Specific meditation practices such as mindful and intuitive eating can help us learn how to have a healthy relationship with food and how to remove any negative feelings related to food. Weight loss is only a side effect of creating a healthy relationship with food through meditation.
Through meditation, we can develop such a relationship with food that we don’t eat because we are stressed and overwhelmed. Also, through meditation, you will be more appreciative of your body.
Can You Lose Weight from Meditation?
Although when meditating you are not sweating and losing weight in a more visible way, you are developing a relationship with yourself and with food. Meditation is strongly related to stress, and eating can be related to stress as well.
Emotional eating occurs when we overeat because of the strong emotions that we experience which are triggers to eating more than we normally would eat without stress. When we are experiencing strong emotions, these emotions can overcome the physical feeling of hunger and it can result in overeating.
What is Meditation for Weight Loss?
Mindful eating is a technique through which you can repair your relationship with food. It demands the feeling of being present, feeling the taste, and the smell of the food. With mindful eating, you eat slowly following internal cues of true hunger and the feeling of being full.
If you are trying to lose weight, it’s important to remember that meditation has an impact on both your physical and mental state. Losing weight is not black and white, it’s not only about physical exercise and it’s not only about diet either. A typical weight-loss method is a combination of diet and exercise but more than often it’s a short-term resolution. While a combination of diet, exercise, and mediation are way more effective in reducing and maintaining weight.
Mindfulness for Weight Loss and Sleep
Meditation can help us deal with focus, stress, eating, sleeping, and much more. When it comes to meditation, physical and psychological factors come into play.
The important factor that relates to both sleep and weight loss is stress. We eat when stressed and we can’t sleep when we are under stress. When we control stress and the way we react to stress, we are more in control of our healthy and unhealthy habits.
Sometimes staying awake during meditation can be a challenge and it’s not a surprise that meditation promotes healthy sleep. Although, it’s not that easy to sit or lay down quietly and breathe while you are stressed and aggravated, it’s important to remember that meditation is calming.
Meditation encourages awareness to see things with curiosity and without judgment. If you set yourself to sleep and you are forcing yourself, it can be even more difficult.
It’s important to remember that you shouldn’t force anything to happen. When you are striving for sleep, it can be even more challenging to fall asleep with high expectations and goals. Practice meditation beforehand to relieve stress. We can’t make ourselves sleep but we can aim to settle down and get less caught up with our thoughts.
How to Meditate Longer
In the beginning, people often struggle with meditation and they can’t take it for more than 5 to 10 minutes. Meditation practice can be developed slowly. Rarely someone jumps into one hour of the meditation for the first time. The practice of meditation progresses as the act of quieting the mind.
Longer meditation can calm the nervous system and establish a more tranquil mind. The problem is execution. Just when your meditation gets deeper, you are itching and your lower back hurts. You feel like a hostage and you think to yourself why are you even doing this? In those cases, longer meditation is not necessarily better. Take a step back and increase the time of meditation by one minute a week if that will take you to a desirable 20 minutes of meditation. Self-discipline is everything but you shouldn’t force yourself into it.
Ancient texts talk about the sages of people who could meditate for a longer period with no apparent discomfort. We don’t need to aim for meditation of one day or longer. Many of us are busy with our daily obligations but we can’t approach meditation as a quick fix either. We should approach meditation as something that will benefit us in the long run.
