How meditation can help you lo

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How meditation can help you lose weight

There may be another way to lose weight outside of spending hours in the gym or living off salads.

How meditation can help you lo

Pixabay

It’s the beginning of another year and a common New Year’s resolution is to shed those extra pounds. But sticking to your weight-loss goals can prove difficult, and with January over, many people will have already abandoned their skinny dreams. But there’s good news.

What is meditation?

Meditation is a practice that involves using various techniques to calm the mind and increase awareness and focused attention. Regular practice is associated with improved concentration, clarity, emotional positivity and clearer perspective. Research suggests that while meditation won’t make you lose weight overnight, it can help you make the positive changes needed to reach your weight goals in the long-term.

Reduces stress levels

Stress is one of the major causes of weight gain and often inhibits our ability to shift those pounds. Whatsmore, when you are stressed, your body releases excess cortisol, which sends signals to store calories as fat. Studies show that just 25 minutes of meditation three days in a row will significantly reduce stress levels, which in turn will lower your cortisol levels.

Facilitates mindful eating

Meditation helps to increase our awareness and to become more conscious of the way we live our lives. To transform our relationship with food and our bodies, we need to do the inner work and address the underlying issues that cause us to overeat.

Meditation creates a space for introspection and can help us identify the causes and resolve them by implementing a daily mindful practice. Through regular practice, we strengthen the connection between our body and mind which facilitates us to establish better habits.

This was echoed in a recent research paper that showed mindful meditation can help to decrease levels of emotional overeating and binge eating.

Creates healthy long-term behaviour

Conventional methods of losing weight are often unsustainable and hard to follow. They focus on what we should be doing rather than the internal changes we need to make, which is why they often don’t last.

Practising meditation enables us to do the inner work and resolve past traumas that have manifested as unhealthy eating habits. Eastern wisdom teaches that “a healthy mind is a healthy body” and therefore our bodies are a direct reflection of what’s going on in our minds.

Meditation isn’t a magic pill for weight loss, but it is a very powerful way to break old habits by creating long-term conscious thought patterns that help us stick to our weight loss goals.

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