How Meditation can help with Eating Disorders?

Meditation (or mindfulness training) is proven to be very helpful for eating disorder sufferers. If practiced regularly, meditation can balance abnormal mental states of patients. It can also bring them peace and stability.

The brains of eating disorder sufferers are overloaded with abnormal thoughts and feelings to the point that they sometimes have to give up on their studies, jobs and relationships; because they simply feel that they can’t cope with it anymore.

Meditation (or mindfulness training) is not a magic cure for all the problems that an ED patient has, but it can help enormously to improve their mental, physical and spiritual state of mind.

First, let’s define what is meditation? Meditation is consciously focusing your attention for a period of time. It is a process when a person is guiding her/his focus in a specific way: directing it to promote health, personal development and spiritual growth . Mindfulness training can be use to drive the person’s thoughts away from food, weight issues, personal problems and bad emotions.

An eating disorder at its roots is a disorder of attention. All the problems sufferers have started with abnormal attention; or attention focused on the wrong things. To cure an eating disorder people need to be able to re-train their whole attention system. That means to learn how to focus on constrictive positive things, and stop focusing on the things that give abnormal feelings like food, weight, body image etc. Meditation is an indispensable tool for doing this.

The results of meditation will depend on the chosen technique and the intention a person brings to her/his practice, meaning are they really serious about getting rid of their ED.

In general, when eating disorder sufferers meditate they can expect to experience:

- A reduction in stress, muscular tension and bring about a state of general relaxation .
- Decreased or even the eliminate the urge to binge
- A better tolerance towards food in the case of the anorexic or bulimic
- Feel happier, more peaceful and more compassionate towards others
- Improved confidence
- Calm, clear and a more focused mind
- Identifying their life purpose and gaining a sense of spiritual connection with that purpose.

Another major skill a person can learn during mindfulness training ( meditation ) is the ability to make clearer choices. That means the ability to do constructive things while their eating disorder tells them to do non- constructive things, like binging, purging, starving, over-exercising, takings diuretics or laxatives. Initially it may be hard to do but the more a person meditates the easier it becomes, because their mind will gradually start to lose the old conditionings it had.

Every person who learns how to meditate becomes a unique individual. This is because these people are able to work and understand their previous conditioning and change it through an awareness of the problem. This will make them a stronger person and set them free.

There is an old saying in Buddhism that all changes start from being dissatisfied or even from suffering. It is not the matter of where the source of your eating disorder stems from or the reason why: but the best reason to start meditating is your eating disorder.

Using special mindfulness training (meditation) developed for eating disorders can easily change your perspective fast. You even don’t need a special trainer and you don’t need to go anywhere, just sit at home and follow the instructions and you will see an amazing difference. To read more about meditation for eating disorders go to http://www.meditation-sensation.com