Can you lose weight with meditation? YES and I’m going to teach you exactly how. This helpful guide to meditation for weight loss will teach you easy techniques, so beginners can start losing weight quickly!
Meditation is gaining popularity as a science-based way to lose weight quickly and consistently without diet or exercise. In fact, a recent study from McGill University found meditation to be more effective than diet and exercise for long-term weight loss. While the participants who used diet and exercise in the study regained ⅓ of the weight they lost within a year, the participants who used meditation continued to lose weight and keep it off.
Meditation is an easy and effective way to lose weight without having to give up your lifestyle or your favorite foods. It works by positively wiring the parts of the brain that contribute to weight loss.
When you meditate for weight loss, it changes your thought processes and behaviors around food. It teaches your brain to turn off cravings, to stop reaching for food out of stress or boredom, and to make healthier choices. As you build your meditation practice, the parts of the brain that lead to weight loss get turned on and you drop the pounds automatically!
This post will give you all the basics you need to start losing weight with meditation. If you’re looking for more, I recommend downloading the FREE Meditation for Weight Loss eBook. It contains the best meditation techniques for fast weight loss, the secret to long-term weight loss, and a sample plan for losing 10+ pounds in just 30 days with meditation.
How does Meditation for Weight Loss Work?
Let’s start with how meditation for weight loss works. Meditation is a practice that involves focusing the mind on a particular object to train attention and achieve an emotionally calm state. In short, it’s about learning to be present and accepting what is.
When we begin training our attention with meditation, we become more aware of our body and its natural responses. Weight gain is often linked to not paying close enough attention to the body. When we’re not aware of our body’s natural cues, we tend to eat when we’re not truly hungry, eat too much during mealtime, or fill our bodies with unhealthy foods.
When we meditate, we start to become in tune with the body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. Our brains start to learn the difference between when we’re truly hungry and when we’re just eating out of stress or boredom.
When you learn the right meditation techniques for weight loss, your behavior around food begins to change and you lose weight effortlessly.
What are the Benefits of Meditation for Weight Loss?
There are many proven benefits to using meditation for weight loss. For starters, it’s an effective way to lose weight and keep it off for good.
While diets can result in weight loss, these outcomes are rarely long-term unless you’re willing to stick to the diet for life. By contrast, meditation helps you lose weight and keep it off long-term by changing your behavior around food.
The right meditation techniques will help you reduce cravings for unhealthy foods, eliminate emotional eating, and increase self-esteem, which all lead to long-term weight loss. These effective weight loss techniques can be learned step-by-step in my Meditation for Weight Loss Program.
In addition to weight loss, meditation has a long list of proven benefits, including:
- Stress Reduction – in an eight-week study, mindfulness meditation reduced the inflammation response caused by stress
- Anxiety Management – volunteers in an eight-week study experienced significant anxiety reduction and maintained lower anxiety levels over the long term (3 years later)
- Decreased Depression – two mindfulness meditation studies found decreased depression in over 4,600 adults
- Increased Focus – a study showed that human resource employees who regularly practice mindfulness meditation stayed focused on a task for longer and remembered more of the details
- Improved Sleep – in a mindfulness meditation program, participants who meditated fell asleep sooner and stayed asleep longer
- Pain Control – a study that used functional MRI techniques reported that meditating patients showed increased activity in the brain centers that control pain
When you meditate for weight loss, don’t be surprised if you experience some of these other awesome benefits too!
Does Meditation for Weight Loss Really Work?
Yes! With the right techniques, you can lose weight with meditation and keep it off for good. Let me share my success story with you.
I personally used meditation to lose over 30 pounds and have kept it off over 5 years later!
Before I discovered meditation for weight loss, I tried one crash diet and crazy workout after another but I just couldn’t lose the weight and keep it off. Meditation changed all that for me. I was able to lose the extra pounds for good using effective meditation techniques that reduce unhealthy cravings, eliminate emotional eating, and create a positive body image.
