5 Ways Meditation Can Help You Achieve Sustainable Weight Loss

5 Ways Meditation Can Help You Achieve Sustainable Weight Loss
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3/15/2023
Updated:
6/17/2023
0:00

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When it comes to managing our weight, it’s important to acknowledge the power of our thoughts and the influence of our emotions. By calming our emotions and becoming more mindful of our thought patterns, meditation can help us make healthier choices and achieve weight loss goals with lasting effects.

Ryan Peterson, MD, board-certified in anesthesiology and pain medicine, told The Epoch Times he recently started working with an obese patient struggling with food addiction and referred him to his clinical counselor for meditation exercises. He felt his patient’s distress was less about food addiction and more about his poor relationship with his body and food. After practicing meditation for a couple of months, the patient made progress by becoming more mindful of his body and changing his approach to weight loss to one “that is soothing, not stressful, to his nervous system.”

Paul Harrison, a Canadian corporate personal meditation coach, told The Epoch Times he successfully helped a young female client with her emotional eating using meditation. Although she yearned to lose weight, her emotions were preventing her from doing so. Whenever she experienced anger or sadness, she would immediately grab food. Meditation has helped her to regulate her eating behavior, which eventually was no longer controlled by her negative emotions.

How Can Meditation Help Us Lose Weight?

Dr. Peterson said that meditation can help with weight loss, but not for the reasons we might think. Although meditation doesn’t help burn calories like cardio, it has positive cognitive effects on mental wellness, which will enable us to better adhere to exercise or dietary regimens. Meditation has helped many of his clients relieve stress and release negative emotions that trigger binging episodes.
Practicing meditation can help us lose weight in the following five ways:

1. Enhances Mindful Eating

Mindless eating during activities such as watching television, working at a computer, driving, or other multitasking, can increase our risk of overeating.

Meditation can help us practice mindful eating. When we eat mindfully, we are using our senses to experience and savor our food, as opposed to just using food to satisfy our hunger. Mindful eating helps us to enjoy our culinary experience as we nourish our body, and will help us avoid overeating.

In a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, researchers randomly assigned 194 obese participants to a weight loss program consisting of diet and exercise, with or without meditation training.
The meditation group experienced greater increases in mindful eating than the group without meditation. Although both groups reduced their intake of sweets, the meditation group maintained this reduction, whereas the other group’s sugary food intake increased significantly after the program completion. Furthermore, fasting glucose didn’t increase among the participants of the meditation group, while the other group experienced a significant increase. These behavioral changes and effects lasted for at least six months after the program concluded.

2. Helps Control Binge and Emotional Eating

Binge-eating disorder is a serious and potentially life-threatening disorder in which an individual experiences episodes of consuming an unusually large quantity of food and feels unable to stop eating. Negative emotions can cause us to turn to food to try to calm our feelings.
Meditation can be an effective tool for controlling binge and emotional eating behaviors. A systematic review of 14 studies assessed the impact of mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge and emotional eating and its effect on weight. Mindfulness meditation was shown to effectively decrease both binge eating and emotional eating in those who engaged in this behavior.

“By reducing stress and anxiety, meditation can help reduce emotional eating,” said Sunjya Schweig, MD, an expert in complex chronic illnesses and the founder and president of the California Center for Functional Medicine. Schweig told The Epoch Times that meditation can help people become more self-aware of their food cravings.

Since meditation can help control binge and emotional eating, it may naturally lead to better weight management.

3. Improves Sleep Quality

According to Dr. Schweig, meditation can also help improve our sleep quality, which in turn “may lower inflammation and improve metabolic function to further support weight loss efforts.”
In a 2021 study, 125 overweight or obese adults participated in a one-year weight loss intervention program in which aspects of their sleep health were assessed, including sleep regularity, satisfaction, duration, and daytime alertness.

The study discovered that the better sleep health, the greater the weight and fat loss. Higher satisfaction, earlier sleep midpoints, and better sleep efficiency were all associated with more weight and/or fat loss.

In another study involving American ethnic minorities, extremely short sleep durations of five or less hours per night were related to increases in body mass index and visceral and subcutaneous adipose (fat) tissue in participants younger than 40.

