The Zen Diet Revolution by Martin Faulks Read Free Book Online Page A

until you have reached your desired weight and then stop, but it can be just the phrase you need to kick-start your weight loss; it is very visual as well – you can almost see that body fat melting away!
Meditation as a tool for change
    Moving on from the previous section, we come naturally to the subject of meditation. For centuries, people from all religions and walks of life have used meditation techniques to calm and train the mind. Below are several techniques for calming the mind and also training it to help with your Zen Diet path.
Meditation for weight loss
    The practice of meditation focuses on engaging the mind, which develops concentration, clarity, positivity, awareness and emotional balance. Meditation needs practice and discipline and gives you a daily chance to spend time on yourself. Meditation also helps to quiet the mind; many people are able to rest their bodies, but very few people can rest the mind. It is a way of taking responsibility and changing the way we think from inside. This form of mental training is one of the most important things we can do in the modern world in which more of us die from stress-related illness than violence or disease. I honestly see it as the most rewarding and beautiful of disciplines.
    Meditation is also an extremely powerful tool in your weight-loss arsenal – more important than diet drink or low-fat spread; more important than any slimming tablet or even a stapled stomach. Why? Because it is the only tool that can change
you
, the person eating the food. Everything starts with your mind. That’s the place where you are going to find the solution. Just like a queen leads a beehive or an MD runs a company, your mind is in charge of the whole of your being. You can see the nature of your mind reflected throughout your whole person. How you move, how you think, how you talk and how you eat. They are all reflections of your mental being.
    Through meditation you can start to see things as they really are. Many people say they want one thing and do everything in their power to prevent it. Inside them there is something else, some other motivation, something that they are doing that is working better for them than the goal they feel they want. Through meditation you can find a way to see the truth and to find out why you are disciplined in many areas of your life, but not in others. You can meet yourself and make that change, see things as they really are and find out why you are overeating.
    But before we go into the methods of meditation, let’s start with a bit of science. It is important to start by saying that meditation has been proven to aid in weight loss and weight-gain prevention.
    It is not a matter of theory – studies show that along with its significant stress-relief applications, meditation is alsobeing proven to be highly effective as a technique for the prevention of weight gain and obesity and also an aid for weight loss. The first study to show an indication of this important discovery was focused specifically on binge-eating disorder. Dr Jean Kristeller, psychology professor at Indiana State University, and Ruth Quillian-Wolever, PhD, clinic director and clinical health psychologist of the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine, put together a ground-breaking clinical trial using mindfulness meditation.
    The study used a very similar Buddhist meditation technique to the one taught in this book, demonstrating that meditation increased awareness and that the participants started to view the eating process in a more genuine way without self-judgement and guilt. The participants reported that they were more aware of what they were eating and felt more in control. They also felt more satisfied when they ate meals and started to enjoy food in a way they had not before. Basically, they started to focus on quality and not quantity.
    This brings us to an important point which we will cover in more detail later on. One of the most important factors in eating is