Mindfulness Training May Help You Lose Weight
 

Mindfulness Training May Help You Lose Weight

http://www.mid-day.com/articles/min...weight/18777152

Mindfulness Training May Help People Stick To Weight-Loss Diet And Shed Kilos, A Study Has Found. Researchers At The McGill University In Canada Examined 19 Studies Conducted Over The Past Decade


Mindfulness training may help people stick to weight-loss diet and shed kilos, a study has found. Researchers at the McGill University in Canada examined 19 studies conducted over the past decade.

Mindfulness interventions in these studies involved either formal meditation, informal mindfulness strategies that focused on eating activity, or some combination of these two approaches. They found that interventions based on mindfulness proved "moderately effective for weight loss" and "largely effective in reducing obesity-related eating behaviours."

Initially, when compared to participants treated with diet and exercise-based "lifestyle-change" interventions, those who received mindfulness training lost less weight by the end of the programme, according to the study published in the journal Obesity Reviews.

The researchers found that mindfulness participants had continued to lose weight, bringing their average weight loss to 3.5 per cent of their initial body weight, while those in the "lifestyle-change" programs regained some weight. The findings are "encouraging" and "highlight the potential of using mindfulness training to support weight loss," said Kimberly Carriere, from the McGill University.

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Mindfulness can be beneficial in many aspects of our lives. It has definitely made me more aware of the difference between (head hunger) and real hunger. Anything (sensible) that helps us with our weight management is worth considering. In fact using mindfulness this very moment ;) to mitigate the desire to eat when relaxing in the evening :nono:

It's important to begin with a healthy eating plan. Trying to use mindfulness to fight against genuine hunger on a low fat semi-starvation diet would be doomed to failure because the body's need to fuel its own survival will eventually win against willpower, mindfulness, etc. But with a good eating plan, to rid one's self of less than optimal eating habits, potential there for mindfulness success.

At first it sounded to me like "mindfull eating", which I don't quite know what it means, so I searched a bit. To summarize, mindfulness is just to be aware. Well, I've been doing that as long as I remember, without it being anything special. Thinking about it, it just occurred to me that when I initially went LC, it became easier to do. So, Ima make a grand declaration.

Going LC makes it easier to be mindful of what going LC does to the brain.

Remember, the brain is an organ, the mind is just to product of this organ. When the organ works right, its product works just as right. To put it differently, I'd think it would be very hard to be mindful of eating sugar and wheat, when we're eating sugar and wheat. There's a nice analogy - GIGO. So, some guy in the computer lab noticed the machine was spewing out garbage. It mustn't be working right, he thought. Then another guy pointed out that the machine was being fed garbage. They stopped feeding it garbage, it started working properly. Now imagine the person trying to figure things out is the machine itself, but it's being fed garbage. How could it ever figure out anything, i.e. that it's being fed garbage? That's our brain.

In modern computing, there's something called virtual computing or virtual machine. There's a computer with an operating system capable of creating a virtual machine as a seperate entity, a sort of simulated computer within this computer. This allows to run programs in a way that cannot disrupt the physical machine, even if the programs are being fed garbage. The physical machine can always recover, it simply shuts down the virtual machine, restarts it as needed. For our brain, since it would be the one being fed garbage, we'd create a virtual entity within it that can detect this, a sort of failsafe. A simple memory will do - going LC removes the brain fog (or whatever works for you). It's even better when it's based on actual experience and not on wishful thinking or something like that, but it's gotta be simple, it's just a failsafe to "restart" the brain.

So, mindfulness yes, but then it requires a properly functioning brain first.