't resonate for you, Destini, feel free to change them because it's important that your subconscious is hearing what you want to tell it. So let's just start here. We're going to bump we're going to tap the side of the hand with the fingers of the other hand. So this is what we call like, the karate choppoint, that fleshy side of the hand just below the fingers, the outside of the hand. And you can just tap it with the four fingers of the other hand. So just start tapping right there and just think about that bag of chips and repeat after me. So even though I'm really craving this food go ahead.

[0:16:12] Dr. Destini Copp: Even though I'm really craving this food.

[0:16:14] Marcella Friel: I deeply love and completely accept myself.

[0:16:18] Dr. Destini Copp: I deeply love and completely accept myself.

[0:16:21] Marcella Friel: Even though I'm really, really craving this food.

[0:16:24] Dr. Destini Copp: Even though I'm really, really craving this.

[0:16:26] Marcella Friel: Food, I'd love to eat it right now.

[0:16:28] Dr. Destini Copp: I'd love to eat it right now.

[0:16:31] Marcella Friel: And I love and accept myself right where I'm at.

[0:16:34] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love and accept myself right where I'm at.

[0:16:37] Marcella Friel: Okay, so continuing to tap on the side of the hand even though I'm craving this food.

[0:16:42] Dr. Destini Copp: Even though I'm craving the food, I'd.

[0:16:45] Marcella Friel: Love to eat this.

[0:16:47] Dr. Destini Copp: I'd love to eat this.

[0:16:48] Marcella Friel: Yeah. And I love myself exactly as I am in this moment.

[0:16:54] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love myself exactly as I am in this moment.

[0:16:58] Marcella Friel: Okay, now let's just tap around the point. So tapping on the top of the head. All this food.

[0:17:03] Dr. Destini Copp: All this food.

[0:17:05] Marcella Friel: Yeah. Okay, so tapping on the inside of the eyebrow right where it meets the bridge of the nose. Okay, so we're going to say this bag of chips.

[0:17:14] Dr. Destini Copp: This bag of chips.

[0:17:16] Marcella Friel: Perfect. And everybody else listening, just say, whatever your food is, okay. And then tapping on the side of the eye, like, right on the template of the eye, basically, this bag of salty chips. This bag of salty chips under the eye. This salty, crunchy bag of chips.

[0:17:33] Dr. Destini Copp: The salty, crunchy bag of chips under the nose.

[0:17:38] Marcella Friel: Oh, I would love to just have at least one I would love to have at least one under the mouth. I'd probably eat the whole bag.

[0:17:50] Dr. Destini Copp: I probably would eat the whole bag.

[0:17:53] Marcella Friel: Good. Tapping on the collarbone point. Just tapping right to the side of the notch in the collarbone. Either side is fine. Just tapping there this intense craving.

[0:18:04] Dr. Destini Copp: This intense craving.

[0:18:07] Marcella Friel: So tapping under the arm, like, basically right where the broth strap is, you can just slap it with your four fingers. Okay, I'm craving this so much.

[0:18:17] Dr. Destini Copp: Oh, I'm craving this so much.

[0:18:19] Marcella Friel: Back up to the top of the head. Yeah, I'd love to eat this snack, whatever it is, of this food.

[0:18:28] Dr. Destini Copp: Yeah, I would love to eat this chips.

[0:18:31] Marcella Friel: Okay, good. Perfect. Inside the eyebrow. And I bet it would taste delicious.

[0:18:36] Dr. Destini Copp: And I bet it would taste delicious.

[0:18:38] Marcella Friel: Side of the eye. Yeah, I would love those first few.

[0:18:42] Dr. Destini Copp: Bites yes, I would love those first.

[0:18:45] Marcella Friel: Few bites under the eye. And I would keep on eating and I would keep on eating under the nose. And as I kept eating and as I kept eating the mouth, my body would probably say, that's enough.

[0:19:03] Dr. Destini Copp: My body would probably say, that's enough.

[0:19:06] Marcella Friel: Okay, collarbone point. But I would probably just numb out.

[0:19:10] Dr. Destini Copp: And bypass that but I would probably just numb out and bypass that under.

[0:19:18] Marcella Friel: The arm and eat the whole damn.

[0:19:19] Dr. Destini Copp: Thing and eat the whole damn thing.

[0:19:22] Marcella Friel: Top of the head until I felt really gross until I felt really gross inside the eye. And then I would say, why did I do that?

[0:19:32] Dr. Destini Copp: And then I would say, why would that why did I do that?

[0:19:37] Marcella Friel: Okay, template of the eye. Why did I do that again?

[0:19:42] Dr. Destini Copp: Why did I do that again?

[0:19:44] Marcella Friel: Good. Perfect. Under the eye. What's wrong with me?

[0:19:47] Dr. Destini Copp: What is wrong with me?

[0:19:51] Marcella Friel: Under the nose. And then I would feel so ashamed.

[0:19:55] Dr. Destini Copp: And then I would feel so ashamed under the mouth.

[0:20:00] Marcella Friel: And I would vow to never do it again.

[0:20:03] Dr. Destini Copp: And I would vow to never do it again.

[0:20:06] Marcella Friel: Under the arm. Until next time.

[0:20:09] Dr. Destini Copp: Until next time.

