Emotional Eating Mind & Body

Yoga And Mindful Eating

August 17, 2009
By J White

Many health problems can be traced back to bad eating habits. The development of these habits stem from behavior unconsciously learned throughout your life. Mindful eating is an attempt to address this problem.

The way in which mindful eating works is to help you to become conscious of the reasons why and how you are eating. To develop this awareness, the practice seeks to answers such questions as, do you eat because you are hungry or is it because you are depressed? Do you eat to satisfy your hunger, or do you eat to get full?

By being able to answer questions such as these, the belief is that you will start to make better choices about the foods you eat and also develop better eating behavior.

In fact, according to a recent report, mindful eating when associated with yoga shows people are less likely to become obese. In the report, the explanation given for this was that one of the things that yoga helps to develop is the ability to hold challenging and sometimes uncomfortable poses in a calm and non-judgemental way.

The researchers speculated that this ability to be calm and observant during this physical discomfort teaches you how to maintain calmness in other challenging situations, such as not eating more food even when the food tastes good and not eating when you’re not hungry.

They also suspected that the weight loss that occurred while practicing yoga probably has more to do with an increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger and satiety than the physical activity of yoga practice itself.

Mindful eating is not the only method that you need to begin to start eating better. It should augments the usual approaches to weight loss, such as dieting, counting calories, and limiting portion sizes. The researcher stated that adding yoga practice to a standard weight-loss program may make it more effective.

In short, if you are finding your eating behavior difficult to control, practicing mindful eating may be just the exercise that gets you pass this problem. And when used with yoga, the skills you learn may further assist you in developing better eating habits.

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