A healthy diet is not just important for keeping yourself in shape, but also important for your overall well-being. A balanced diet is rich in all essential nutrients, including vitamins and minerals, and it is key to ensuring that your body and mind stays fit. However, your weight can indicate a lot of things about your body's health. A healthy weight - that is within the recommended BMI range - is likely to bring you many benefits, including heart health, an alert and happy mind, as well as healthy joints and muscles. Controlling your diet is perhaps the most important thing you can do to reduce weight, but it's not just about what you eat. A popular concept for promoting weight loss in people prone to binge-eating is mindful eating.
Just like practicing mindfulness in life is said to bring happiness, contentment and peace, practicing mindful eating can also bring about a shift towards healthy dietary habits. In fact, mindful eating is one part of the holistic philosophy of mindfulness, which basically tried and put the focus back on the present events and present experiences. So how does mindful eating help people in gaining control over their weight? Let's take a look!
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Mindful Eating For Weight Management And Weight Loss
Mindful eating is said to help people cope with chronic weight problems, by helping them part ways with the habits of making unhealthy food choices. Mindful eating is a process of slowing down while consuming your meals. For example, when you're eating an omelette, focus on the act of eating the omelette alone, instead of rushing through it or thinking about the tasks that lay ahead. Mindful eating dictates that people should chew their food slowly and swallow in due time, which helps the brain register the fact that the stomach is being filled up and that the body is getting nourished.
Mindful eating is devoid of any distractions like watching TV or internet videos, or even chatting with a friend or family member. It may sound absurd, but just bringing this small change in the way you consume your meals can help you feel more satiated and fulfilled at the end of those meals. This is because the process of digestion occurs with a coordination of the gut and the nervous system. It takes about 20 minutes for the brain to register the feeling of fullness.
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This means that if you rush through your meals, you may have already overeaten by the time your brain registers satiety. On the other hand, if you slow the process down, you can ensure that you eat only a designated healthy portion of food recommended for that particular meal. This is a way of tricking your brain to steer you away from reaching out for extra food during and in between your meals.
Some research studies have showed that mindful eating techniques are beneficial in helping those afflicted with the problem of emotional or binge-eating. So, if you're trying to lose weight by reducing meal sizes, mindful eating is a strategy that may actually work!
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