[0:20:11] Marcella Friel: Perfect. Top of the head. I am so ready to be done with this pattern.

[0:20:17] Dr. Destini Copp: I am so ready to be done with this pattern.

[0:20:20] Marcella Friel: Okay, good. Inside the eyebrow. This food is not really my friend.

[0:20:24] Dr. Destini Copp: This food is not really my friend.

[0:20:26] Marcella Friel: We're going to talk to the food directly now. So imagining it in front of you. Yeah, you're delicious for the first few.

[0:20:33] Dr. Destini Copp: Bites yeah, you're delicious for the first.

[0:20:36] Marcella Friel: Few bites under the eye. And then you're just junk.

[0:20:40] Dr. Destini Copp: And then you're just junk.

[0:20:42] Marcella Friel: Perfect under the nose. I deserve so much better than this.

[0:20:46] Dr. Destini Copp: I deserve so much better than this.

[0:20:49] Marcella Friel: Under the mouth. I want better than this.

[0:20:52] Dr. Destini Copp: I want better than this.

[0:20:54] Marcella Friel: Excellent collarbone point. And I choose to give myself better than this.

[0:20:59] Dr. Destini Copp: And I choose to give myself better than this.

[0:21:02] Marcella Friel: Good. Under the arm. And I really appreciate myself for making that choice.

[0:21:08] Dr. Destini Copp: And I really appreciate myself for making that choice.

[0:21:11] Marcella Friel: Okay, that's it. There's the tapping. So this isn't actually part of the tapping, but I like to ask women to just really vigorously shake out their hands after they've done the tapping. Just shake it out. Shake it out. Shake it out. That's the little thing that I add on the end. Just shake it out. Brush it off your arms. If that feels good, brush it off your chest. And then if you have water, just taking a drink of water is a good thing to do after tapping.

[0:21:37] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that exercise.

[0:21:39] Marcella Friel: So how do you feel now? The cravings for you are at an eight or a nine. Like, what number would you give it?

[0:21:47] Dr. Destini Copp: I don't feel like I'd want the bag of chips right now, but I definitely want to eat my dinner soon.

[0:21:56] Marcella Friel: Good. Okay. There you go. So the craving for the chips, like, strong, medium, low, I would say I.

[0:22:09] Dr. Destini Copp: Am not interested in eating a bag of chips right now.

[0:22:12] Marcella Friel: Excellent. There we go. We eliminated the food cravings in minutes with no willpower.

[0:22:18] Dr. Destini Copp: You did you got me on that one.

[0:22:20] Marcella Friel: I did. I know. It works like magic. It's really good. Yeah. That's why, like I said, when I do this exercise in a lodge setting or, like, in an online group, I bring the trash bag because people look at the Pringles or the bag of tortilla chips, and they're like, this is junk. Actually, what I will do after the exercise is say, okay, go ahead and meet it. And I remember doing whenever I do this exercise with other women, I do it myself as well, for my own food cravings. And one time, Destini, I did it with seaweed snacks. I don't know if you've ever seen those. They're like.

[0:22:59] Dr. Destini Copp: Yes, I have.

[0:23:01] Marcella Friel: Yeah. My craving was, like, eight or nine, just like yours. I really wanted to eat it, did this exercise, and then when I smelled the seaweed snacks again, they just smelled like chemical rancid oils and just junk. And that's what can happen. Like, the tapping can kind of awaken your sensory response. The craving has calmed down, and you go to put that Pringles in your mouth or the good and plenty candy, and you're like, this tastes so awful. Yuck. I don't even want this. And in the trash, it goes.

[0:23:41] Dr. Destini Copp: Well, it's such a good exercise, and I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to learn about it today, because I had never heard of it before. But, Marcellan, before we wrap it up here. Do you have any last minute tips for the audience?

[0:23:58] Marcella Friel: I would just say your struggles with food are not your fault. There's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing bad about you. There are things that might be in the way, and they can be moved out of the way as you become ready to allow them to be moved out of the way. So my parting tip would be forgive yourself. We live in a society right now where so much has broken down in our food system, in our eating rituals, in our lifestyle, that inevitably these situations will show up, these emotional eating patterns and so on. And once you start to learn about that and really place your own struggles in that context, I think it becomes so much easier to just understand and forgive and release.

[0:25:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love that. Just simply forgive yourself. So, Marcella, can you tell people where they can find you? And I believe you also have a free gift for them.

[0:25:14] Marcella Friel: Yes, I do have a free gift. So I have a PDF download that I can offer. You called the root causes questionnaire. And this is a little toolkit to use this tool EFT Tapping, to help you get very quickly to the emotional roots of, you know, whatever food behavior you're struggling with. So it's called the precautions questionnaire. It's just a very step by step guide how to use tapping to uncover and release the hidden issues that are driving your food behaviors. And you can find that. You can also visit me on my website, womenfoodandforgiveness.com. So that's all one word lowercase womenfoodandforgiveness.com.

[0:26:05] Dr. Destini Copp: And we will make sure that those links are in the show notes so people can go there directly and find you. And Marcella, thank you so much for joining me and walking us how to eliminate Food Cravings in minutes with absolutely no willpower.

[0:26:21] Marcella Friel: Yeah. Thank you, Destini. That was fun.