Just 5 years ago, when I asked people what they knew about mindfulness or meditation, I often got blank stares. A few years later, it seems that everyone knows about mindfulness.
Mindfulness meditation has been around for many years but was more formally adapted for westernized medicine in 1979 by Jon Kabatt-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He developed the 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. At that time the program was focused on patients with chronic pain and other medical conditions. He also started doing formal research on the effectiveness of mindfulness.
Over the past 40 years, there has been considerable research and clinical trials about mindfulness. We have learned that mindfulness helps with… almost anything ranging from managing medical conditions like chronic pain, diabetes, and cancer, to general stress management. It also helps reduce binge eating, emotional eating, and maybe even weight loss?
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
It is different than guided imagery, which I discussed in a recent post, in that it is not typically encouraging you to feel any particular way, but instead encourages you to show up and notice what is here right now.
While guided imagery might suggest that you feel or think a certain way, mindfulness practice has you notice what is there without attempt to change it. That is, you are practicing observing, describing, and doing so in a non-reactive way.
Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
– Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Mindfulness and Weight Loss
Mindfulness has been shown to help improve depression and anxiety symptoms and some studies have shown that it can be part of effective weight loss interventions.
A few years ago, my colleagues and I wrote a review paper on mindfulness interventions and their impact on emotional eating, binge eating, and weight loss (Katterman et al., 2014). We found that across 14 studies, mindfulness-based intervention did reduce binge eating and emotional eating, but evidence for it’s impact on weight loss was mixed. That is, mindfulness alone (without other behavioral components like tracking your eating habits) did not consistently show weight loss (Katterman et al., 2014).
Although mindfulness seems to improve almost anything, it isn’t all that surprising that it alone does not cause weight loss, at least over the short-term. Like most research studies, participants in these studies were not followed for 5 years, because doing so is expensive and logistically challenging. For studies in our review that measured weight loss, the longest follow up was 28 weeks (Katterman et al., 2014).
Additionally, unless you are binge eating frequently on large amounts of high calorie foods, focusing on your breath or hunger and fullness signals and eating until you are satisfied but not overstuffed, while a worthwhile goal, is unlikely to just naturally create a large calorie deficit (burn more than you are taking in), without some degree of focus on changing eating habits.
Should you worry about doing mindfulness if you are trying to lose weight?
Maybe. There is no doubt that mindfulness is useful, so if you want to learn it and can implement is consistently, you should go for it.
Mindfulness may be particularly beneficial for people who struggle with binge eating and/or emotional eating. Our review paper found that mindfulness was consistently helpful for those conditions, even when the only intervention was mindfulness only (for example, Jon Kabatt-Zinn’s MBSR program) and did not have a specific focus on eating habits (Katterman et al., 2014).
Acceptance-based behavioral therapy (ABBT) is somewhat different than mindfulness, but may also be useful in those looking to lose weight. This type of therapy encourages a focus on acceptance of thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations that might be difficult to get rid of (for example, food cravings) but doesn’t have a large focus on formal mindfulness meditation. Instead of focusing your energy on getting rid of uncomfortable internal feelings, ABBT encourages the skill of allowing those feelings to be there, will you move in the direction of your most important values, which typically includes behaviors like eating well and exercising.
There is evidence that acceptance-based behavioral therapy works better than standard behavioral therapy for weight loss, particularly for people struggling with depression, difficulty controlling their eating, emotional eating, and responsiveness to the food environment (Forman et al. 2013). It may also help people maintain more weight loss up to 2 years, compared to standard behavioral weight loss (Lillis et al., 2016).
Additionally, another recent study found that people who had higher levels of “compulsive eating” at baseline had lower levels of fasting blood glucose (a measure of metabolic health) at 18 months when they were given a diet and exercise program plus the mindfulness program, versus just diet and exercise alone (Radin et al., 2020).
Taken together, there is evidence that mindfulness and/or acceptance-based approaches are useful for improving one’s relationship with food and likely for weight loss, when combined with other lifestyle and behavioral strategies. This may be particularly true for people who having difficulty controlling this eating or eat in response to stress.
How to Use the Wisdom Of Mindfulness and Acceptance Regardless of Whether You Plan to Meditate an Hour per Day
- Utilize informal mindfulness. Mindfulness is pretty much the anti-multitasking activity. But yet, informal mindfulness appeals to people like me, who don’t necessarily want to spent a set amount of time meditating when I could be doing something else. You can be informally mindful while doing pretty much anything. The idea is that you bring attitudes of mindfulness like non-judging and non-reactivity to your daily activities. Now, we can be mindful while doing anything ranging from taking a shower to noticing our emotions and physical sensations that arise in our body during and after a stressful conversation.
