Stop The Cravings with Dawson Church

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise and mindset with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus I give you tips that you can put into fast action up level your health so that you can go out there and live that big life you're meant to live. I'm going to share with you today. Gosh, one of my new favorite people. I am so excited about the information I'm about to share and we're going to be talking about using something for weight loss and cravings that can get rid of your cravings in minutes by as much as 86%. Crazy. Crazy. I met this person at Transformation Leadership Council a month or so ago and I'd seen him at a couple other events and heard him speak and I basically stalked him. His name is Dr. Dawson Church. He is a leader in EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping and a wealth of knowledge research. He's just a pioneer in the field and what you're going to learn today is mind blowing and I'm. I'll be sharing more because it's something I'm going to be using with my son and also with me. And you'll hear a little bit about what happened with me at this meeting in terms of PTSD and what I'm going to use this for. So I'm super excited to share Dawson with you. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He's an award winning author. His best selling book is the Genie in youn Genes. It's been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. He founded the National Institute for Integrative Health Care to study and implement promising evidence based psychological and medical techniques. His groundbreaking research has been published in prestigious scientific journals. He's the editor of Energy Psychology Theory, Research and Treatment, a peer reviewed professional journal, a blogger for the Huffington Post, a Reviewer for the APA's mental health mobile Phone Application Review database and he shares how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. This guy is the real deal. I am so excited to have Dr. Dawson Church here with me today. So let's do it. Dawson Church, welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here today, jj.

I love your energy and the information you give people. Thank you so much.

Well, let's jump into this and I want to start just with for people who don't have any clue what we're talking about. Eft, what's it even stand for?

What is stands for Emotional freedom techniques. It's often called tapping because it includes regular psychotherapy methods like cognitive therapy and exposure therapy. It borrows from those, but it adds in them the, the extra ingredient of tapping on acupuncture points. So like if you get an acupuncture needle inserted in a point, we don't do that. Instead we just have you tap or rub on those points and we find that people calm down really quickly when they do that.

Yeah, it was interesting growing when I had my kids were babies, they were about four and five. I went to an EFT practitioner and she taught me how to do it with my kids and, and especially my younger one. He would come in at night and go, can you tap mommy? Can you tap me? It was one of our nighttime rituals. It's so cool. But you were sharing some information offline that blew my mind that I cannot wait to share with our listeners about research on EFT and cravings.

You know, that number blew my mind as well when I first heard it. And I first was researching EFT with a colleague from the University of Arizona. And there have now been maybe a dozen studies at EFT for weight loss and cravings. And jj, when she finally this research scientist mailed me the results of their research. We'd been looking at EFT at various medical conferences. So typically there'd be a one day post conference workshop. We'd be training the doctors or psychologists or whoever they are to do eft and we were measuring their cravings for things like chocolate and cookies and hard candy, whatever it might be. And some. So finally, after we collected data at five different conferences with over 200 healthcare workers, they did this huge data analysis at the University of Arizona and emailed me the results. Now I was really keen to see those results. And when I finally got them though, my left brain said, absolutely no way. There's something wrong with this data. You guys have got to reanalyze this. They said, no, Dr. Church, it's really true. And what they showed was in that one day workshop that people had a 45% reduction in anxiety and depression. And that was good. And this was highly statistically significant. There's only one chance in 10,000 that the results were due to chance. So highly significant results, okay, but 45% drop in anxiety, depression. They had an 83% drop in cravings for chocolate. And whatever it was they were cravings.

You know, that's insane. What else can do that? I've never heard a number like that.

It's absolutely remarkable. And nothing else I know can do it, but it's very simple what happens. Harvard Medical School did three studies of acupuncture. And what they found was that if they hooked people up to an MRI and then had them remember a really bad thing that happened, an emotional event in their lives, that they had an activation of the limbic system, the emotional brain, the midbrain. And what we found then with acupuncture is that if you then insert a needle, that midbrain totally shuts down. No longer is it activated, and no longer is that fear response really active. So this little remembering the bad thing, but there's no emotion attached to it. Same thing with cravings. So the chocolate's there, and people just no longer have any emotional tag with it. It's just a thing. It's just chocolate. There's no longer any emotional baggage that's being projected onto the chocolate. Because most of our cravings aren't for chocolate or donuts or whatever it might be. They're for the losses, for the grief, for the unprocessed emotions in our lives, which we then project onto that substance. When you remove the emotion, suddenly it's just something. It's just a thing sitting there on a plate. It's no longer an emotional event.

