Being aware of your body and therefore your health: it sounds simpler than it really is. However, it is the key to a healthy and happy lifestyle. You can diet as much as you want, but if you do not listen to what your own body needs, sooner or later the same problem will come up again.
Losing weight through mindfulness
The simplest way you can start in a moment is mindful eating. Many people eat unconsciously; by this we mean that while eating you are reading the news on your laptop, running to catch the train, catching up on work, and therefore not paying attention to the food you are eating. Sometimes, for example during an emotional eating binge, you can unknowingly eat all kinds of unhealthy things, when in fact you don't even enjoy them or may not even really like them. Small adjustments will help you lose some extra pounds.
The meditation with the raisin
This exercise is often the first one you do on a mindfulness course: the raisin exercise. You're going to eat one raisin. And then not bite, swallow, gone but with your full attention. This is often to introduce people to mindfulness and you'll find that immediately afterwards you start looking at the world a little differently.
Looking, smelling, feeling, tasting
So in mindful eating, your mind is with the food. You look, smell, feel and taste the food. When I eat mindfully, I actually can't enjoy a bag of chips anymore because I realize that I'm really only eating fat, salt and carbs. The whole enjoyment that snacking during a movie gave me is now instantly gone. When you become more mindful with food, you will look more for foods that really take care of your body: products with fiber, vitamins, minerals and healthy fats.
The smell of green apples
Need another push? American research from the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation shows that certain smells can also make you feel full faster. For example, your brain would get a signal of "feeling satiated" when you smell (and therefore don't eat) green apples and bananas. We are actually fooling our brain! A trick you can use in combination with hypnosis.
From diet regimen to daily meditation
One of the first things you normally set up when you want to lose weight is a diet plan. The downside of this is that you have to worry about nutrition throughout the day; what you can and cannot eat and at what time. Violating or adjusting your schedule can feel like failure. One way to make sure you are less preoccupied with this, find resignation and balance in the process is meditation. Research shows that meditation (through mindfulness or yoga) can help support weight loss and maintain this lower weight for a longer period of time(1).
"Meditation not only gives you mental strength needed to choose healthy eating, it also helps you recognize the emotional triggers that cause you to eat (too much). Through daily practice, you become more aware of your body's signals."
Mindfulness as the starting point of everything
When you are working on losing weight with mindfulness, it is important to distance yourself from your thoughts. You become a kind of witness to your thoughts rather than a judge. This prevents a negative thought spiral which can undo your good work. Mindfulness is actually the starting point of (almost) everything. Mindful walking, mindful breathing, mindful dealing with your emotions, mindful you name it... It's a way of living, a way of dealing with emotions without any external factor like - in this case - nutrition or adjusting your diet.
