Can Meditation Help With Weight Loss?

Can meditation help with weight loss? It can, but indirectly. It is not a quick fix. Meditation is the slow, but powerful, process of transforming your mind and emotions to achieve higher states of consciousness.

If you’ve ever studied your mind, you know that it can be stubborn and needs to be coaxed into seeing things differently. We are creatures of habit. Slowly over time, our thought patterns, emotional responses, behavioral patterns, and outlook change with the process of meditation. Patterns around food, as well as other patterns, change with daily practice. We start to develop mindfulness around what we’re doing.

Now, why do people gain weight to begin with? It’s not about the food. It’s the result of past traumas, upsets in life, and present day stressors. We unconsciously protect and buffer ourselves with an extra layer of fat. Food gets used as a reward because the day is too much to cope with without some relief. It’s a way to feel in control of an otherwise uncontrollable and unpredictable environment. Food keeps us feeling safe.

Knowing this, how can meditation help? It helps in a few ways…

Meditation slowly helps us change our thought patterns and emotional responses. When this happens, we are more calm, clear, and centered during the day. We then end up making better food choices.
Developing a good breathing pattern is key to meditation. This healthy breathing pattern carries over into the day. We feel more grounded and make healthier choices, regarding food and other things as well.
Meditation uncovers repressed material in the mind. Slowly we are able to look at troublesome events from the past, traits about ourselves that we don’t like, and dysfunctional habit patterns that may have served us at some time but no longer do. Gradually we evolve into new ways of being and new ways of approaching life’s challenges.
Meditation tunes us into our bodies at a deeper level. When we eat foods that are not good for us, we feel the effects more acutely. Over time we no longer wish to feel bad and slowly let go of these foods. The con’s outweight the pro’s.

Where to start? Here are some short and simple breathing and meditation videos that you can practice with. It’s important to do a little every day. You will notice positive changes in how you feel if you commit to daily practice.

Click here for the videos.