To see the chocolate, that's just amazing. I can see why freedom's in the middle of this.

You can sleep the stuff you love. I had pizza last week. I actually had some chocolate last. It's not like you have to strictly observe any kind of diet, but you can just take a bite. Like, I took a little bite of at a party on Monday, took a little bite of this really delicious homemade blueberry pie, but I didn't need to eat the whole piece or.

Yeah, anyone listening knows the difference between being just, like, driven to distraction on I have to have that cookie or whatever and it's controlling you, versus saying, oh, look at that. I'll just have a bite and put it down. There's completely different feelings now getting into the practicality of this, is this something that you need to have a practitioner guide you through? Can you do it on your own? How does it all work?

That's a really good question, jj. And what I recommend is that people. The Mini Manual is available online for free. People get the Mini manual, try it themselves, and that's your first experience of eft. But for really intractable long term conditions, the chances are there's grief, there's shame, there may be body image issues, there may be psychological trauma. We recently began, when we do research, we began not just looking at the anxiety and depression of people who are in a weight loss program or who are overweight. We've been looking at their PTSD levels and it's shocking. We found actually in the first study of this kind of, that they have people who are overweight, they have clinical levels of ptsd and their problem isn't weight, isn't cravings. It's that they're traumatized and are severely psychologically impacted by ptsd and it's showing up in that way. So if you're dealing with something like that, we recommend you use a practitioner because you want somebody who's an expert in psychological trauma. Work on that and you'll find that a huge number of other things in your life start to be affected, including your psychological state and then your cravings and weight.

What would be the best way to find someone to guide you through this?

We'll give people a link at the end of the podcast and that will include a free copy of the EFT Mini Manual to try it yourself and our list of certified practitioners. There are practitioners all over the world, all over the country, and they'll help people. Many of them specialize in weight loss as well, so they know how to help people get over those hurdles.

But, you know, we all have something in our subconscious, in our history book, I call it, right? And I was just thinking about, we were just at that event together and watching a movie and I was sitting between two really close friends and there was a child that almost got hit by a car. I don't know if you remember the scene. I can see the scene right now because I jumped out of my seat because my son was the victim of a hit and run and left for dead in the street. And I saw that and I've done a lot of work, I thought, to help me process a lot of this ptsd. And it was like it just was happening all over again. So I'm looking at this going. Grant definitely needs to get this everyone in the family needs to get this. Like, we all need to jump on board on this. And, you know, it just seems like one of those tools you'd want to have in your toolbox to be able to use at any time, because you can, then you're stressed out during the day. I mean, who doesn't get anxiety or depression or. Like, don't we all?

Well, one of the interesting things about psychological trauma is that when we experience a traumatic event, say you were bullied at school, or say you had some unwelcome attention or say something, you got a bad grade, you had performance anxiety, whatever it might be, whatever that happened that really hurt you psychologically. We have something that one of my colleagues calls the trauma capsule. We wrap around it. So to deal with Uncle John exposing himself to you, and you're only 7 years old, and all the bad stuff that happens to kids, we put this trauma, we wrap it in trauma capsule. And when we do that, we often dissociate from it, and we may even totally forget the bad thing ever happened. It's a natural response. Dissociation is natural response when we're kids. But if you're 40 years old or you're 70 years old and you're still dissociating, that's not good. Because in that trauma capsule are all of the sensory channels that were active when you were traumatized. So in that trauma capsule are the things you saw, you felt, you tasted, you smelled. All of those things are wrapped up in that trauma capsule. There's a book on trauma called when the Past is always Present. And for those people who are traumatized, the past is always there. And then you have an experience that looks a little bit like the bad thing that happened to you in the past. And suddenly you're traumatized in the present. You're feeling really bad, uneasy, shocked, whatever it might be, because you haven't dealt with all of the pieces of the trauma capsules. We train our practitioners to notice, help their clients notice what's triggering you now. The things triggering you about your job, about the presidential candidates, about your spouse, about your kid. All those things aren't about now. They're all about then. They're all about some early event. And the reason this person triggers you now is because you haven't resolved that trauma capsule when you were 2 or 4 or 9. So it's really important to go in and then clean up all of that material in the trauma capsule. When you do that, suddenly you have emotional freedom. And the thing that bothered you most about your Husband or about your job or whatever it is, just doesn't bother me anymore because you've gone back and cleaned up your past.

