Losing weight is something that concerns many people. Most men and women have tried to lose weight at some point in their lives. Meditation can support you to achieve your weight loss, but it is not a substitute for the healthy lifestyle and diet needed to lose weight. Most of all, it can make it easier to stick to your weight loss plans.
Therefore, in this article I will discuss how meditation can provide support for losing weight.
Losing weight often means 80 percent adjusting your diet and 20 percent extra exercise. Adjusting your diet can be especially mentally challenging. You have to be mentally strong to never make mistakes when adjusting your diet, but even if you have a day when you did eat three chocolate bars it does not immediately mean that you have failed. Meditation can help you realize that a healthy lifestyle also involves trial and error and that even then you will get there.
Diet Schedule
A diet regimen is often one of the first things you can set up to lose weight. The downside of this is that you have to be very concerned with nutrition and cannot just eat anything you feel like eating.
Because of this, it's common to find yourself dealing with nutrition throughout the day. You're at work, but thinking about the schedule. You're eating and thinking about how long you can't eat next. You're thinking about your growling stomach and that you may eat something in 15 minutes.
This can make it difficult to perform tasks in addition to your diet.
Mindfulness meditation
One way to ensure that you are less concerned with food during the day is through mindfulness. Through mindfulness meditation, you learn how to accomplish tasks without being distracted by your schedule.
If you are engaged in a task, such as arranging a bunch of flowers, you engage with mindfulness meditation on that task. You feel the flowers (and any thorns AU!) you enjoy the colors and textures. If you find that you do get distracted you go back to your breathing, feeling, seeing and smelling the flowers with your mind.
You can also do this with other tasks if you find that you are distracted by thoughts that do not help while losing weight.
Lasting weight with meditation
Meditation can also help with weight loss in other ways besides distracting thoughts about food. Studies show that meditation, mindfulness meditation and yoga meditation can help support weight loss and maintain this lower weight for longer periods of time (1, 2).
Through meditation, not only can you help yourself have more mental strength to choose healthy eating, it also helps you recognize emotional triggers that cause you to eat and becomes more aware of your body.
This also helps you feel it better when you are full and therefore when you don't need to go for another serving of food, even though it is so delicious.
In addition, meditation can also make you feel more positive about life, reducing emotional binge eating.
Meditation techniques for healthy eating
Many meditation techniques used to eat very consciously are similar to mindful eating. Raisin meditation was developed in 1990. Its goal is to eat one raisin and experience this eating as completely as possible. The feel of the raisin in your fingers, the smell just before the raisin enters your mouth, the feel of the raisin in your mouth, the way the taste of the raisin spreads in your mouth, how it stimulates your saliva production, and how the raisin changes texture as you chew it and finally the feel of the raisin as you swallow it.
Through this meditation and total focus on the raisin, it is as if you have never eaten a raisin before. You may notice things you have never experienced before.
This is a good exercise to start with to apply mindfulness eating during your meals, such as breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. That way, you will enjoy your food more, eat more slowly and thus avoid accidentally overeating.
In addition, it is important to strengthen contact with your body and living environment so that your life takes place less "in your head and thoughts."
For that, you can use any than 20 minutes of seated meditation to be more in touch with your environment.
You can also apply mini meditations throughout the day. For example, you can set an alarm that goes off every few hours after which you just focus on your breathing and try to clear your mind or become aware of what you are doing, what you are thinking about and how you are feeling.
Meditation exercise for more control over eating
You can also apply meditation to focus on how you deal with food. In doing so, you first sit and focus on your breathing. On how your breath passes through your body and relax and close your eyes. Then bring up the feeling of one of the last times you went out to eat and answer the following questions:
- What were you planning to eat?
- What did your diet look like?
- How did you come to choose to eat these foods?
Also note that with answering these questions come feelings and thoughts, which is all good.
- Are you hungry now?
- How do you know?
- What does hunger feel like?
- How much hunger are you feeling right now?
Now proceed to imagine eating as you normally do.
- What does your mouth do?
- How fast do you eat?
- What are you thinking while you eat?
Imagine eating normally, as you always do. You have now almost eaten your plate empty.
- How full are you right now?
- How do you know?
- What thoughts do you have?
- What kind of feelings do you have?
- What do you want to do next?
- How's your breathing going?
Bring your thoughts back to your breathing during this seated meditation remembering how you recently ate. Take a few deeper, more relaxed breaths. Feel yourself sitting on the floor or chair. Feel yourself in the here and now and open your eyes.
The purpose of this meditation exercise is to clarify the physical, emotional and mental activities while eating. It's not there to judge, it's not good or bad, but it will give you a better understanding of how you eat, what you feel about it and what thoughts eating triggers in you and whether it happens at all. This can give insights that can already cause you to deal with food differently and allow you to set new goals in the way you deal with food.
In addition, you can improve contact with your body and sensing hunger or other sensations that can be mistaken for hunger through meditation where you focus on your breathing, the rest of your body and meditation combined with movement.
Yoga exercises lose weight
Exercise, of course, is also a great way to lose weight. A good way to combine exercise and meditation is to apply yoga meditation. Yoga meditation has several forms, such as sitting meditation, breathing meditation, mantra meditation and the best known form is hatha yoga which focuses on the movement of your body, along with breathing and how the movements affect your thoughts and emotions.
A yoga pose that helps for weight loss is the warrior I. In the warrior sit a large step forward you keep your hips straight and bend the front knee while keeping the back knee straight. You push forward with one side of your hip so it stays straight and not twisted, that temptation is great when one leg is backwards. By doing this you also stretch a muscle at the front of your hip and you strain your front leg. Then turn your arms up sideways and bring them together above your head. You can then also look up at your thumbs yourself and feel your back muscles working and perhaps stretching your abdomen.
This pose helps on one hand because it puts a lot of muscles to work, on the other hand it can help by making you stronger and making you feel strong. It is not called the warrior for nothing.
This feeling of strength both physically and mentally lets you take 10 breaths all the way in. You feel that your body is strong, the wonder that you can cause your body to do (or at least approximately) what you want it to do. Then you lower your arms with a sideways swing and put your feet back together.
Then do the exercise again with your other leg forward.
Want to learn more about the benefits of meditation for your health, both mental and physical? Then come to a seminar or check out Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' trainings.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
Sources:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965229910001044
http://metanexus.net/archive/conference2004/pdf/kristeller.pdf
