Slowing Down Aging and Mindful Eating

Being Mindful Can Help You With Your Eating Disorder

We all have ingrained habits when it comes to what we eat and how we eat. For some people, though, there’s a struggle with eating that can result in an eating disorder.

You can help any abnormal eating pattern through the practice of mindfulness – Mindful Eating. When you engage in mindfulness techniques it means that you’re focused on what’s going on around you in that present moment.

Mindful eating is a technique that helps you gain control over your eating habits.

It has been shown to promote weight loss, reduce binge eating, and help you feel better.

It means that you release the judgment that you have when it comes to your relationship with food. Eating isn’t merely a process of putting food into your body.

Eating is connected to what your body experiences emotionally when you eat. For most people, this would be satisfaction, but for those with an eating disorder, it can be dread.

When you eat, the action can trigger emotions, whether they’re good or bad.

Mindful eating is about using mindfulness to reach a state of full attention to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating.

Mainly, mindful eating involves:

• eating slowly and without distraction
• listening to physical hunger cues and eating only until you’re full
• distinguishing between real hunger and non-hunger triggers for eating
• engaging your senses by noticing colors, smells, sounds, textures, and flavors
• learning to cope with guilt and anxiety about food
• eating to maintain overall health and well-being
• noticing the effects food has on your feelings and figure
• appreciating your food

These things allow you to replace automatic thoughts and reactions with more conscious, healthier responses

If you struggle with an eating disorder, you might feel depressed at the thought of eating.

Or you might crave the food, but be unable to stand the thought of keeping it within your body. Mindfulness can free the negative connection you may have to food.

It can be used to rewrite the past negative experiences you may have had concerning food and lead you to a healthier understanding of eating. When you practice mindful eating, you’re aware of the food, but you don’t focus on the food – which is the basis of an eating disorder.

When you have an eating disorder, whatever you’re feeling and thinking is projected onto the food. The food becomes the enemy, and overeating or undereating becomes of a way of dealing with the emotions.

Mindfulness teaches you how to understand and find relief from eating disorders by changing the way that you think about food and breaking the cycle of emotions.

There are countless articles about eating disorders where the person who has the disorder isn’t even aware that they have a problem. This is because they’re not fully present, and not focusing on being present with their thoughts, actions, or habits when it comes to food.

An awareness toward eating takes away the power of an eating disorder. It breaks the hold that the condition has over a person. To heal from an eating disorder, you have to learn how to associate food with becoming aware of your body sensations.

With mindful eating techniques, you would ask yourself why you feel the way that you do about food. But you would not ask yourself this in a judgmental way. The purpose of this exercise is not to make you feel bad about yourself, but rather to help you understand the reasoning behind your thoughts.

Mindful eating helps you to examine when it is that you feel hungry or you don’t and if there are any activities, thoughts, or emotions tied into that hunger or lack of appetite.

When you practice mindful eating, you’ll learn how you handle eating. Whether it’s something that you feel you need to get through or if it’s something that you feel ashamed of.

Mindfulness will help you be able to be more aware of the behaviors you have toward food that aren’t healthy and lead you to establish a new foundation with food that will allow you to heal.

Mindful Living Can Help Slow Down the Aging Process

You don’t have to buy the most expensive anti-aging products that are available on the market or go to the plastic surgeon for a face-lifting.  So, how do we slow the aging process? One of the best anti-aging techniques really could be something as simple as Mindfulness.

From the time that you’re born, your body begins to age. Some people end up aging faster than others. Mindful Living is the key to slow down the aging process.

When you practice mindful living, you not only add years to your life, but you live a better quality of life as well.

Scientific studies have shown that there’s a direct link between the emotional health of a person and his or her physical health.

When someone experiences negative emotions such as ones fueled by stress, it can speed up aging because it has a negative effect within the body. When you practice mindfulness, you can slow down the aging process because you’re fighting back against the causes of aging.

Inside your body, you have DNA that acts as caps on the end of your cells. These caps are called telomeres. These are needed to help your cells continually divide. As time passes, these telomeres would gradually lose their length, and the result would then be cell death.

You can prevent the shortening of the telomeres by practicing mindful living.

The connection between mindfulness and the length of telomeres rests in an enzyme known as telomerase.

This enzyme is responsible for keeping the telomeres at a healthy length. One of the key factors that can impact the length of the telomeres is stress. When you have stress, it damages your cells and can lead to cell death.

There are a lot of health conditions that can be linked with the telomeres once they begin to shorten.  Among these are heart disease and some types of cancers. When you have stress, especially if you have a lot of it, this will cause the telomere length to shorten faster.

But, you can change that by learning how to live mindfully. When you live mindfully, you can defeat the stress that’s causing so many adverse reactions within your body. You can learn how to do mindful exercises that can boost the grown of the telomeres.

When you practice mindful living, you focus on the present, and you don’t practice self negativity, and you don’t judge what you think or feel. What mindfulness does is it boosts the amount of telomerase that’s present in your body.

You learn how to stop the cycle of negative emotion and thoughts that tie in to stress. Mindfulness also boosts positive thoughts and feelings. They are linked to physical well being and can slow the aging process.

A mindful living will allow you to have better concentration, gain self-control and will enable you to have more compassion for yourself and toward others.