Mindfulness has become a popular meditation technique to relieve stress and help with our overall mental and physical health. But mindfulness, because of the way it promotes the mind-body connection, can also help when working on weight loss.
In fact, a recent study published in the Journal of Medicine and Life concluded that: “…because individuals who received both mindfulness training and dietary regime were ready to reduce weight in terms of mental and physical and this mutual readiness led to more durability.”
So why use mindfulness for weight loss?
Mindful eating, meditation and intuitive eating can help us get back to a healthy relationship with the food we eat and help confront negative feelings we have about eating. Weight loss may be a result, but the aim is to return to eating intuitively and mindfully rather than having a specific goal of losing a few pounds.
Sometimes stress and emotional eating results from strong emotions or feelings that we’re dealing with rather than our body’s internal hunger cues. This can lead to food being used as a coping mechanism to dull these negative influences on our minds in a vicious cycle that only makes us feel worse and results in more binge eating.
Mindful eating is a method you can use to re-balance your relationship with food and the way that you eat. It means you are present when eating and engage your senses fully in the taste and aroma of your food and, most importantly, how it makes your body feel. It also incorporates intuitive eating which helps you listen to your body when it signal that you are satiated.
By doing this you can help reduce, or entirely remove, the emotional triggers that cause you to binge eat or simply eat more when you\’ve had enough. Mindfulness helps you to adopt an intuitive eating approach to food that engages both the mind and body to achieve health and wellness. It rejects dieting as such, in favor of a natural approach to eating that involves eating mindfully and intuitively and trusting your body\’s eating cues to rebuild a healthier relationship with food.
Ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5319254/
