Can tapping your body really help you lose weight? A cynical Lee Marlow finds out
Can tapping your fingers under your nose really help you lose weight? A cynical Lee Marlow finds out more about Thought Field Therapy
Janet Thomson is having a day off. It doesn't happen often. We find her making tea in her kitchen, one of those straight-from-an-expensive-country-catalogue kitchens, in a pretty bungalow squirrelled away on the edge of Broughton Astley.
Janet, 48, and a mother of three, is the size all dieticians/fitness coaches/lifestyle experts/nutritionists should be: that is, miniscule.
"But I couldn't work in America," she says. "I'd be too big."
Surely not?
"No, it's true. But do you know what?" she says. "I wouldn't want to. I'm a size 8 to 10, I don't want to be a size 6.
"It's all about the choice you want to make. Is it worth being a size 6 if it means you can never eat a creme brulee?"
Janet doesn't think it is. Life without a creme brulee wouldn't be much of a life at all, she declares.
It's this kind of thinking that informs Janet's philosophy to health and fitness, to life and love, weight loss and the occasional creme brulee (she talks about creme brulees a lot.) It's all about balance.
Janet Thomson is opening a new, if controversial, front in the multi-million pound weight loss war.
Diets and fitness programmes just don't work, she says. Well, they do work, but they don't continue to work.
You might lose weight if you drink cabbage water for every meal – but you'll put it all back on the moment you start to eat anything more sensible and substantial.
So you need to change your mindset. Change your mind. Change your body. That's the way to do it.
So far, then, so good. It sounds like hard, joyless work, naturally, like this kind of thing always does, but Janet – fast-talking, easy-going, look-you-straight-in-the-eye, endearingly sincere Janet – has a secret weapon: tapping, or to give it it's proper name, Thought Field Therapy.
Uh-oh. At this point in the interview, everything is going splendidly. She's told me about moving to Leicestershire from Surrey, the business she set up with her ex-husband (which failed), working with Rosemary Conley, splitting with her ex and working so much she hardly ever saw her three kids.
She's a good talker, Janet, and a brilliant communicator. I like her a lot. Now she's going to spoil it all, I fear, by trying to tell me I can lose weight by tapping certain parts of my body.
She's ready for this. She comes up against this brick wall of scepticism all the time.
"And that's fine," she says. "We should be sceptical about the diet and fitness industry.
"I hear things at conferences and read certain things in books and I think: 'Well, what a load of old baloney," she says.
The cabbage diet, she tuts. Colonic irrigation. The Atkins diet.
"I don't mind sceptics," she says. "We'll get on just fine."
Janet has a masters degree in nutrition and exercise science and was, for many years, number two at Rosemary Conley's health and fitness empire.
She knows all about the eat-better/do-more philosophy of weight loss but found that, with most people, it wasn't enough.
"You need to go beyond the diet and fitness regime and look at people's personality," she says.
So she approaches the whole weight loss issue with an arsenal of weapons: hypnotherapy, psychology, neurolinguistic programming ... and tapping.
You might have seen Janet on the telly, sitting on the GMTV sofa dishing out her no-nonsense advice.
She was on prime-time Channel 4 a few weeks ago, trying to usher a giant 21-year-old female singer away from the fridge.
It was all a bit of a shambles that show, she says, and a travesty of the truth, but it was great publicity.
Her phone didn't stop ringing. Her website crashed. She's just had a big hush-hush TV screen test for another diet/weight-loss/lifestyle show.
"I'd love to tell you more," she whispers, "but I can't."
If it comes off, though, she says, it'll be brilliant.
Anyway, the tapping. It works like this, she says. You use the tapping to repel cravings.
So if it's a craving for cakes, creme brulees, cigarettes or your neighbour's husband, you can collapse that craving by tapping.
Begin by tapping the side of your hand, then under your eye, under your arm, your collar bone, under your nose, back to your collar bone, your middle finger, and then repeat.
It sounds ridiculous. Janet performs the routine as she explains it.
Incredibly, it looks even more ridiculous than it sounds, like a specially demented version of the Hokey Cokey.
Really, Janet, how can that work?
"Oh it works," she says. "People always ask me that: 'How can that work?'," she says. "And I say 'It works well'. That's how it works."
It works, she insists, for 80 per cent of the people she sees.
What you or I might see as a kind of series of extended nervous twitches or ticks are actually specific taps on the body's meridian points, the same points used by acupuncturists.
There's science at work here, says Janet. It's proven to take your mind off the cravings.
I wonder if a lap round the garden in your pants might also help to get your mind off the cravings, but Janet is unmovable: it works.
She's written books on it, produced CDs about it and takes weekend seminars where, in just two days, fat people learn to become thin people and leave their anguish behind.
Try it, she insists. Try it when you feel weak. "My marriage ended after 25 years," she says.
"I did it myself to help get me through it. It has improved my life immeasurably."
I must be pulling the kind of face which suggests that as much as I like Janet – and I do – I'm really not sure of any of this tapping stuff.
Typically, she sees this as a bigger challenge. I leave, arms laden, with her book and four CDs. Give them a try, she says.
"I hear all sorts of mumbo jumbo, I do, really," she says.
"But my rule of thumb is: it must work for most of the people, most of the time. And this does.
Of course, she says, almost as a throwaway, "you do need to eat better and move around more.
"But the TFT will help you achieve your goal. It has worked for me, and it's worked for thousands of others who have used it – you should see my testimonials, they're great.
"I only embrace these things if they work."
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