As it turns out, there’s no place like ‘Om’ for weight loss. In our increasingly busy and stressful lives, meditation continues to gain popularity as a way to deal with daily trials and keep ourselves centred and sane.
But as its popularity soars, meditation is moving out of its stereotype as religious practice to “find inner peace”. Perhaps in another sign of the times, many people who get into meditation do so only after they learn of the long list of practical benefits it can offer. From better sleep to increased creativity, there seems no end to how meditation can positively affect your life.
Fortunately for anyone trying to lose weight or keep it off, meditation offers a number of benefits that can help you achieve and maintain your goals. And you can enjoy them without signing up at an expensive club, buying fancy outfits … or even sweating.
Reduces Emotional Eating
Unconscious or reactive eating, based on stress or bad moods and emotions, is one of the biggest reasons that we overeat. Emotional eating isn’t done to satisfy the normal hunger we feel when our body needs energy, but to ease whatever negative feelings we have.
Meditation reduces stress and anxiety so that you won’t need to smother them with a bag of potato chips.
Increases Activity
How many times have you been told that you need to exercise more if you really want to lose weight? But extra weight can reduce the energy your body has for extra activity. That makes it more difficult to get up and move around.
Meditation has been shown to boost energy levels. While no one knows how long humans have practiced meditation, but for as long as there have been references to mediation in history, the term has been closely related to building internal energy, or life force. In both scientific and anecdotal evidence, those who meditate have higher energy and activity levels.
Speeds up Metabolism
We all know the importance of your metabolism for weight management. In one new study, two groups of 24 people, one group with no history of meditation and one group with a minimum of four years of practising mediation.
After an eight-week program, both groups were found to have a suppression of stress, inflammation, cancer symptoms and trauma, all of which were previously documented. But what researchers didn’t expect was the increase in mitochondria, the energy centres of our cells. Increased mitochondria are generally considered signs of increased