meditation for weightloss
Up until my 20s I was blessed with a lean, athletic body. But ever since the first depression/mania and accompanying meds, my weight has been all over the place. More up than down.
So I'm really pleased that right at this point I have lost 7kg over the past 3 months. There are a lot of factors in this success, but if I had to single one - meditation would be right up there. Weird huh, I mean meditation isn't exactly a calorie-burning excercise. Here's how it worked for me:
In December I came upon the one, inescapable but most denied truth of all weightloss:
IN ORDER TO LOSE WEIGHT YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO ENDURE PERIODS OF HUNGER.
In the long (and sustainable) term, there is no way round that. You are going to feel hungry, and you are going to have to be able to endure these periods.
"Endure" is not normally a word that you would associate with meditation, but in terms of my own endurance-withstanding-arsenal, I'd say meditation has prepared me best. Yes, I could give the whole spiel about "mindfull" rather than "mindless" eating, and that certainly is important, but its the ability to ENDURE that is key. Not easy to put into words, but let me try explain it like this. Anyone who has meditated for a long time will have had the experience of a radical itch occurring somewhere on your body during a meditation session. Scratching that itch is just not an option. Ignorning it is difficult too. So what I've learnt to do with them is just LET THEM BE. Acknowledge the itch. Feel it even. Yes, its got a weird burning unique sensation of its own. But you can observe it without reacting to it. You can ENDURE it. You dont HAVE TO scratch it. And the more you let-it-just-be the easier it becomes.
So thats how I endure hunger.
The really sad fact, of course, is that the vast majority of us from the developed world don't even know what REAL hunger is. I mean real, 24/7 starvation hunger like people in Ethiopia feel.
The doppelganger effect strikes again! I have lost 10kg in the past 7 weeks. Given that I have a much higher starting point, 118kg, I have a target weight of 100kg. If I was at my peek physical fitness a target weight of 95kg would be ideal.
ReplyDeleteI went through the hunger period as well. It has lessened now as my stomach has shrunk. I also find eating a meal that was half the size of my usual has left me feeling bloated!
Well done with your efforts, keep up the good work!
I have also used this same technique of "enduring" when I have difficult depressions. When medicines aren't working sometimes all you can do is endure your state of mind until it works itself out or new medicines kick in.
ReplyDeleteMy son announced to the neighbor that he was very hungry. The old man, who had lived through WWII told him very kindly, that's not hunger, son, that's appetite.
ReplyDeleteSo true. I lost 50 lbs a few years ago, and at the beginning it was hard to go to bed hungry, but I did anyway. After a week, I started losing weight, and that made the hunger so much easier to endure.
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