By Scott Gooding, Creator of reconditioned.me
Losing weight is more than just a numbers game, there are so many factors at play when it comes to your body other than calories, exercise and macros. One of the most important aspects of losing weight is training your brain through meditation and paying attention to our own psychologies when it comes to our diet habits.
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Is meditation key to losing weight?
Suggesting that meditation will help you lose weight is somewhat contentious – when said without setting the broader framework. Studies have shown that meditation can improve neural plasticity but to suggest it helps you lose weight requires a bit more explanation.
As I’ve suggested, mindset is vitally important to adhering to a healthy lifestyle. Meditation is certainly a “tool” to help with corrective mindset. Regular meditation will help with self-love, compassion for yourself and others, as well as forming discipline. It’s discipline and self-love that will contribute to the bigger picture and the success of adhering to a healthy lifestyle.
Incorporating mindfulness into your daily practice will certainly help with mindful eating. This will serve to downplay the urgency to scoff your food and allow for signalling to take effort – telling you to stop eating when you’re satiated. This is a significant factor when it comes to total daily calories and could help to prevent overeating.
How to train your mindset through your diet
To me, mindset is the missing piece to the health puzzle.
We seem to get preoccupied by diets, macros, exercising and calories, which distract us from the all-important corrective mindset. Without the right degree of self-love, self-talk, self-esteem and positive patterns of behaviour, adhering to a health regime has a limited shelf life before old patterns of behaviour start to creep in.
Diet has a direct impact on mindset and attitude, and can influence it negatively or positively. It’s a complex discussion but the types of foods which contribute to your diet will either help to amplify your health and cognitive function or not. The brain and gut aren’t two separate organisms within the body. In fact they share physiology and are inextricably linked.
Sugar-rich foods affect the integrity of the gut lining (in particular disrupt the production of mucin) which increases gut permeability. Increased gut permeability increases the chance for endotoxins and plagues forming. The hormonal cost of eating high sugar diet will greatly affect mood.
Gluten consumed in the diet, triggers other proteins, such as zonulin, that affect the gut integrity. The antibodies that attack gluten also attack our own tissues in our skin, gut and brain.
The age old adage – we are what we eat – still rings true. What we eat will affect our mood, cognitive function, energy, attitude and mindset. Embracing a real food diet is a fantastic way to, not just amplify health, but also improve mood and cognitive function. Having improved mood with help with a positive mindset.
The bottom line is that there’s more to the equation that just following some healthy recipes and workouts – our psychology needs to be attended to as well.
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