Here's How Meditation Helps With Weight Loss

Nick Onken

What if our ideas around weight loss are only partially true?

What if losing weight is about more than watching our eating and working out?

Entrepreneur Sarah Anne Stewart learned this when she signed a modeling contract at 15 years old and had agents immediately bark at her to "stay skinny" and "not eat until next week." For the next ten years, she developed a fear and anxiety around weight that consumed her life. Then one day she woke up in an NYU hospital bed, almost dying from anorexia. When the ER staff told her she needed to make changes in her life to survive, she finally found her saving grace: meditation.

Now she's a Holistic Health Practitioner, coach and the founder of Holistically Slim. She's dedicated her career to teaching others that "what to eat" is only a small piece of having a healthy relationship with food and your body. Stweart says the inner journey is equally important, and that meditation is the secret key to long-term weight loss and a healthy body.

Nick Onken

What's wrong with traditional weight loss programs?

Traditional plans usually focus on calories in versus calories out, designing meal plans, educating people about exercise and telling them what supplements to take.

If you type the words “weight loss” into Google, you'll find endless sites on how to lose weight, but more often people struggle with keeping weight off or not gaining the weight back plus more! 

Sadly fad diets, trends and pills usually only give you temporary results. They can cause you to yo-yo diet, which often makes people feel frustrated. And research shows that traditional diets often lead to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression. These feelings often fuel the decision to choose unhealthy foods, and the cycle continues.

So let me give it to you straight! I’ve discovered in my practice that ‘what to eat’ and ‘how you exercise’ are only small pieces of the big puzzle.

You see, what traditional programs overlook is that you'll face countless obstacles to successfully adopting a new routine and most importantly, the highest barrier is often ourselves.

Traditional weight loss programs tell us what we should be doing, which is often not sustainable, and they rarely focus on how we can change our long-term behavior.

When it comes to losing weight, most of us have focused on the wrong things. We haven’t worked on the most important part of ourselves, our minds.  And then we blame and judge the ‘program' or coach instead of looking within.

Often, the story of our weight begins with us. It can be an accumulation of internal and external experiences we've had throughout our lives.

Ancient wisdom teaches “a healthy mind is a healthy body.” Just as a house falls to the ground without its foundation, your body can become overweight and sick without a mind focused on health and happiness!

What's the connection between meditation and weight loss?

Meditation is often thrown out the door and disregarded because people question how sitting and not burning calories can help them lose weight.  But our body is a mirror reflection of what’s going on in our minds. If our primary focus is on losing weight, we cut ourselves off from the emotional and mental beings we are, and that prevents us from understanding why the weight is showing up in the first place.

I've discovered that the successful clients who lose weight and keep it off are the ones who do the inner work.  They're ready to confront their thoughts, feelings, love for self and how they perceive themselves. They're willing to dig up emotional triggers and past traumas that have manifested into an unhealthy weight and/or their relationship with food.

Sitting quietly allows them to sift through their thoughts, challenge their limiting beliefs and raise their standards of what they want for their mind and body.  For example, a relaxed and welcoming state allows you to ask yourself questions about your health and the habits that hinder and promote it.

In meditation, you get to the truth of why you consistently skip your morning workout or grab fast food each night on the way home. You can explore your motivations for weight loss and why you haven’t accomplished your goals.  You can confront childhood programming such as being told you have to eat all the food on your plate. Most importantly, you can understand why weight loss has been an issue in the past and get to a place where you're mentally prepared to stick to a weight loss program and get to (and keep) your ideal weight. You'll also see the subconscious blocks that keep you from healthy change, such as fears built up from your childhood that are manifesting in self-sabotage.

Nick Onken

Through meditation and mindfulness, you can connect the dots to create a unique and personalized approach so that you are keeping the weight off as well as finding peace with food and your body. Best of all, you’ll find yourself becoming more confident, compassionate and loving towards the most important person in your life — you!

