healing your heart 97
realized even more dramatically through a practice known as emo-
tional freedom technique (EFT). A few years ago, Dr. Larry Burk, a
radiologist and a dear and respected friend, was the director of edu-
cation at the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine, responsible
for organizing the people involved in complementary medicine. He
often invited me to speak to Duke ’ s medical students, and I invited
him to come over with his students to see how we at the Rice Diet
Program prevent and reverse chronic disease, with an emphasis
on empowering the patient. For the last seven years, he has taught
and practiced EFT, a self - healing method that is being taught to
thousands of people all around the world. It was fi rst developed by
Gary Craig, a Stanford University – trained engineer, who describes
this method as a “ needle-free version of acupuncture that is based
on new discoveries regarding the connection between your body ’ s
subtle energies, your emotions and your health. ” A summary of this
method is available for free at http://www.emofree.com. Although this is
a relatively new therapy, you will quickly note from reading the
information on this Web site and the references in the back of this
book that substantial and impressive research results have been
accumulating since 2003.
This very simple and safe approach to dealing with chronic
pain, past emotional traumas, and current anxieties is also very
useful for weight loss and is especially helpful in dealing with food
cravings. It involves self - tapping on acupuncture meridian points
while repeating short statements about a particular emotional expe-
rience or belief. Tapping on the acupoints in this fashion deletes
the body memory of the issue that is connected to the cognitive
memory, allowing anxiety to be replaced by emotional freedom.
In one example, a fi fty - year - old overweight woman complained
that she craved chocolate so much that she had to eat a large candy
bar every day to calm her nerves. She used EFT to give up this
addiction by starting with the phrase “ Even though I crave choco-
late when I am anxious, I deeply and completely accept myself. ”
After doing the EFT tapping for ten minutes, she returned a month
later to report that her freezer full of chocolate bars had not been
touched since the last visit, and she had lost ten pounds.