These are the same techniques I teach in my successful Meditation for Weight Loss Program to help others achieve the same results. Whether you need to lose 30, 50, or even 100+ pounds, meditation for weight loss can work for you!
How to Use Meditation for Weight Loss
Here’s a full overview of how to lose weight with meditation. If you’re looking for a more detailed plan, you can download the Meditation for Weight Loss eBook for FREE here.
Let’s get started! Here are the 5 basic steps to rapid weight loss with meditation:
1. Start building awareness of your body.
As I mentioned before, meditation is all about building awareness. If you want to lose weight with meditation, you need to become aware of your body and its natural cues.
Try this simple meditation technique. Close your eyes and tune into your body. Begin to notice all the sensations in the body. Do you feel tingling, pulsing, or numbness? What about other sensations? Spend a minute or two just focusing on all the sensations in your body. If your mind wanders, bring your attention back into the body.
We often spend so much time in our minds that we don’t fully inhabit our bodies. The first step to losing weight with meditation is building awareness of the body.
2. Learn to listen to your body.
Once you’ve become aware of the body, the next step is to actually listen to it! There are so many different reasons why we might reach for food besides true hunger. Some of these include: eating out of boredom, eating to comfort ourselves (emotional eating), eating because it’s “time” to eat (i.e. you always eat at noon), eating because other people are eating, and eating because of a craving.
As you build awareness of the body and begin listening to it, you’ll be able to tell when you’re truly hungry. This will help you lose weight because you’ll only eat when your body actually needs food and not out of stress, boredom, or anything else!
You’ll also begin building awareness of when you’re truly full. Most of us tend to overeat because we don’t listen to our bodies. As you become more in tune with your body, you’ll be able to sense when its full and stop eating.
3. Enjoy your food mindfully.
Mindful eating is an important component of meditation for weight loss. So what is mindful eating?
Mindful eating uses the principles of mindfulness meditation to bring full awareness to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating. In short, it means paying full attention to the experience of eating.
How often to you really pay attention to your meal? We’re so used to mindlessly eating while watching TV, working, or checking out smartphones that we barely even taste our food.
Studies have shown that people who eat while distracted, consume 10% more calories at the time AND 25% more calories later in the day. So do yourself a favor and enjoy your meal mindfully.
Here’s how to get started:
- Sit down to eat without distractions. Turn off the TV, computer, and smartphone.
- Eat your food slowly and bring all your senses to the meal. Notice the aromas, textures, and flavors of the food as you eat.
- Focus on taking small bites and chewing your food thoroughly before swallowing.
4. Discover the emotional reasons behind cravings.
Many cravings are associated with past emotions, memories, or experiences. This means that you may be in the habit of reaching for certain foods in response to specific circumstances.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’ve had a stressful day at work and you’re craving ice cream. An effective way to manage this craving may be to think about other times that you’ve craved or eaten this particular food. Maybe when you were a kid, your mom gave you ice cream every time you had a bad day.
Just being aware of the emotional reasons behind the ice cream craving will help you resist the urge to indulge in it. You’re now free to find other ways to comfort yourself that don’t involve food, such as reading a relaxing book or taking a bath.
Meditation helps us build awareness of our emotions without judgment. This is extremely helpful for reducing cravings, eliminating emotional eating, and more.
5. Learn to manage stress effectively.
When we’re stressed, we release a hormone called cortisol that causes the body to hold onto fat. Cortisol increases sugar cravings, slows down metabolism, and heightens appetite. You have to effectively manage stress in order to keep your body out of stress mode and in fat-burning mode.
Meditation is a great way to reduce stress, so you can lose more weight! Research shows that meditation decreases the inflammation response caused by stress.
Try this guided meditation for quick and effective stress relief!
I hope that you found this simple guide to meditation for weight loss helpful!
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This is very useful information for all weight loss and meditator. Thanks
You’re very welcome, Amit! Thanks for stopping by.