So I'd love to hear, and I'm sure you've got hundreds, if not thousands of these, but one of your favorite case studies success stories using this.

Well, in my book, the EFT manual, I have two. And one of them is a lady who let us use her story. And we have a recording of her on a website, too. And I was working with her on a live call, and she said that what she craved the most was cinnamon rolls. And she said, I love the smell of the cinnamon, that caramelized sugar and that white stuff they put over them. It was funny, jj. She was describing this on this group call and doing this work front of the whole group, and we were all salivating. She was describing these cinnamon rolls with so much detail. So I asked her about her childhood memories of cinnamon rolls. She said, well, there was a lot of love in my family, but one of my grandmothers would make cinnamon rolls for all the kids. We'd come over to her house on Sunday mornings and she'd have cinnamon rolls for us all after church. And I felt so much love for her. And we realized that she's been not projecting her sense of loving and being loved. This is the one person she felt real love for when she was a kid. And our cinnamon rolls are her psychological way of connecting with love. There was a lot of love in her family that her grandmother, who loved her, made cinnamon rolls. So she still craves them and sleeps them. When we tapped and did EFT with her, her craving for those cinnamon rolls went from a 10 out of 10 down to a 0 out of 10. She totally lost her craving with cinnamon rolls. And one of my nonprofit board members said to me, dawson, you know, I. I'm really mad at you. You tapped me on Reese's Pieces ten years ago, and I have been able to stand eating. It's my favorite thing. I haven't eaten one since. So people just totally lose their cravings and then they realize it's just emotional, it's not really physical. So we do this with people. We've done it with thousands of people now, and we've also begun to study their long term weight loss. And there are several studies of long term weight loss vft, but in the one study comparing it to cognitive behavioral therapy, people lost an average of 11 pounds. Now, they didn't lose that during the EFT program. They lost that in the following year. They finished their program, and then they lost 11 more pounds over the next year. We've just finished a study now that showed that people lost an average of 22 pounds. Again, not in an EFT program, but in the following year. So all of the research is now showing that people lose the weight, but then they don't regain the weight. They actually keep on drifting down in their average weight over the course of the next year. So it's a long term solution to those cravings. And when you drop those cravings, short term, long term, you keep on losing weight.

Now, is this something that you do on a regular basis or you just do it that one time and you've got it handled, or how does it work there?

I wish, I wish, I wish. You have to do it every time until you. It's called counter conditioning. Until you desensitize yourself. And that might take 2 times, 5 times, 10 times.

Oh, my gosh. That's still like easy peasy. Even if it was 40 times. It's short. You can do it at home, right?

I mean, yeah, do it at home. Do it when you. When the food's right in front of you and you're craving it. That's. You can't go to your therapist then, but you can tap? Yes.

Gosh, I love this stuff. Okay, I'm going to throw you a curve ball, Dawson.

Throw it away.

So I'm talking straight to you now. What's the one thing you do every day that makes the biggest difference in your life?

J.J. i meditate. I wake up in the morning and I meditate. And what I tell people in our live workshops is that I'm going to turn everyone in this workshop. My goal is to turn all of these people into drug addicts. I want them to be so addicted to their own feel good hormones, their own serotonin, their own natural endorphins, so that when they wake up in the morning, they crave feeling that good. That's what people want, ultimately. I mean, the reason we want other things we want is we think they'll make us feel better. And that feeling better state is a state where serotonin and dopamine are balanced in your brain, where cortisol and DHEA are balanced in your body, and you have this beautiful biochemical balance inside. And we call that feeling good. And if we can train people to do that, then they crave feeling good. So wake up in the morning, I feel bad. Dreams. I may be confused and not feeling really good for whatever reason. I sit up in bed and I meditate Right away I after about, I also tap to release any of those negative emotions. And after a while I'm flooded with endorphins. I go from being kind of a low energy person, being a super high energy person, feeling good, feeling happy. And I want to see people addicted to that feeling of just having a wonderful inner world. And if you do that, after a while, you change your baseline. So I'm now doing new research on how we reset our baseline of those biochemicals like serotonin and dopamine, gaba, acetylcholine, all of those neurotransmitters. Also how we reset our cortisol level lower. I've done several studies of cortisol. We find that EFT produces large drops in cortisol. And I want people to go from that high baseline, high stress, high cortisol level to a much lower baseline where you have enough cortisol to function, but you are driven by cortisol on a daily basis. So that's what I do every morning. I meditate and I wait till I feel super good, then I start my day.

