The Zen Diet Revolution (5 page)

You will need a set of mala beads or a rosary, or make a string of 54–108 beads of your choice. Choose your mantra to help aid your Zen Diet. Think carefully about what exactly it is you want to achieve.

Sit in a quiet place where you can comfortably do several ‘rounds’ of your beads.

Say your mantra in your head or silently while moving your lips.

Each time you say your word or phrase, move your fingers along the beads one by one.

You can do as many rounds as you like, but try to do no less than 100. A set of 500 may take you 20 minutes, but by this time your brain will be taking it firmly onboard and you may well have also elicited what is called the ‘relaxation response’, which we will discuss shortly. When you become used to doing your beads, you can use them anywhere – on the train, waiting for the bus or during your tea break at work.

How long will it take to notice an effect? After a week or so of doing your beads twice a day, with up to 500 repetitions, you may well begin to notice a change. For some this change comes quicker than for others, but there
will
be change. The more you do it, the better, stronger and longer-lasting the change will be; you may need to keep up
your ‘reps’ for months, but you can be sure that what you are doing is creating a new mental pathway with a positive new change, one that you can keep coming back to if ever you need to top up the habit.

You can do more than one word, phrase or mantra at a time, but it is not as effective.

Bear in mind the fact that the unconscious mind does not acknowledge ‘negatives’; for instance, repeating ‘I will NOT eat cake’ will translate as ‘I WILL eat cake!’, and you would need to phrase it slightly differently such as ‘I will eat healthily every day’.

Examples of words or phrases/mantras to use; you will need to tailor-make your own personal mantra, but a few simple ones are:

CALM – incredibly simple, but when you are totally stressed out, it can be the one word you really need and, said repeatedly, can have a potent effect.

I AM COMPLETELY HEALTHY IN MIND, BODY AND SPIRIT – a really good ‘blanket’ term and one that is reassuring and empowering; again, repetition is the key. Saying it once or twice is pointless; you really have to convince your subconscious, and thus your entire being, that it is indeed completely healthy.

MY BODY FAT DECREASES EVERY DAY – this is a succinct and to-the-point suggestion. Obviously, you use
it until you have reached your desired weight and then stop, but it can be just the phrase you need to kick-start your weight loss; it is very visual as well – you can almost see that body fat melting away!

Moving on from the previous section, we come naturally to the subject of meditation. For centuries, people from all religions and walks of life have used meditation techniques to calm and train the mind. Below are several techniques for calming the mind and also training it to help with your Zen Diet path.

The practice of meditation focuses on engaging the mind, which develops concentration, clarity, positivity, awareness and emotional balance. Meditation needs practice and discipline and gives you a daily chance to spend time on yourself. Meditation also helps to quiet the mind; many people are able to rest their bodies, but very few people can rest the mind. It is a way of taking responsibility and changing the way we think from inside. This form of mental training is one of the most important things we can do in the modern world in which more of us die from stress-related illness than violence or disease. I honestly see it as the most rewarding and beautiful of disciplines.

Meditation is also an extremely powerful tool in your weight-loss arsenal – more important than diet drink or low-fat spread; more important than any slimming tablet or even a stapled stomach. Why? Because it is the only tool that can change
you
, the person eating the food. Everything starts with your mind. That’s the place where you are going to find the solution. Just like a queen leads a beehive or an MD runs a company, your mind is in charge of the whole of your being. You can see the nature of your mind reflected throughout your whole person. How you move, how you think, how you talk and how you eat. They are all reflections of your mental being.

Through meditation you can start to see things as they really are. Many people say they want one thing and do everything in their power to prevent it. Inside them there is something else, some other motivation, something that they are doing that is working better for them than the goal they feel they want. Through meditation you can find a way to see the truth and to find out why you are disciplined in many areas of your life, but not in others. You can meet yourself and make that change, see things as they really are and find out why you are overeating.

But before we go into the methods of meditation, let’s start with a bit of science. It is important to start by saying that meditation has been proven to aid in weight loss and weight-gain prevention.

It is not a matter of theory – studies show that along with its significant stress-relief applications, meditation is also
being proven to be highly effective as a technique for the prevention of weight gain and obesity and also an aid for weight loss. The first study to show an indication of this important discovery was focused specifically on binge-eating disorder. Dr Jean Kristeller, psychology professor at Indiana State University, and Ruth Quillian-Wolever, PhD, clinic director and clinical health psychologist of the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine, put together a ground-breaking clinical trial using mindfulness meditation.

The study used a very similar Buddhist meditation technique to the one taught in this book, demonstrating that meditation increased awareness and that the participants started to view the eating process in a more genuine way without self-judgement and guilt. The participants reported that they were more aware of what they were eating and felt more in control. They also felt more satisfied when they ate meals and started to enjoy food in a way they had not before. Basically, they started to focus on quality and not quantity.

This brings us to an important point which we will cover in more detail later on. One of the most important factors in eating is awareness. More often than not there is a deep-seated reason for overeating. We have simply developed habits that are not useful and are not really engaging with what we do. Our whole vision of how many calories we eat and how much we eat is out of focus, and we are on autopilot. When this is the main cause, meditation can make an amazing change.

One other study into the weight of adolescents in
America recently demonstrated that meditation could be a more effective weight-control solution than dietary education; evidence has shown that education on diet does not work. To put that into layman’s terms, it demonstrated that you are better off meditating twice a day than trying to stick to a diet!

It has been conclusively proven in countless studies that meditation is the most effective solution in existence for stress management. So it is logical to think that meditation would help in weight control due to reduced stress levels.

