Overview of meditation and weight loss
Changed your diet? Drinking enough water? Working out four to five times a week? Giving the body the rest you need? But when you get on that weighing scale, you hardly see the difference.
It can be frustrating especially when you have pushed away your comfort food away just to lose some weight. Sometimes adding something else could really help you in your weight loss journey. That is meditation.
You might be confused. How does an activity that is meant to train or help the mind help with losing weight? Well, it had everything to do with it. Before that, you need to understand what meditation does to the mind and the body.
Meditation can result in a profound level of relaxation and a calm mind. During meditation, you focus your thoughts and clear your mind of the confused ideas that may flood your head and generate strain.
This procedure has the potential to improve both physical and mental well-being. For instance, when you have a stressful day at work or fight with someone close to you.
There are chances for you to be emotional and lose track of thoughts. And for someone who has been controlling their eating habits would want to take a break from their diet or restrictions and eat something comforting. Maybe it’s a tub of ice cream or it could be downing a few drinks.
Now if you had been practicing mediation, you would have developed self-control. Meditation allows being in the present moment. Thus, whenever something stressful takes place, you would be able to hold yourself from spiraling out.
You won’t find the need to look at another source to calm yourself down. This is just one of the few times how meditation will help in your weight loss journey.
The relationship between eating and mediation
We usually think about attending a dance class or eating a salad instead of a burger for lunch when we want to lose weight. As a result, it may be paradoxical to contemplate sitting in one spot, concentrating your thoughts, and practicing weight loss meditation.
These kinds of views just show a portion of the picture. Bear in mind that losing weight isn’t only a physical process, and it’s not all black and white.
We are emotional creatures as humans, and understanding that reality may help us create a healthy connection with food and perhaps lose excess weight or maintain the weight that is optimal for our bodies.
Meditation, mindful eating, and intuitive eating are just a few of the practices and approaches that may help us learn or relearn how to have a good connection with food and erase any negative feelings we may have about eating.
Weight reduction may be an unintended consequence of nurturing this restored relationship, but it is critical not to make reducing weight the primary objective. This may limit us to the point that we are unable to eat instinctively or mindfully.
Whenever people eat and overeat as a result of intense emotions or sentiments, rather than reacting to their own internal hunger cues, this is known as stress or emotional eating.
When we are experiencing intense emotions, these emotions might overpower our bodily sense of fullness and satiation, causing us to overeat.
Food is utilized as a coping technique in these situations, temporarily dulling intense emotions. However, it is critical to recognize that this experience leads to the perpetuation of a cycle.
Feelings of stress can lead to overeating, which can lead to feelings of guilt or shame, looping back to feelings, and an inability to manage or control unpleasant emotions or stress.
Mindful eating is a strategy or approach that can help you heal your connection with food and your eating habits. It invites us to be present and to engage our senses – how the meal tastes, smells, and, most crucially, how it makes us feel in our bodies.
Mindful eating combines intuitive eating, which helps us slow down and listen to our internal signs of genuine hunger vs cues of satiation, and as a result, it may help us minimize or even completely stop our emotional or binge eating.
While mindful eating can result in weight loss, it should not be the aim or incentive.
There is a quasi approach to health and wellbeing that focuses on the mind and body. It is called Intuitive eating. It dismisses the idea of dieting and instead encourages us to trust our bodies and respond to our own bodily cues to repair our attitude towards food.
Intuitive eating incorporates mindful eating concepts, but it also contains a larger broadened philosophy that incorporates exercising your body as it feels nice to move including using nutrition facts without prejudice.
Ways that meditation could help
Meditation helps us become much more conscious and perhaps treat any lingering emotional eating issues thus allowing us to be mindful while eating. Here we can understand how exactly mediation helps us with weight loss.
Feeling anxious might lead to binging to calm or avoid these sensations for people who suffer from emotional eating. This might result in feelings of guilt or shame.
You need to put a halt to the cycle. Meditation not only helps relieve stress, which eliminates the trigger in the first place, but it also helps you become more aware of your emotions and sensations, allowing you to distinguish between eating when worried and eating when hungry.
Meditation has also been found to improve compassion, which may lead to us becoming more accepting of ourselves and the other body types that exist.
Meditation lowers cortisol and C-reactive protein levels, which are good for our general health and may help us lose weight and keep it off. Cortisol is linked to belly fat storage and stress, and high C-reactive protein levels might be an indication of inflammation, which is at the core of many illnesses, including obesity. Meditation may help reduce your overall stress and inflammation levels.
It might be difficult to resist overwhelming food cravings if you suffer from emotional or binge eating. According to research, mindfulness meditation can help us regulate our emotions and binge eating.
Meditation might aid in the retention of your weight loss goals. While diet and exercise can help you accomplish your weight reduction objectives, combining them with meditation makes weight loss attempts more sustainable.
It takes a lot of effort to lose weight, and maintaining that weight loss can be difficult, sometimes leading to anxiety.
How to get into meditation?
People often think that meditation requires a lot of energy and time to get through. It honestly doesn’t need anything much. However, it only requires your mind and your body and a few minutes.
Even if you practice meditating for 5 minutes every day can have immense positive effects.
Ensure you have a peaceful area to go to during these five to ten minutes. If you have children, you may want to schedule it before or after they get up or before they go to bed to avoid any sort of distraction.
You could even try it in the shower. Make yourself at ease once you’ve found a peaceful spot. Once you are ready to start, just follow these simple steps:
- Be in a place and position that you are comfortable in. You can either keep your eyes open or close.
- Take a long, deep breath in. Hold it for a few seconds.
- Exhale slowly and repeat a few more times.
- Breath as you normally would
- Notice your breathing as it enters your nose, elevates your chest, or moves your abdomen, but make no changes to it.
- For the next 5 to 10 minutes, concentrate on your breathing.
- Your thoughts may wander, which is totally natural. Simply accept that your mind has gone and restore your focus to your breathing.
- Note how simply your thoughts strayed as you begin to wrap things. Then, notice how simple it was to return your focus to your breath.
Attempt to do as much time as you can in a week. Keep in mind that the first few times you try it, it may not feel particularly successful. However, with consistent practice, it will become simpler and more natural.
If you find it difficult to do this on your own, there are guided meditations available online and on apps. You could try out our app to help you start with meditating and take advantage of other incentives as well.
Meditation should not substitute for a healthy diet, regular exercise, and according to your doctor’s recommendations for weight reduction and blood pressure control.
However, if done with care and dedication, it can help to promote those beneficial improvements. Meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, can be an effective element of your weight reduction strategy.
When trying to reduce weight, the bottom line is to create a calorie deficit. On the other hand, a mindful awareness program is likely to make the process simpler and may help you keep the weight off for good.
It can help you make long-term adjustments to your eating habits, mental patterns, and even how you perceive your weight over time. Set up at least 5-10 minutes every day to get started.
Related Article: Take care of your mental health with a diet
