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Why using daily meditation works as a tool for weight loss is because if you’re an emotional eater, it can help you feel centered when life gets challenging. Losing weight is tough enough when life isn’t so demanding. However, once I understood how using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss helps me cope with stress levels, I was on board with it.
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It’s clear to me that keeping weight off requires a different frame of mind. Since I reached my goal weight in 2018, keeping it off has been even harder for me than losing weight. I haven’t regained the 100lbs that I lost (not even close), but so far the events of this year have made maintaining my weight loss an uphill battle.
Now I understand the statistics that roughly 80% of people who lose weight gain it back within a few years. If you are a self-proclaimed emotional eater (like me) and life has made keeping weight off a huge struggle for you, I invite you to draw a line in the sand.
You do not have to become a weight loss statistic. It will take some work, determination and some reprogramming. Statistics are not laws etched in stone, they are just data. Take it upon yourself to defy the odds!
You can reach your weight loss goals and keep the weight off using daily meditation as a weight-loss tool. Think of this as your secret weapon.
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Using Daily Meditation Works As A Weight Loss Tool
Meditation comes from the Latin word “ponder”. It can help bring an awareness of your emotions to the surface so that you can observe your behavior. Think of meditation as the catalyst that makes it possible to understand what’s going on in your subconscious.
Consider this analogy: You have a car that keeps breaking down and you don’t know why. Until you take the car to a mechanic and look under the hood, you don’t have an awareness of why your car is breaking down or where the problem is coming from.
Once you are aware of all the reasons why your car continues to break down, you can work on solving the problem. Looking deeper (under the hood) connects you to the source of the issue.
Using daily meditation as a weight-loss tool works because it allows you to get a glimpse into your daily life so that you can see how it’s affecting you.
Meditation As A Weight Loss Tool Strengthens The Mind-Body Connection
Losing weight is a mental game. If you are an emotional eater, your issues aren’t with food, but rather, how you process your feelings. The reason meditation is so effective as a weight-loss tool is because it helps you strengthen the mind-body connection.
If you make a strong enough connection between your thoughts and feelings often enough, you will bring more awareness to your behavior. Not only does using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss make you aware of your behavior, but it also allows you to see your behavior in the most nonjudgmental way.
Using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss will help you uncover why you make the choices you make despite knowing that you will sabotage your weight loss goals.
As an emotional eater, this explains why it almost feels as if there’s a disconnect between my mind and body. If this sounds familiar, you are responding to your emotions with the physical act of eating.
Eating in response to emotions that are hard to process is a self-destructive behavior that only helps you feel better in the moment. However, in the long run, emotional eating can be disastrous because you magnify the feelings you’re trying to soothe.
You ultimately feel worse for the dysfunctional behavior, and it becomes a dangerous cycle.
I’ve seen with my past dieting history that when I have a stronger mind-body connection, my weight is better controlled.
Meditation Brings Awareness To Your Thoughts
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Studies show that people have around 60,000 or more thoughts every day. Most of them are negative and even more are repetitive. If you don’t believe this is true, think about how much you dwell on an issue that is bothering you.
You already know you can go days and days rolling a problem over in your mind, am I right?
Using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss can help you identify the thoughts that are causing you emotional stress. After you’ve observed your thoughts, you can decide whether said thoughts are serving you and choose whether to believe them or not.
Remember my analogy about the car? You can’t address your emotions until you understand what thoughts are causing them.
Daily Meditation Brings Awareness To Your Actions
Meditation can bring the truth to light. I know I’ve said a million times, I don’t understand why I keep gaining and losing the same 10 lbs over and over again.
Now you may know on a conscious level the reason on the surface is that you keep snacking on junk food, or eat way too much sugar. However, using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss can help you see on a subconscious level why you keep snacking on junk foods even though you know doing this will cause you to gain weight.
Meditation peels back the layers in your mind by revealing the thoughts that cause your emotions, and your responses to those emotions. What you’ll discover is that you are allowing your thoughts to control your behavior.
Once you understand this, you will have identified the obstacles that are hindering your weight loss efforts.
Meditation Opens Your Mind To Help Create Solutions
Slowing down to meditate can help you uncover solutions or answers to your problems. When you meditate with intention, you are taking a look from the outside in and giving yourself 20-20 hindsight.
This self-reflection promotes understanding, compassion, and love. You are more likely to follow through with behavior changes and respond with patience when you have a slip-up, rather than throw yourself deeper into self-sabotaging behavior.
Meditation For Newbies
You don’t have to be an expert to experience the benefits of meditation. It can feel a little strange at first, but with a little practice, you’ll get the hang of it.
When you learned to drive, it felt strange in the beginning, right? You had to think about every step from getting in the car, adjusting mirrors, to turning on the engine.
If you make meditation your practice every day, I promise you’ll experience calm in the chaos that is your life right now.
As a beginner, just decide when you want to meditate. I choose first thing in the morning, and I’m still a beginner so I’m meditating for 5-10 minutes.
Make a cup of your favorite morning beverage if you have time, and choose a comfortable place to sit. I always have my journal handy so that I can write down the first few thoughts or feelings that come to mind when I’m finished meditating.
I set a timer using my cell phone, close my eyes and breathe. Inhaling 8 counts, exhaling 8 counts. I do this breathing technique until my timer rings. My thoughts do wander but I always bring them back to my breath. That’s all there is to it.
This breathing meditation can be done at any time of the day that you feel yourself getting stressed or anxious. I have done a quick breathing meditation while in the restroom for a few seconds while at work.
In the middle of the day, it can help decrease your stress to a more manageable level.
Be Consistent With Meditation And Reap The Benefits
Your body is a direct reflection of what’s going on in your mind. If you make a habit of using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss you will stay aware of what your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are trying to communicate to you.
Once you have a conscious awareness of what drives your behavior, you can respond appropriately to situations that have the potential to throw you off track with your weight loss goals.
Using daily meditation as a tool for weight loss can shift your thinking from that of a victim to someone who is empowered because they can control their behavior and respond confidently in difficult situations.
If you have the confidence to succeed at losing weight and keeping it off, you’ll forever see yourself through a different lens.
Have you tried meditation? Please share your experience in the comments!
Sources:
https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20161014/how-your-appetite-can-sabotage-weight-loss#1
https://mindworks.org/blog/history-origins-of-meditation/
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