Can Meditation Support You to Eat More Healthily?

Are you overweight or underweight?  Could you honestly put your hand on your heart and say that you have complete control of your eating habits? Most of us are guilty of over-eating whilst on autopilot or of eating when bored or stressed. Some of us see food as the enemy and become upset and negative around food.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find a way to eat simply when hungry and to make healthy choices when deciding what to eat, without feeling deprived? Think about the people you know who meditate regularly. Would you say that the majority of them are a healthy weight, with a positive attitude to good nutrition? There just might be something in it. Research has shown that certain types of meditation can help us to control our emotional eating. There is also evidence that meditation can be helpful in treating binge eating disorder. So if you’ve tried every diet known to man and still have weight issues it might be that the answer lies in using meditation to help you change the way you think about food. 

Noticing what you eat

If you meditate regularly you are likely to find that your approach to food changes. You will begin to eat more consciously. Quite a few meditation courses include a session in which participants are asked to eat a piece of fruit or other food in a way which encourages full engagement with the experience. You might try this simple exercise at home. Take a small piece of simple food. Hold it and spend a few minutes looking at it like you’ve never seen that food before.  Notice any “imperfections.”  Explore the colour and feel of the food. Gently squeeze it. Does it make any sound? Now bring the food closer and smell it. How does it smell? Does the smell change? Finally take one small bite. How does the food feel on the tongue? What sensations do you experience in your mouth and the rest of your body? Now slowly bite the food. Close your eyes and experience the taste and texture of the food. Swallow and then pause to think about how your body feels before taking the next bite. 

Didn’t eating in that way change your experience of eating? You will most likely have felt more satisfied with what you ate than you would have if you’d eaten it without thinking while staring at your computer screen or watching TV. If you eat more consciously you are likely to eat less than when you eat on autopilot whilst doing other things. And here’s the good bit: every mouthful of food you eat will become more delicious and more satisfying. You are likely to feel full sooner.

Why might meditation help you approach food with the right attitude?

People who meditate regularly start to experience a range of positive changes in their daily lives. Meditators often find themselves starting to exercise better self-control in their approach to many aspects of their lives, including their eating habits. One of the most widely reported benefits of meditation is that meditation can cause changes in the brain which affect the way we perceive stress.  These changes are likely to help us control our emotional eating patterns.

How to get started

So if you’d like to give meditation a try, a good place to start might be to find some meditations which will give you a taste of how you might incorporate this wonderful healing practice into your life.

The Corporate Jungle - A Place for Meditation?

So you’ve worked hard all your life, beaten all the competition and finally found that well-paid job. You already know that big business can be a pretty cut-throat place. You’ll need to have all your wits about you to successfully navigate the political machinations of others and to cope with the relentless long hours, not to mention actually getting on with doing your job.

A new breed of successful executive is emerging. This 21^st-century business leader is the type who doesn’t seem to make enemies. Even rivals admit that they’re good at their jobs. They are likely to believe in clean living and manage to tactfully avoid the pitfalls of heavy drinking and partying which often form part of the corporate culture. The chances are strong that this person meditates. Here are some of the reasons why meditation can help you survive and achieve your goals in the corporate jungle without losing sight of your soul.

What meditation can do for you

Have you noticed how some individuals don’t seem to let stress get to them? They see situations which others would regard with horror as positive challenges to be faced with enthusiasm. One of the most immediate effects you’ll start to experience once you start practicing meditation is a decrease in your stress levels. This is because regular meditation has been shown to affect the regions of the brain that trigger the “fight or flight” responses to stress. Starting your day listening to a guided meditation will clear your head and strengthen your cognitive function.

You’ll also find that you become more focused and much less likely to fall into the trap of excessive multitasking. A study at the University of California in Santa Barbara found that participants who had practiced meditation for as little as 2 weeks were more focused whilst completing cognitive tasks.

If you practice regular meditation you might begin to find that you start waking up earlier in the morning feeling refreshed and ready for the day ahead. It appears that meditators need less sleep than others.  Think how much more you could achieve in life if you felt fully refreshed and alert after six hours sleep.  It would more than make up for the time you set aside each day to practice.

Will I lose my edge?

You might worry that if you start meditating you’ll lose your edge. In a world of survival of the fittest, might there be a risk that meditation will make you less thrusting and more detached from what’s going on around you? Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst it’s true that meditation might make you more empathic and incidentally kinder to yourself, it will actually increase your mental strength and resilience. So on balance, there’s nothing to lose. It’s really time for you to learn how to do meditation. Your long-term career could benefit in all sorts of unexpected ways.

How to Improve Your Decision-Making at Work with Meditation

Nobody wants a work colleague or, even worse, a boss who cannot make effective decisions. In today’s hectic and unpredictable work environments we need to be able to make decisions quickly and to get the decisions right. Wouldn’t it be great if there were techniques out there which we could use to improve our decision-making powers? Well the good news is that research over the last 20 years has found proof of what many of us already knew. Regular meditation really can improve your ability to act incisively and effectively at work.

Make better decisions

Activities such as meditation are likely to make us better able to cope with stress. We are more likely to make the right decisions, without letting negative emotions influence our decisions, if we have trained our minds to work in a more disciplined, focused way. This is exactly what regular meditation achieves.

Avoiding the sunk-cost trap

We now know that people who meditate regularly are better able to focus their attention on the present moment and are less likely to be distracted by ruminating over what has happened in the past.  Research shows that a group who listened to a series of short breathing-focused meditations and were then asked to make a decision were less likely than a control group to let sunk-cost factors influence their decisions. An example of the sunk-cost trap is when an investment company continues to pour money into a disastrous project simply because they have already poured millions into it, rather than because it is a good idea.

Meditation changes the way we think

A study published in 2011 by a group of neuroscientists found that experienced meditators were better equipped to stop negative emotional responses influencing their decision-making. This was because the meditators were found to activate different areas of the brain to the control group when faced with decisions.

How to incorporate meditation into your life

The good news is that getting started at meditation has never been easier.  With a whole range of guided meditations just a click of the computer mouse away, you’ve no excuse not to start immediately.  They reckon that to get the full benefits of meditation you should aim to meditate for at least 30 minutes every day.  That may seem like a big ask, but once you start to experience the positive life-changing effects of regular practice, you’ll agree that it’s time well spent. If you can’t manage a full 30 minutes to begin with that’s not a problem. Even spending 5 minutes every day focusing on your breathing and recognizing when your thoughts drift away and gently bringing the mind back to your breathing is better than nothing. After just a few weeks of regular daily meditation you’ll probably start to find your decision-making powers are sharper and that you have the confidence to speak out in meetings and follow-through your decisions.