It's almost midnight, and you thought you were so tired that you'd just fall asleep. However, you are suddenly craving some chips or burgers and a big cup of soda.
Unfortunately, this intense craving is something that a lot of people can relate to. It is like people always have this unwanted craving for junk food. Whether it is the urge to eat a piece of dessert after dinner or munching on a bag of potato chips while watching the late-night news, food cravings in the middle of the night are never good.
If you think there is nothing you can do to avoid food temptation, you are wrong. You'd be surprised to know how this bad habit can be stopped through mindfulness and meditation.
How Exactly Can Meditation Help?
Perhaps the first thing you want to ask is what meditation has to do with suppressing your cravings. Meditation is known to be the practice to achieve awareness. It is like bringing one's self into a state of deep peace.
The calming of the mind allows you to live at the moment. It helps you realize how you feel and what you think affects the way your life is going. When you remain alert and know what needs to be done, you can make sound decisions and do everything with ease.
Through the practice of meditation, you can help target the stress and reduce your levels of suffering and cravings. Not only does it help improve your mental health, but it allows its benefits to run through your physical health as well.
How To Not Give In To Cravings?
Are you interested to learn how not to give in to cravings? Are you wondering how you can control your emotions and those urges to eat junk food? Here are some tips on how meditation can help change the way you think and how you feel about food.
Tip 1: Put in more effort to achieve better control
Did you know that a study conducted by Duke University in 2009 shows that the part of the brain that people with the high willpower use to control their actions is the same part of the brain activated during meditation? Other studies show that the part of the brain that focuses on self-regulation is highly activated among people who engage in self-regulation compared to those who can't control their cravings.
Through regular meditation, people can exert more effort to become better in controlling their emotions. Their decision on whether to eat or not to eat junk food is regulated. This helps them make better choices. Eventually, meditation has led them to develop better eating habits.
Tip 2: Allow you to cope up with the effects of stress
You crave junk food every time you are under a lot of stress. The body produces more cortisol or the stress hormone whenever you are put under a lot of pressure. This is the hormone that makes you crave things you shouldn't be eating at all.
Did you know that the body produces serotonin, which allows your mind and body to relax whenever you give in to those sugar cravings? You can correct all these hormonal imbalances with regular meditation practice. To better manage your stress, you can spend thirty minutes a day in meditation. In the princess, you are also helping your body reduce the cravings for junk food.
Tip 3: Practice living in the moment
The best part about meditation is that it allows you to develop your mindfulness about life. It is about being aware of what you are dealing with at the moment. It lessens the temptation of worrying about the past and wondering about the future.
Mindfulness meditation is also about helping you break the bad habit with the awareness that it is happening right now. With improved mindfulness, you can control what you eat, so that you can start changing all those unwanted behaviors.
How Does Meditation Help You Become Better?
In the past, you worried too much about how you could stop chocolate cravings? And then you started to eat more junk food apart from chocolate. At that moment, it helped you feel good about yourself.
However, in the long run, it made you gain more weight. It put you in a position where you began to worry about having too much weight; you could no longer recognize yourself.
Meditation is the kind of help that makes you want to help yourself even more. The more meditative you become, the more aware you are of your current situation. More importantly, this awareness makes you feel like you can do something to improve your situation.
This alone is the reason why you should continue meditating. You become better in a way because you know what the problem is. Through sustained meditation, you will find it in you to solve the issue at hand.
Satisfying your cravings is different from giving in to your cravings. With meditation, you would only be craving for things that you know will give you peace of mind and heart. You will also want to indulge in things that make you feel healthy from within.
Meditation is not just about finding focus so that you can live at the moment. It is also about finding the focus to continue doing what you need to do to improve yourself.
If you want to stop those unwanted cravings for junk food, go ahead and indulge yourself in a thirty-minute meditation practice every day. You'd be surprised at how well you can handle those urges.
In the long run, the choice is really up to you. When you know what you want, you can easily find what is best for you.