This may be due to the fact that sleep deprivation affects ghrelin and leptin, which are both hormones that control our appetite.

Ghrelin, also known as the “hunger” hormone, signals our brain to feel hungry, so it’s important in regulating our calorie intake.

According to a German study, just one night of sleep deprivation can increase our ghrelin levels and make us feel hungry.

Produced by our body’s fat cells, leptin is a hormone that sends a signal to our brain to help us feel full, decreasing our appetite.

Less sleep is associated with the activation of our stress system, which causes our leptin levels to decrease. And leptin levels have been found to increase during sleep.
Since meditation can help us sleep longer and better, it can cause our ghrelin levels to decrease and leptin levels to increase, thus helping us feel less hungry, curbing our calorie intake, and making weight loss easier.

4. Helps Us Stay Motivated to Lose Weight

“Individuals reach a more relaxed state by boosting the production of calm neurotransmitters, making it easier for them to stay motivated in their attempt at losing weight,” explained holistic physician, Dr. Sony Sherpa, in an email to The Epoch Times.

Dr. Sherpa also specifically mentioned two types of neurotransmitters: serotonin and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA).

Serotonin, also known as the “calming chemical,” modulates our mood and cognition, among many other functions. GABA is an inhibitory transmitter, which can produce a calming effect in our body.

A study of the neurophysiological and neural chemical mechanisms underlying the processes of meditation showed that during meditation, serotonin and GABA levels both increased.
As explained by Dr. Sherpa, serotonin and GABA can help us stay motivated once we start our quest to lose weight. When starting a weight loss program, it’s common to feel super motivated and stick to our diet and exercise regime for the first couple of weeks, only to completely abandon our plan once our motivation wanes. Through the production of both serotonin and GABA, meditation can help us to stay motivated in our weight loss plan and obtain concrete results.

5. Reduces Stress Hormones That Cause Weight Gain

Several stress hormones can affect our weight as well.
For instance, our body releases cortisol in response to stress. Elevated levels of cortisol can increase our appetite and lead to weight gain.
In a Thai study, after meditation, the participants’ serum cortisol levels significantly decreased from their pre-meditation level.

Epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, and norepinephrine are both neurotransmitters that can lead to increased blood sugar levels and heart rate.

When high blood sugar levels drop, they can make us feel hungry and want to consume food.

High blood sugar levels can also lead to more insulin secretion as the body tries to process the excess blood sugar. Insulin is another stress hormone that regulates our body’s sugar absorption. Specifically, insulin transports sugar into the cells, and if the sugar is not used, it is stored as fat. So the more insulin the body releases, the higher the chance of weight gain through increased fat storage.
According to a Spanish study, the epinephrine and norepinephrine levels of regular meditators were significantly lower than those who didn’t meditate. Therefore, it’s reasonable to suggest that if meditation can reduce the epinephrine and norepinephrine levels in our bodies, then it also may result in better weight management.

Combining Meditation With Diet and Exercise Can Improve Weight Loss

Combined with other effective methods such as a balanced diet and regular physical exercise, meditation can help us achieve and maintain better weight loss results.
In an Iranian study, 60 obese individuals were randomly assigned into four groups, with one group being on a diet, one receiving meditation training, one doing meditation while also being on a diet, and one with no dietary regime or meditation.

The group on a diet while doing meditation achieved the most success with weight loss results, followed by the meditation group.

The study concluded that combining the mindfulness training of meditation with a healthy dietary regime (both physical and psychological control) can be more effective for achieving weight loss than meditation alone.

In another study, researchers found evidence that combining meditation with a diet-exercise program may help with the long‐term maintenance of fasting blood sugar levels and improve atherogenic lipid profiles.

Therefore, practicing meditation after we lose weight can help us maintain our weight, in addition to other health benefits.

In summary, meditation can help us lose weight by practicing mindful eating, reducing unnecessary calorie intake, improving sleep quality, decreasing the hormones that can cause weight gain, and helping us maintain the efforts of our weight loss.

Mercura Wang is a health reporter for The Epoch Times. Have a tip? Email her at: [email protected]
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