Meditation: can it help when you want to get in shape?
What is meditation?’ I hear you cry. It’s highly effective in helping people be more mindful in their daily experiences. I know you’ll read that again and wonder what it means. Read on.
I have private clients all over the UK with a huge range of different mindsets and attitudes towards their bodies and getting in shape. One such client approached me recently and, long story short, she’s frightened of carbs, wants fast weight-loss and ‘gives up easily’ (her words not mine). She is someone who has to be on a diet or off a diet, and needs to confront the past and start afresh (my words, not hers). For someone like that, meditation could really help. I can explain, coax, demonstrate and motivate until I’m blue in the face, but changing a mindset has to come from the individual.
Us women burden ourselves with all sorts of emotional baggage when it comes to changing our physique. Things like our dieting history, our successes and failures, comments made when we were teenagers, short-fix diets, long-term misery, it all leaves its mark. Ten minutes a day of quiet concentration may help swap some of those negative thoughts for positive ones.
Meditation can help get a handle on emotional or stress-eating. It prevents you from falling into the inevitable trap of guilt and shame that blights so many women’s lives.
Self-esteem and selfacceptance will benefit, too. We pretend that events of the past are forgotten, but they can scupper our plans without us realising. Meditation gives us space and time for ourselves. All we need is a quiet place, some patience and an awareness of breath. It’s about staying in the here and now, and not wandering off in your head to think about that top you didn’t buy last week, but wish you had.