Aalst Mariska van - Meditate your weight: a 21-day retreat to optimize your metabolism and feel great

Every day, all day, we are bombarded with messages from social media, family, coworkers, Photoshopped ads telling us that were not enoughwe need to eat healthier, lose weight, look skinnier. It can be virtually impossible not to feel like you should look better or you should feel better, regardless of who you are.

With all this noise swirling around in our heads, figuring out where these messages stop and where our own best instincts toward health begin can be very difficult. In our struggle with these body-policing messages, we often unconsciously capitulateor we resist their tyranny by rebelling against healthy changesand end up hurting ourselves in the process.

We all know that the apple and kale are better for us than the doughnut, but somehow we still end up choosing the doughnut. We all know that going for a walk or to the gym will help us lose weight more than watching TV will, but we still end up on the couch. And even when we choose the apple and the gym, we sometimes still end up hitting a wall when it comes to feeling our best. Well consult doctors, run tests to check that our thyroid, digestion, reproductive hormones, or adrenal glands are functioning properlyyet we may still not have an answer to our stubborn health woes. We still dont feel good. Whats going on here?

I have a theory. I believe that the most powerful ally in the quest for vibrant health is one thats often overlooked: the huge capacity of the mind-body connection.

The mind-body connection is actually a bit mislabeled. Our mind lives in our nervous system, which is most definitely part of the body. What happens in the mind can create a direct physical effect on the rest of the body. In that way, you can say there really isnt a connectionthey are one and the same.

And yet we know intuitively that they are different. A thought is just a thoughtits not completely automatic, like your heartbeat. Thoughts are more like breaths or the blinks of an eyethese can happen without our awareness but also can be studied and shifted with awareness, even if just temporarily.

When we neglect to pay attention to the mind-body connection, we might do everything right and still find ourselves frustrated in our health and weight-loss goals.

As a master yoga teacher, founder of Yoga Medicine, sports medicine expert, and practitioner of Chinese medicine, I have specialized in helping my patients and students optimize their health for more than a decade. And in that time, with thousands of patients and students, Ive found, over and over, that ignoring the power of the mind can be the primary limiting factor in our health.

When highly trained, the brain can help us achieve any goal, no matter what aspect of our livesfrom scoring that promotion at work to having a healthy pregnancy and delivery to losing twenty pounds. But often our brain limits us. Sometimes it hampers our ability to follow through. Sometimes it makes us give in to cravings. Sometimes we just plain live up to our own low expectations.

But these very human tendencies dont necessarily mean we need to rush that brain to the psychiatrist. In fact, many of us share the exact same types of self-limiting thought patterns. And because these patterns are so universal, we have decades, even millennia, of great experience in what works to help change them.

In meditation, the goal is not so much to eliminate these thinking patterns as it is to identify them. Once we get clear about whats happening inside our head and how it affects the rest of our functioning, its easier for our brain to make decisions that align with our true health goals. Recognizing unhelpful thought patterns allows us to directly address them through the use of simple meditations and mental affirmations (mantras) that help us achieve our goalssuch as to lose weight.

Decades of medical research have shown us that meditation is powerful medicine. Studies have proven that meditation does the following:

reduces heart rate and blood pressure

reduces stress hormones

reduces pain and inflammation

reduces depression and anxiety

improves immune system function

improves focus and memory

improves a sense of peaceful calm

improves the feeling of connectedness

improves sleep

Thats just the tip of the iceberg. The research on meditations power continues to grow more compellingand one of the promising lines of research concerns meditations effect on our weight-loss efforts. For example, multiple studies have found that meditation helps improve our awareness of internal hunger and satiety signals, as well as our ability to regulate what and how much we

Of course, meditation is not a magic wandwe still have to nourish ourselves with healthy foods and exercise. But meditation is an incredible supplement to any kind of weight-loss regimen, creating a multiplying effect on your preferred approach. When you make the commitment to try even five minutes of meditation a day, you strengthen and train your mind to more easily support your goals and your metabolism.

And then anything is possible.

Over the course of my decades of work with patients and students, Ive identified some very common self-limiting thought patterns and developed meditations to help draw awareness to those patterns. Ive given a lot of thought to selecting the meditations, reflections, and mantras included in this book, choosing only those that Ive found most effective for resetting the metabolic engine.

The 21-day program in this book is a structured, progressive, mind-training sequence. All of the meditations and exercises help you first identify and then address the thought patterns that are holding you back from achieving your health and wellness goals. Just as any athlete follows her coachs program to help her train for a race or competition, you can follow this program to help you train your mind for optimal health and wellness. To live with more energy, feel stronger and leaner, look radiant, and reach the best possible state of health doesnt mean starving ourselves or running a marathonbut it does require us to live with greater awareness.