The above question at first glance seems ridiculous, we all know that exercising and food management is the way most people lose weight or at the extreme polarity, surgery. How can sitting on your backside doing absolutely no physical exertion can have any place in weight management.
Stay with me for a few moments longer and I’ll explain. There is a certain population group who will lose weight by meditating and those are people whom unfortunately find themselves moderately or highly stressed-out.
There are always individuals who find themselves highly stressed who do not meet the criteria to lose weight and of course, there are a number of health issues that may occur for people who find themselves in a state of chronic stress. But for this article I am concentrating on the group who are stressed and maybe carrying a little more baggage than they originally wished for.
When we are stressed, there are copious amounts of body, mind and emotional reactions and triggers that are activated as natural survival mechanism. These actions are primal as we start entering into the ‘Fight and Flight’ response. This natural response is exactly what is needed to run or fight an adversity. I could go into detail about the many chemical, emotional and physical reactions due to this response but I will try and make this as simple and painless as I can.
Cortisol is one of the hormone secretions that gets activated when we become stressed. It has a number of roles, and one of those roles is to release glucoses into the body for an emergency fight or flight response. You can look at it as an emergency fuel supply to survive an oncoming threat.
Normally our fuel source is relatively balanced between glucoses and fat, but stress requires additional glucoses so starts producing these extra glucoses from glycogen (stored sugar).
This additional sugar being released into the bloodstream for the purpose of fight or flight, gets secreted in extremely high levels for an instant burst of energy to help us evade or combat the incoming or immediate threat. This is why we will often experience sweet or starchy food craving when we are stressed, chocolate and cake are the usual go too, but cravings for bread, pasta and forms of potato are also common. Caffeine is another preferred choice but this is a whole other rabbit hole to go down, so for now I’ll put caffeine aside.
This bodily reaction to stress was an absolutely necessary one for our ancestor’s survival. Today the threat is usually an emotional one, so this physiological response is seldom needed in the same way that our ancestry required it.
This means the emergency sugar increase will just sit in the bloodstream effecting our insulin levels. If this excess sugar is not being burnt up as an emergency fuel source by physical exertion, it needs to be dealt with another way. If it remains in the bloodstream, it could cause considerable harm to our health in a number of ways, but diabetes is the most apparent and can be fatal. To avoid these complications occurring, the body will automatically get rid of these high and harmful levels of sugar and insulin, by converting the sugar into fat, so it can be used as a future and stable fuel source, and as a natural causation will reduce the insulin.
Obviously, this eventually forms as extra unwanted body weight, so by meditating and reducing our stress levels, we no longer enter into the flight or fight response which means a normal and appropriate hormonal reaction is adhere to, keeping any additional cortisol release from occurring. Therefore, stopping the above process from happening and keeping any future weight gain from forming.
Now, how many of you knew that……… so whether you’re meditating for enlightenment, stress or weight management, let’s get meditating together, it may literally save your life.
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