Beyond impacting our emotional well-being, research is now proving that meditation positively impacts the physical body as well! Meditation can help with easing chronic pain, increasing immunity, decreasing inflammation, improving heart health and more! But what's so amazing is that meditation is now being shown to positively wire parts of the brain that could help you lose weight. For example, it decreases loneliness which can make you more hopeful and less likely to overeat when alone. It can help you overcome addictions, promote compassion for yourself, improve our ability to be present while we're eating, and helps us sleep better which ups our metabolism! It even promotes happiness, which is linked to taking better care our ourselves.

If someone has never meditated before and is really just into losing weight, what's the best first step in taking a more holistic approach?

Not to worry!  The best way to integrate a holistic approach to weight-loss is to understand that like traditional weight loss programs, it’s not a one-size-fits-all practice.

First, if you're resistant to meditation, you can start by trying to become more mindful during the day or even just slowing down, especially while preparing meals, eating, and moving. This will help you start becoming more aware of any unhealthy habits and triggers that don't serve your weight loss goals.

Then begin to shift from thoughts on weight loss to feelings of compassion, exploration, and a more holistic approach to health. This could mean going for a walk when you're triggered to eat, recording affirmations about body positivity in your voice, keeping an emotional food journal, writing a forgiveness letter to your body or listening to a self-love guided visualizations! I also suggest learning to regulate your breath, which increases your energy and moves you one step further towards developing a mediation practice.

To focus on business for a bit, what was your path towards not promoting a traditional weight loss program?

After several nutritional certifications, which taught me how to eat healthy and heal on a physical level, I opened my first company and started coaching clients. It was overwhelming, and I felt embarrassed that I still hadn't completely recovered from my own eating disorder.

Every time I walked past a mirror, into a fitting room or was in front of a camera, the anxiety returned, and my heart would race. Some days I still felt too skinny and some days too fat. I continued to portion out even my kale salads so I wouldn’t eat “too much.” I also never skipped a yoga class out of crippling fear the weight might pile back on.

I realized all the ‘nutrition’ information had helped me on a physical level, but it had not healed my mind or released the grips of anxiety that still existed in me.

I decided I needed to do the inner work, beginning with a consistent meditation and yoga practice, and to reconnect my mind with my body rather than focusing on a number on the scale. I added in breath and energy work, then integrated personal mantras to help repair my subconscious beliefs around my self-worth. I also used mindfulness techniques to help create a new relationship with food. I slowly began to cultivate self-love and started taking care of my entire being. I felt the grip of anxiety and depression release, and I began to live a normal life for the first time since I signed that modeling contract all those years ago!  

After a few years of self-exploration, I decided to focus on building my private coaching practice. I felt stronger, happier and more confident than ever before, and I re-launched my company with a focus on the mind-body relationship instead of a ‘traditional weight-loss’ model. I also decided to layer self-love and compassion into the practice, the two things meditation brought forth in me and that I was sure could help my clients reach their goal weight — and help them find inner peace too. Integrating these new concepts, I was finally able to click "go" on my first holistic health company!

Can this holistic approach to life and weight loss also help women in their jobs and careers?

Certainly! My work may focus on meditation and mindfulness as an avenue to weight loss, but the mindset my clients create helps more than their body. Once meditation becomes part of your daily practice, and the personal exploration begins, you understand how to apply this awareness to all areas of your life.

Just as you would explore what's keeping you from achieving your weight loss goals during meditation, you can explore why you may not be finding a job you love or the patterns that show up in your romantic life. We unknowingly place subconscious barriers in many areas of our lives, and meditation can help us discover and overcome them. Also, neuroscientists are now finding how meditation and mindfulness rewire different parts of our brain in positive ways, impacting ALL areas of our lives. Meditation really is the greatest hack for health, happiness and self-improvement.

How do you stay mindful and keep up your practice while building your own brand and writing a book and developing online programs? Is it hard to squeeze this all in?

I take plenty of time for self-care. It’s that simple!  Many people neglect themselves and their health when they get busy, but I tend to use a full schedule as a way to recognize that I need even more self-care so I don’t burn out. By making time for empowering exercise sessions, cooking delicious and healthy meals, or a quick ten-minute walk with my dog, I can quiet my mind, reset my nervous system and return to my work with a new sense of inspiration.

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I started and run The Path, which teaches meditation for the modern mind. I also think and write about how to live mindfully. The Path is a community of meditators — we...