Mindful Eating: how to reprogram your thinking to lose weight

O beginning of the year It’s a time when we always reaffirm changes we want for different spheres of our lives. Going on that dream trip, taking a desired course and, above all, something related to our body, such as a goal to lose weight.

Among these goals related to the body, the one at the top of the ranking of goals for the new year is to lose weight. In that sense, the Mindful Eating – technique to eat consciously – can help to reprogram your thinking that leads to weight loss.

What does slimming mean?

The question that comes up is: do we know how to understand, in fact, the meaning of the word slimming?

First fragment of the word, “lose weight” means “to be or become thin” and the second, “ment”, symbolizes the process. The result of the word slimming is therefore “the process of being thin”.

In fact, we know deep down in our subconscious that we will not lose body weight with eating habits or extreme physical exercisesbut rather with the consolidation of changes in habits, which is triggered in stages, that is, phases of a life process.

As in any dimension of life, a process of change requires commitment, overcoming challenges and (a lot) resilience! This includes your goal to lose weight or the desire to move apartments or change career areas.

How to reprogram your thinking to lose weight

This trajectory of change will not be straight, stable and smooth, quite the contrary. She is winding, unstable and with aspects that emanate mental training so that we have more balance and adaptation.

In that sense, the Reprogramming of Thought It is an action of great importance and functionality for conscious and lasting weight loss.

Mental reprogramming occurs in various areas of lifestyle and good living, such as:

sleep early so that we have a better modulation of the chemical mediators of hunger (ghrelin) and satiety (leptin)
perform physical exercises to increase total caloric expenditure and, consequently, increase caloric expenditure at rest.

These are highly determinant pillars.

The Reprogramming of Thought needs to encompass changing the relationship with food so that we can adopt more balanced and humane relationships with food.

Three Mindful Eating Precepts for Your Weight Loss Goal

Based on this context, I believe that three precepts of Mindful Eating have a very beneficial application in this Reprogramming of Thought with the objective of losing weight:

1 – Compassion in Compulsion

If you have an episode of binge eating, do not punish yourself. This makes you even more vulnerable to a new compulsive event in a short period of time.

Do the Thought Reprogramming to understand the reasons that led you to this episode of compulsion.

Try to have an attitude self kindness It’s no use violating yourself, because the act has already been committed. The important thing is that you learn lessons from what happened and be aware so that there are no relapses.

2 – Question hunger

“Am I eating this food now because I’m really hungry (organic energy need)?”

That’s the question you can ask when you’re in those more agitated, stressed moments or when you ′′ skipped ′′ a meal. It is usually at this time that the caloric balance is unbalanced and we compromise the weight loss process.

Because mind automationwe eat to reactivate our organism’s pleasure and happiness system and, generally, we are more likely to eat foods with a higher caloric content.

3 – Re-signify organic pleasure

Speaking of the pleasure system, we need to give new meaning to the body’s sources of pleasure, because we often think that only food is the only source.

Chatting with friends, doing physical exercises, practicing meditationpainting a mandala or listening to music generate new brain connections, which changes our mental state, releasing chemical mediators of well-being into the body.

The key to change here is to resignify by increasing the repertoire!

How to Start Mindful Eating

Since we’ve talked a lot about the “importance of the process”, how about putting one Mindful Eating attitude into your life at a time?

Mentally encourage yourself to apply one attitude per month and repeat it at least once a day to make this Reprogramming of Thought gradually concrete.