If we know better and better its anti-stress virtues and its positive influence on our psychic abilities and overall health, can meditation come to our rescue on the scales? More and more slimming programs (apps, thalassotherapy treatments, behavioral therapies ...) include the practice of meditation in their approach to issues related to weight.

On her website, Well Being at Table ¹ , Géraldine Desindes explains, for example, that she shares her professional life between the meditation classes she teaches and the development of the "Eating and Living with Consciousness" program. Convinced that the practice of mindfulness can lead us to transform our relationship to food, and therefore, potentially, lose weight, the latter comes back with us on the influence of listening to the self in weight loss.

Losing weight through mindfulness, concretely, what does it consist of?

Géraldine Desindes: Mindfulness is about paying your attention voluntarily to what is happening around and in yourself, with two particularities. The first is that we focus only on what is happening here and now (we leave aside the past and the future); the second is that it is an observation without judgment or criticism. We simply observe, without doing anything, without categorizing.

The program, lasting 8 weeks, is based on this reconnection to oneself, to one's feelings. It was originally developed by Jan Chozen Bays ^2, Ph.D. and Zen Charity and Char Wilkins, psychiatrist and trainer MBSR (Mindfulness Stress Reduction Program), two women respectively who have seen all the modes go by. diet and who have realized their danger. Beyond thinness, we are first and foremost in well-being, through meditation and mindfulness.

How can meditation affect our diet?

GD: First, mindfulness helps reduce stress - which, as we know, often leads to compulsive eating . After 15 minutes of daily meditation, as studies show, there is already a reduction in this stress.

This technique allows to reprogram gradually the brain with new habits. We take our time, we eat slowly, we chew the food, to feel a real satisfaction. The goal is to learn to be present to fully enjoy.

When one is an infant, one is very instinctive (note: for example, one stops eating when one is not hungry). With full awareness, we try to find this intuitive feeling, this self-listening, that we have naturally when we are baby.

What are the bases of a mindful diet?

GD: The human being has been programmed to cope with lack, but today, in our societies, it does not make much sense anymore. Faced with the over-presence of food, we must instead succeed in taking a step aside, find the limits.

By slowing down, we are more likely to probe his body and recognize and separate hunger for envy from emotional hunger and physical hunger .

There are 9 kinds of hunger: the hunger of the eyes (that the advertisers have very well understood), the hunger of the nose, the hunger of the mouth, the hunger for taste and touch (the 5 senses) and the hunger for the stomach, hunger for the cells (the biological needs of our body), hunger for the spirit and hunger for the heart. The most complex to manage are of course the hunger of the mouth, the mind and the heart. The latter evokes memories, a need for love or benevolence.

In everyday life, how to apply this food awareness?

GD: Once we have learned to listen and recognize our hungers, we will look for what can "feed" for example, our desires, which reconnects us to the present moment (to paint, go walking, see friends ...)

During the meal, we take the time to eat small quantities. We calm down, we turn off the TV, we do not read, and we become aware of what we eat without being spoiled by what surrounds us. Thus, we only take what we really need to eat.

What are the main benefits of mindfulness?

GD: In the first place, we make the choice of a diet more respectful of oneself, since we try to listen to each other. We will change the products we eat. It will not necessarily be less caloric products but of better quality. We are therefore adopting a more ecological approach, for ourselves and the environment.

In the second place, we act on quantity. One learns to eat according to the filling of the stomach and its physiological needs. If the emotional is calmed by meditation , then we necessarily listen better to the real needs of his body. You learn to observe your emotions and thoughts and understand your emotional hunger (and therefore to tame it): what drives me to eat? What happens in my body when I have a drive to food? If you take the time to observe, your body, then your thoughts and your emotions, you manage to "dick" this state and thus to make it lose strength. It's just a thought and I can overcome it.

How to begin meditation to achieve (perhaps) to full consciousness?

GD: Jan Chozen Bays' book is a good base, but finding a group to start the practice allows you to feel surrounded and help each other in a collective way. There are courses and courses ³ to begin the practice of mindfulness. But everyone, at their level, can begin with 3 minutes of meditation per day (note: lots of apps now exist for autonomous practice), to learn to reconnect with oneself.

A cause-and-effect relationship not (yet) scientifically proven

Dr. Katy Tapper, professor of psychology at The City, University of London, has published an article in the journal Clinical Psychology Review entitled Can Mindfulness Influence Weight Management Related to Eating? If so, how? . This is based on research conducted to seek to demonstrate the causal link between the practice of mindfulness and the maintenance of fitness weight.

According to Dr. Katy Tapper, "We can not categorically say that conscious eating is able to facilitate weight control, many different practices have been called conscious practices, and the effects of each of them on Weight control dietary behaviors are far from established, so we need to invest in more controlled experimental studies before developing and publicizing new interventions for weight control based on conscious eating. "

The expert points out, however, two promising points about consumptive nutrition: the increase, thanks to this method, of the awareness of the sensory characteristics of foods in the present moment and the decentration . On the other hand, although some weight control programs have been based on mindfulness and have been successful, it is not always clear that the practice of mindfulness is at the origin. To be continued.

¹ bien-etre-a-table.com
² author of Relearn to Eat, Mindfulness Food, ed. The arenas.
³ Notably at the meditation bar, 5, rue Gaillon, Paris 02 or during Mindful Eating and Thalasso stays in Concarneau