How to Lose Weight Without Changing Diet | Relaxation Response

I bet you have been taught to believe that to be fit and manage weight effortlessly you need a good nutrition (eating the right healthy foods), exercising and filling in the gap with the right supplements.

While this is true to an extent, there’s more to the equation. What we eat is only half the story of good nutrition; the other half is our persona as eaters: how we eat, our beliefs about food, our levels of stress, relaxation, awareness, and the inner stories that we tell ourselves all have a powerful effect on our metabolism and weight.

So the good news is you can radically transform your health and achieve your optimal weight without changing anything you eat, but by changing you, the eater. 

Consider these lesser known "secrets" of mindful eating that may be the missing link in your weight loss efforts:

Reduce Stress to Slim Down Your Body

When stressed, we literally change our calorie burning capacity. When our stress levels go through the roof, our adrenals and pancreas start pumping more cortisol and insulin, two hormones that literally signal the body to store fat.

You could be following the best weight loss diet in the world and eating the most nutrient dense foods, but if you’re a frazzled mess, the power of your mind is sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

I see many women who participate in Mindful Eating Program program that come in with impossible to follow reduced calorie diets, overly intense exercise programs, gulping tasteless shakes, and eating "medical food" that tastes like cardboard, all of which can actually create the kind of stress physiology that ensures your weight will stay put.

Can you recall what happened the last time you unconsciously consumed a meal after a heated argument with your partner or your kids?

The food likely just sat there like a ton of stones and you suffered symptoms such as heartburn, cramping, gas and digestive upset, right?

This is because during stress the body automatically shifts into the fight-or-flight mode, a brilliant safety mechanism that's evolved to support us during life-threatening events; All the body’s metabolic energy is directed towards survival and your digestive system shuts down.

You could be eating the healthiest food on the planet, but if you aren’t eating under the optimum state of digestion, your body can't use those nutrients. 

Ready for change?  

How about relaxing into weight loss?

Ever noticed how you've gone on a vacation, eaten more than usual and yet lost weight? That’s because on vacation many of us do something that is highly unusual for us. We relax. We move from chronic sympathetic dominance (stress reaction) to a parasympathetic state (relaxation response).

Physiologic relaxation response is the state where we actually create our optimal calorie-burning metabolism. In fact, Dr. Herbert Benson has defined the Relaxation Response as something you have access to as easily as shifting into that fight-or-flight mode (which many of us can do quite easily); he's written about it eloquently in his timeless book of the same name.

When in relaxation state our frame of mind changes our metabolism to such a degree that we can eat more, yet lose weight. 

How to activate relation response:

• Learn to smile more
• Ease into life
• Breathe more deeply

When you sit down to eat:

• Take three slow, deep belly breaths to relax and calm the body before you start eating.
• Followed by eating mindfully.