- Focus on mindful eating. Mindful eating is a form of informal mindfulness. If a better relationship with food is your goal, some degree of mindful awareness of your body’s internal signals is essential. The problem with most diet programs is that they are almost always externally driven. That is, a diet program might encourage you to eat a certain amount of calories, carbohydrates, or grams of food per day, but this doesn’t take into account your body’s individual differences and the fact that your hunger and eating and movement needs will fluctuate to some extent on a regular basis. Especially if you struggle with emotional eating or binge eating, mindful eating or brief mindfulness practice will very likely help you to regain control over eating, particularly if you can begin to approach eating with the question, “What will fuel my body and mind today?” or “What is going to make me feel best over time?” and then listen to your body’s signals. Bonus is that mindfully eating often gives us more enjoyment of what we are having, while automatically eating less.
- Describing versus Judging. One of the principles of mindfulness is non-judgment. Mindfulness teaches us to look at our thoughts more objectively and descriptively and less judgmentally and re-actively. So instead of thinking “I can’t handle this” and feeling anxious and overwhelmed, we label the thought for what it is (“I’m having the thought that I can’t handle this and I’m having the emotion of anxiety and overwhelmem”). This subtle shift helps to remind us that we are not our thoughts or our emotions, but a person who has thoughts or emotions. It’s called cognitive defusion, meaning it helps us to detach from our thoughts and remember that they are just mental events and neurons firing in our brain, not necessarily truth.
- Find the optimal dose of mindfulness. Keep an open mind and see what you actually think with different amounts of mindfulness. Don’t think you have time to do 30-60 minutes per day? No problem, try 2-3 minutes per day and see how that works for you. The cool thing is, we have pretty much any length of mindfulness exercises available to us at the click of a button. Want a 4 minutes meditation? What about a 12 minute one? Do a search and I bet the internet will have it.
- Find creative ways to be mindful. Sometimes we can get caught up in thinking that mindfulness has to look a certain way, or be a certain way. For many people, they find new ways to be mindful that maybe isn’t exactly what you might initially think. I know people who incorporate aspects of mindfulness into their daily prayer. Or they might listen to a song or album they love (with or without words) and be mindful of the impact the music has on their mind and body. Anything that brings you into the present moment is helping you to be mindful and will likely have a benefit.
- Be mindful while goal setting. Again, mindfulness can look different. Right now, for me, my “mindfulness” time includes writing down 5 things I’m grateful for, and 10 dreams I have. This is in a journal by Rachel Hollis that encourages us to write down “10 Dreams I Made Happen” 10 years from now, and write them as if we already achieved them (one of mine is, I ran a 5K and placed in my age group). I sip my coffee and try to make time for this as often as I can in the morning. It centers me, focuses me on gratitude, and sets the tone for the day.
- Yoga, yoga, yoga, yoga… Do some yoga please. Yoga often incorporates varying levels of mindfulness. There are a ton of benefits to yoga beyond stress management, as it helps with mobility, balance, and strength. But the fact that we can move and get all those benefits while also getting the mindfulness benefits? As a goal-oriented perpetual multitasker, I clearly love this.
Before You Close This Post: Take a Brief Mindful Moment
Before you close out this post, let’s end with a brief mindful moment.
Bring yourself into the present moment, and bring your awareness to your body right now. Notice any stress you are feeling, any tightness or tension. Notice if you have judgments about this (“My body feels so tight, I’m getting old”) and just let any thoughts be there and bring yourself back to what’s here now. Perhaps close your eyes for a few moments and just notice how that feels, and allow whatever has been going on with your recently to just be. Perhaps this is the first break you’ve taken amidst a busy day. Allow yourself to just be here now, with whatever shows up for you. There is no need to judge, analyze, or figure things out, just practice being here amidst everything that is present in this moment.
And if your mind wanders, know that is normal. That is what our minds do. Simply notice what took your attention away and bring it back to the present moment.
Once you have taken a few moments, thank yourself for taking this brief time for you, and know that even this small act has a direct impact on your mindset and your health and well-being.
If you have thoughts or questions about how mindfulness fits into a health lifestyle and a weight loss journey, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below or send me a message. Thanks for reading!
References
Forman, E. M., Butryn, M. L., Juarascio, A. S., Bradley, L. E., Lowe, M. R., Herbert, J. D., & Shaw, J. A. (2013). The mind your health project: A randomized controlled trial of an innovative behavioral treatment for obesity. Obesity, 21, 1119-1126.
Katterman, S. N., Kleinman, B. M., Hood, M. M., Nackers, L. M., & Corsica, J. A. (2014). Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: A systematic review. Eating Behaviors, 15, 197-204.
Lillis, J., Niemeier, H. M., Thomas, G. T., Unick, J., Ross, K. M, …. Wing, R. R. (2011). A randomized trial of an acceptance‐based behavioral intervention for weight loss in people with high internal disinhibition. Obesity, 24, 2509-2514.
Radin, R. M., Epel, E. S., Daubenmier, J., Moran, P., Schleicher, S., Kristeller, J., Hecht, F. M., & Mason, A. E. (2020). Do stress eating or compulsive eating influence metabolic health in a mindfulness-based weight loss intervention? Health Psychology, 39, 147–158.