Mindfullness and Weightloss

Specific practices and techniques — meditation, mindful eating, and intuitive eating — can help us learn or relearn how to have a healthy relationship with food and how to remove any problematic feelings we may have surrounding eating. Weight loss may be a side effect of cultivating this renewed relationship, but it’s important not to establish losing weight as the primary goal. Doing so may constrain us so that we are unable to truly eat intuitively or in a mindful way.

Instead, focus on enjoying foods — eating because you’re hungry, not because you’re stressed about work or family issues and feeling overwhelmed. You will learn through these practices how to appreciate and love your body for all it can do for you.

When it comes to talking about meditation for weight loss or meditation for eating and working toward developing a healthy relationship with food, it can help to understand what the terminology means.

Stress or emotional eating occurs when people tend to eat and overeat because of strong emotions or feelings, rather than responding to their own internal cues of hunger. Sometimes when we experience strong emotions, these emotions can outweigh our physical feelings of fullness and satiation, and this can result in us overeating. In these cases, food is used as a coping mechanism, dulling strong emotions momentarily. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that this experience contributes toward perpetuating a cycle. Feeling stressful emotions can lead to overeating, which leads to guilt or shame, circling back to feeling — and not being able to process or handle — negative emotions or stress.

Mindful eating is a technique or framework you can use to help repair your relationship with food and eating experiences. It calls us to be present and to engage our senses — how the food tastes, smells, and most importantly, how it makes our bodies feel. Mindful eating incorporates intuitive eating, to help us slow down and listen to our internal cues of true hunger versus cues of satiation, and as such, it can help us reduce or even entirely cease our emotional or binge eating. While mindful eating can lead to weight loss, losing weight should not be the goal outcome or motivation. If our food choices are made based on a certain physical outcome we are wishing for, it indicates that we have already stopped eating mindfully. 

Intuitive eating is a mind-body, non-diet approach to health and wellness. It rejects the concept of dieting and teaches us to trust our bodies and listen to our internal physical cues, with the goal of healing our relationship with food. Intuitive eating includes principles of mindful eating, however, it encompasses a broader expanded philosophy that spans across, moving your body because it feels good to move, and using nutrition information without bias.

Just as meditation can help us with stress, sleeping, focus, and much more, it can also have an impact on our relationship with eating and managing our weight.

When it comes to losing weight, we typically think of taking a spin class or opting for the salad instead of a burger for lunch. Consequently, it may seem counterintuitive to consider sitting in one place and focusing your thoughts and doing a meditation for weight loss. These sorts of perceptions are only viewing part of the picture. Keep in mind that weight loss is not simply physical, and it’s not simply black and white. As humans, we’re emotional beings, and acknowledging that fact is helpful in developing a healthy relationship with food, and potentially losing body fat or maintaining whatever weight is healthiest for our bodies.

Consider a 2017 meta-analysis of 19 different studies that found that typical weight loss methods (diet and exercise) work in the short term, but eventually the study participants’ weight was gained back after the programs ended. On the other hand, weight loss protocols that included mindfulness interventions such as meditation (in addition to eating well and exercising), were seen to be more effective in reducing weight and keeping it off among study participants.

So, why is it possible that meditation helps when it comes to weight loss, exactly? There are physical and psychological factors at play. Another 2017 meta-analysis found that generalized meditation helped reduce cortisol and C-reactive protein levels. If our cortisol levels are consistently high, this is connected with the persistence of obesity over time, according to a 2017 study.

Psychologically, research shows that meditation may help squash overeating. A 2014 review compared 14 different studies and found that using mindful meditation as the #1 intervention decreased binge eating and emotional eating. Meditation has been shown to lower our stress levels. In fact, Headspace reduces stress in 10 days. This is important because stress is a contributing factor, causing many of us to overeat. Meditation teaches us to sit with and observe our emotions without passing judgment, instead of resorting to our go-to coping mechanisms like overindulging on food.

#repost from https://www.headspace.com/meditation/weight-loss