Can meditation and mindfulness help you lose weight?
By now, you’ve probably tried everything to shed the extra weight, from restricting your calories to intensifying your workout routine. While these efforts might be helping you shed a kilogram or two every few weeks, there’s something that can give you that extra boost: meditation.
This cost-free, natural, simple strategy can be very effective in helping you slim down, while also alleviating stress and anxiety. The research surrounding mindful meditation practices suggests that meditation is closely linked to weight loss.
The concepts of mindfulness and meditation can not only lower your stress levels and boost awareness. Having an attentive mind can keep you from binge eating and emotional eating. Because of this, meditation for weight loss can be a naturally healthy and effective way to lose weight and eat better.
What is meditation?
Meditation is the act of focusing the attention on becoming more mindful. According to the American Meditation Society, during meditation, a person’s attention essentially flows inwards instead of engaging in the outer world of activity. The practice involves clearing the mind with the aim of returning to a state of calm emotions and straightforward thinking.
Some people practice meditation for only five minutes a day, though experts suggesting trying to work that up to about 20 minutes a day. For those who’re just starting out, consider taking five minutes just after you wake up to clear your mind before getting on with your day.
Close your eyes and simply focus on your breathing pattern without trying to change it. If your mind wanders, which is quite common when starting out, just guide it back to your breathing.
What is the link Between Weight Loss and Meditation?
The main reason why meditation can be so effective in helping you lose weight is that it aligns your conscious and unconscious mind into agreeing on the changes that you want to apply to your behaviors. These changes include regulating cravings for unhealthy foods, changing eating habits, and finding the motivation to get up and exercise
Developing a meditation routine will also help you keep the idea of weight loss alive. It essentially brings the object to the forefront of your mind and your day. This way, it’s much harder to forget, which it will motivate you to keep going. Meditation creates a higher level of concentration and focuses on your weight loss goals. Since it’s so easy to get distracted, taking some time out of your busy day to meditate will harbor that motivation.
Meditation and mindfulness have also been shown to improve psychological health. Mindfulness has been shown to lower emotional eating, binge eating, and generally enhance the weight loss process.
Stress Relief is one of the fastest benefits of meditation. It essentially takes you out of the fight-or-flight mode by lowering the levels of stress hormones in your body. Stress hormones such as cortisol usually signal the body to store more calories as fat. Because of this, high cortisol levels are going to make it much difficult for you to shed extra weight, even if you’re consistently making healthy choices.
Choose the Right Practice
There are a number of different meditation styles that you can go with, though they all follow a similar basic technique of calming the mind and taking some time to breathe and becoming aware of the present moment. It’s wise to try a number of methods that sound interesting to you to find out which ones work best.
Conclusion
No meditation practice for weight loss can help you lose weight without changing to a healthy diet and activity plan. If you are looking for a great plan to combine with your meditation practice click here. With The diet Doctor you can look forward to losing as much as 10kgs in 30 days