I love it, love it, love it. I've been working on some stuff with Hal Elrod on the miracle morning and you just, you know, you just nailed that whole one and his whole hypothesis of the successful people have this morning routine and they get it started and you know, love what you just said. Fantastic. Now people are going to want more from you as you know. So where should we send them?

Go to one place and that is my website, dawsongift.com so this is just my name, D A W s o n dawsongift.com and you go to dawsongift.com and YOU'LL get the free EFT mini manual. You'll also get my solution to meditation. Because I found that meditation is hard for people to learn. They often report not being able to do it easily. So with some colleagues like Roland McCrady from HeartMath, Joe Dispenza and others, we developed this little set of physiological triggers that automatically makes you meditate. Just do these certain things, breathe a certain way, hold your body a certain way without any effort whatsoever. You will meditate. You'll drop down into a deep meditation in about 90 seconds. So we have that on the website too. So Dawsongift.com has the EFT mini manual, the list of practitioners. It has a discount coupon for our online weight loss program. It has the instructions for meditation. All of that is available through that dawsongift.com link.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And I love the idea of automatic meditation. I've been resisting it so that's a huge help for me and something I'm going to be checking out too. So thank you again. And that's Dawsongift.com and after the break going to be answering listeners questions. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question is awesome. It comes from Mon and she asks jj, how do I increase vitamin D levels if I'm off dairy and gluten? I just did the 25 hydroxy vitamin D test and I'm within a normal range but lower than the 50 to 80 ngs per ML range you recommended. All right, thank you, Mon. There's a couple things that I want to address here. Number one, forget normal ranges. Normal ranges are not healthy ranges or ideal ranges. You want to be in the ideal in any lab test you do. And so here it's 50 to 80 ngs per milliliter for 25 hydroxy vitamin D. Now we tend to think, oh my gosh, I'm not getting dairy. Where am I going to get this? Actually, I find that very few people can get enough from the food they eat. Some of the places obviously you could get this would be grass fed. Ghee is a great source of this. Another place would be fish oil. Another place are mushrooms. But even with all of that, I find most people tend to be deficient in vitamin D. Now the best place of all, of course, is to go out in the sunshine with exposed arms and legs, 20 minutes a day, no sunscreen because that will block the vitamin D production. But if you're doing that and you're still low, or if you're living in a place where there's not sunshine all year round, then you're going to need to supplement. You want to make sure when you supplement with vitamin D that you're using vitamin D3 and you're taking it with vitamin K2 because D3 vitamin D is going to help your body absorb the calcium and then vitamin K is going to make sure the calcium goes where it should go. And this is critical, super important. So look for a supplement that has both together. My vitamin D plus is called plus because it's vitamin D plus vitamin K. And again, it's D3 and K2. This is critical. Here's what I find. In general, most people need somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 IUs of vitamin D3 a day to maintain optimal levels. If you're trying to get to optimal levels, what you want to do is load for one to three months at 10,000 IUs a day or 50,000 IUs a week again plus vitamin K2 and then retest and then see where you need. When you get up to optimal, bring your dose down so that you can maintain it. And depending on what's going on with where you live, your diet and your genetics, you'll again generally need anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 IUs. I must tell you, I rarely ever see someone that can get to their optimal levels now without supplementation. All right, if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I can't wait to hear from you. And one more way, I'd love to hear from you. I would so appreciate it if you could jump on stitcher or or iTunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy Dare to live a life that matters.

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