Unlike other slimming strategies like diet and exercise that cause weight loss by focusing on the physical body, meditation may help weight loss by improving brain function and correcting mental imbalances.

Some people believe that when the brain is not functioning correctly, it could cause food cravings. These incorrect signals to the body of course result in overeating and weight gain!

We don’t know a specific mental imbalance that causes obesity, but there have been several different independent
scientific studies that show how a particular disturbance in the brain chemistry leads to weight gain. Often this can be low serotonin levels (the brain chemical associated with a feeling of wellbeing), or sometimes the hypothalamus may not be functioning optimally.

The important thing to note is that many studies, including one by brain researcher Dr Alarik Arenander (
India Science Journal
, 1999), have demonstrated that during meditation the various areas of the brain tend to work together in a coherent fashion. If you would like to see for yourself, I myself have clearly demonstrated on my YouTube channel (martinjfaulks) how meditation leads to brain-wave coherence.

Most excitingly, some research has even suggested that the increased coherence through meditation becomes a habit in daily life and is present even during day-to-day activity. This means that if you practise meditation, you gain permanently improved brain functioning. This may be one of the main reasons that meditation helps you lose weight. Your brain is no longer giving you confused signals, and your self-control and self-awareness are permanently increased.

As mentioned previously, one of the factors that keeps on coming up with meditation training is mindfulness. Meditation helps you learn to be in the moment. Studies show that meditation prevents emotional eating by increasing
awareness. By practising being aware in meditation, you create a habit of awareness that carries on into your daily life. This means that you become aware of when, what and why you are eating, and how you are eating, too.

Still confused? Have you ever forgotten you are on a diet? I have and I bet you have, too. You decide you are going to make a change like cutting wheat out of your diet or that you are never going to a pizza restaurant again, and only remember halfway through the pepperoni! Or worse, on the way out afterwards and it feels terrible. But why didn’t your brain warn you? Why didn’t the alarm bells go off saying, ‘Hey, you decided not to eat this or do this anymore?’ Lack of awareness is the cause and meditation is the cure!

But worse than the pizza dream experience is the ‘Jedi mind trick of hunger’. Have you ever been tucking into a giant meal only to realize that you’re not really that hungry? Or that you are not enjoying it that much? Yes, it’s another one that most of us have done. Being aware helps you get in tune with your ‘hunger cues’. Then you realize you are no longer hungry or already full, so that you stop eating more than necessary.

Studies may show this to be true; however, after 15 years of meditation I am still waiting for the last benefit to manifest in me; if I have a plate of food before me, I am going to finish it! At least I am more aware at the time of loading the plate, so I put less on it.

I am not alone in seeing improvements in my eating behaviour and portion control through meditation. The
effectiveness of using meditation as a tool for weight loss is also supported by scientific studies into methods of behaviour modification, which consists of many factors, including social support, self-control, self-awareness, error management, stress control and cognitive behavioural strategies. One in-depth study into behaviour modification showed that meditation is the most effective way to improve self-awareness and stress-reduction aspects of behaviour modification.

We have known for some time that the stress response and the effect of tiredness and fatigue are probable causes of weight gain and obesity – this will be covered in depth in
Chapter 3
in the section on rest and recovery. It is not just sleep but also meditation that helps you recover. We have ample evidence to show that when you are lacking sleep, you are going to eat more.

Research has convincingly and conclusively shown that when you don’t get enough sleep, your body’s hormonal system becomes imbalanced. Most importantly, secretion of growth hormone is significantly reduced, which is bad because human growth-hormone has a large fat-burning effect! The reason for this is that your human growth-hormone secretion is not a constant trickle; it is released in 2 or 3 intervals during the night. It is first secreted during deep sleep at about 2 am and then again at about 4 am. If you lack sleep or have restless sleep, you will be missing
out on the beneficial effects of this potent fat-burning hormone.

To make matters worse, if you don’t get enough sleep, your cortisol levels are increased which, in turn, also disrupts leptin levels. In layman’s terms, if you don’t sleep enough, you get stressed and your body loses the ability to regulate your energy levels and your appetite. So how does meditation help with all this? Well, in many ways. First of all, mediation helps you sleep better because you are more calm and relaxed all the time. Secondly, it reduces cortisol levels, thus preventing some of the negative effects of lack of sleep. Finally, there are some studies that meditation may even be able to help with growth-hormone secretion and thereby keeping you young – they are only suggestive, but I suspect we will find in the future that meditation really does help with human growth hormone.

This section includes basic, easy-to-follow instructions on awareness meditation. It is all based on being in the moment by focusing on the ‘here and now’. This form of meditation is useful for those wanting to lose weight because it decreases stress, aids relaxation and increases awareness in daily life. In fact, it teaches all the skills needed to achieve your goals; including impulse control and the ability to keep focused on a goal. Often during meditation practice, you will find yourself distracted by external noises
or things in the environment around you. With practice, you will learn how to keep your mind focused, and even use distraction as a means of focusing your mind on your purpose. This is an extremely useful skill in your quest for weight loss when a moment’s loss of attention can lead you to eating 1,000 extra calories.

During meditation, a large amount of distraction is internally generated, and sometimes this is the hardest to control as it can be emotional and self-defeating. This, like any skill, gets better with practice, and after a few weeks you will find it far more gentle and easy. You will be able to remain in the moment without internal conflict or distraction destroying your focus. This will be reflected in your outer life as you see the conflicting parts of your personality coming into harmony. This is exactly what you need to help achieve your Zen changes!