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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.”
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.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.
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.“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.
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.”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.
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.
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.
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.
5. Reduces Stress Hormones That Cause Weight Gain
Several stress hormones can affect our weight as well.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.
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.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.
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.