3 Surprising Ways Meditation Can Help Weight Loss

Who would ever have thought sitting in a calm, relaxed space turning our thoughts inwards would ever help us lose weight. Everyone knows that burning off more calories than we take in results in weight loss don’t they! Eating healthy foods and taking regular exercise increases our chances of keeping weight off. Of course it does.

Though this simple calculation of calorie balancing fails to account for the emotional drivers of eating to calm shame, guilt, sorrow, grief or any other negative emotion you can think of. Most often the temporary numbing of painful emotions through eating are followed by feelings of greed, guilt and shame that leads to more negative feeling and more eating causing a vicious cycle of weight gain.

Using meditation can help us control the negative thoughts, understand our eating motivations and cause physical changes within our bodies to assist us in keeping the weight off more effectively than diet alone. Many studies have shown that meditation is effective in reducing weight and improving obesity-related behaviours among individuals who are overweight or obese.

Let’s learn how meditation can help us maintain healthier levels of weight and fitness:

1.      Lowers our stress chemical levels

Stress and anxiety can trick our bodies into getting fat! Some stress in our lives is of course normal and acceptable for most people. However, when the stress becomes prolonged or excessive it can become very harmful for our physical and mental health. No huge surprise there, I hear you say!

When the stress is excessive or prolonged our bodies start producing the chemicals cortisol and adrenaline. When the body has high levels of these chemicals the mind interprets that as a threat of danger and goes into a kind of protection mode for us.

It anticipates that we are going into some kind of battle where we will need our energy resources. To help us it starts storing sugar as fat. Bob Roth, author of the bestselling book "Strength In Stillness" and well-known meditation teacher to famous celebrities like Katy Perry, Jerry Seinfeld is quoted saying "We know if a person is stressed, they get sick more. If they're stressed, they gain weight. A lot of this comes down to the release of cortisol in the body... [which becomes] toxic when we have too much."

Meditation lowers our stress chemical concentrations in 3 ways:

· By raising our emotional breakpoint so we become more resilient and able to manage difficult situations and emotions with more conscious control.

· Meditation develops and strengthens our brain's "command and control centre" prefrontal cortex keeping us calmer and more in control when we need to be.

· By kicking off the relaxation response which is the opposite of the stress response. The relaxation response being coined by the esteemed Harvard cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson in the 1980's.

2.      Reduces insulin resistance

 When our insulin receptors don't open up properly, our liver and muscle cells can't store the energy (glucose) we need from food. This sends our blood sugar sky high. Then all that energy has to go somewhere and it does, it gets stored as fat! And not the wiggly jiggly type that goes all over your body it’s the nasty visceral type that clings to your organs and around your belly area. As this also starves cells of nutrition people experiencing insulin resistance also find they have insatiable appetites too. This is difficult to identify as they are below the levels for diabetes testing. In lab tests at her practice, weight loss (bariatric) physician, Dr. Caroline Cederquist found that around 90% of her obese patients suffered from insulin resistance!

Scientists from Cedars-Sinai Research Institute (Labrador et, al) had 47 coronary heart patients practice meditation for 16 weeks. What did they find? Amazingly, the meditating heart patients plummeted three key metabolic syndrome markers, including their insulin resistance, glucose, and HOMA scores (homeostasis model assessment).

3.      Naturally increases dopamine levels

When we eat certain foods we get a rush of a happy chemical called dopamine. As with most mood enhancing chemicals, the “high” is temporary and short lived, leaving us wanting more after feeling low. This can lead to binge eating and inevitable weight gain. Often starting cycles of unhealthy eating patterns that are difficult to break.

Regular meditation provides natural increases in our dopamine levels. A landmark 2002 study at the John F. Kennedy Institute (Kjaer et, al) found that dopamine levels were boosted by a colossal 65% during meditation! In addition the levels stayed higher so the crash seen with food induced dopamine where not observed. When meditation naturally makes us feel incredible all the time, then we put down the fork to enjoy the present moment. This transformation puts us on the road to healthy eating and weight management.

Dina Kaplan says-our body is a mirror reflection of what’s going on in our minds. If our primary focus is on losing weight, we cut ourselves off from the emotional and mental beings we are, and that prevents us from understanding why the weight is showing up in the first place.

Let meditation help you get to the health and fitness goals you desire for the New Year and the future.