Magical Benefits of Meditation for people with Eating Disorders.
Many researches have proven now that people with eating disorders get a lot of benefits from doing meditation. Eating disorder sufferers have disturbances in autonomic nervous system, problems with impulse control and many emotional problems. All these can be improved with regular meditation.
You see, human beings are made up of three components—physical, mental and emotional. You can think of it as like a triangle with the same length sides. To correct eating disorders all the sides of triangle have to be balanced.
The Mental side represents the knowledge people learn about their condition and how to cope with it. The physical side represents the natural strength of a person’s body which we inherit from parents. The Emotional side of the triangle is the one which always becomes unstable in people with eating disorders.
That’s why eating disorders sufferers have very bad mood swings, uncontrollable negative thoughts, long-standing bad feelings and painful sensations in different parts of the body that they try to moderate with food (obsessive eating or abstaining from food).
Emotional strengthening is the key to curing many eating disorder problems. Meditation and relaxation techniques are great strategies to do for emotional strengthening in order to become healthy again.
In order to understand about emotional strengthening, you first need to understand a bit about how the brain works. You’re probably aware that our brains work across a range of different levels or brain-wave frequencies. While the range is actually continuous, it is divided for convenience into 4 categories—beta, alpha, theta and delta.
As adults, we spend most of our waking time in the beta area. Beta is where we do our logical thinking, rationalising and planning. Stress also occurs in the beta wavelength but on high frequencies beta waves. Eating disorder sufferers spend nearly all their time on high frequencies beta waves where the problem lies.
Alpha, on the other hand, while still an “awake” state, is that relaxed, day-dreamy state that you can go into when you are doing something creative (eg, painting, knitting) or meditation. It’s the time when your mind just wanders freely, and when time just seems to fly by.
Alpha-experience represents a relatively stress-free and euphoric state of being. For eating disorder sufferers the alpha state helps to balance their autonomic nervous system and correct impulse control problems.
Now here’s another important piece of the puzzle—besides containing our feelings and emotions, the alpha (sub-conscious) state also contains our “self-beliefs”. Our self-beliefs are the sub-conscious view you have of yourself (the real you), they drive our behaviour at a sub-conscious level. They are similar to the programs you have on your computer that makes it run.
So if, for example you have a self-belief that says “I am bulimic or I am a binge eater or anorexic”, the behaviour that results is that you perform compulsive eating, binge or starve yourself actions. This becomes the real you even if you consciously don’t want to become that person.
Where do self-beliefs come from? Mostly they develop in us at a very young age up to when we are teenagers. These self beliefs go through many developmental stages throughout our lives. It’s interesting to note that, unlike adults, children spend the majority of their waking time in the alpha region and this is why they are so resilient.
Most of our adult behaviours are based on “programming” we picked up before the age of 7. Many eating disorder sufferers picked up their programming when they where youngsters to teenagers.
When it comes to getting results, your self-belief (programming) will always win out over your conscious desire. So it does not matter if you get up every morning swearing that you will eat today, or you will not binge, but by the end of the day you have not done what you said you will do. This is because you are in the beta state and this can not affect the subconscious mind, so you are doomed from the start.
That’s why it seems impossible for many people to stop their eating disorders. But the problem is that they try to fight it with their logical conscious mind, being in a beta state, not an alpha state.
What happens if you target an eating disorder from the alpha state?
Well, you will get a completely different result. Being in alpha state you will target the emotional core of the eating disorders self-beliefs. When sufferers start to change their self-beliefs then the magic occurs: then they can be cured from their eating problems.
Specific meditation which target people’s self-beliefs can create a real magic in the sufferers life. For eating disorder sufferers who put themselves in an alpha state while meditating regularly, means they can stop their disorder for good.
If the sufferer is only ever in a beta state this probably means they will have their disorder for the rest of their life, with no escape.
It has been proven that meditation brings enormous relieve for the eating disorder sufferer who starts to add meditation into their treatment methods.
But a word of warning, not any old meditation method will do, it has to be a system that is purposely made for anorexia or bulimia and eating disorders. It is totally useless listening to a meditation CD that is just generic, as the subconscious mind will simply dismiss it as irrelevant.
Also lookout for CDs that say they are for Anorexia or Bulimia, but are exactly the same with only the words anorexia replaced with bulimia but everything else does not change. Although anorexia and bulimia are similar they are not exactly alike, so you do need slightly different words to affect the subconscious mind.
Dr Irina Webster.
You can read about healing meditation CDs for Anorexia-Bulimia at http://www.meditation-sensation.com
your brain’s beauty as a living and constantly-developing structure with billions of neurons and its connections. When you understand what happens in your brain while you binge-purge or starve yourself – you will have an idea of how to reverse it. Until you understand this process you are like a blind person who is trying to find his way home walking through the debris in the wilderness.
u are an anorexic and don’t eat (or eat little) your brain starves. It can not function properly and that’s why people with anorexia stop seeing a clear picture of reality that other people see. They see themselves fatter than they are, they judge others by the way they look and how skinny they are. And their starving brain is a big contributor to it. The Brain can only function at its best when it has enough energy and nutrition to process the information.
cise the spending of energy increases rapidly and body needs energy to burn. Energy comes from the food we eat but when there is not enough energy from food, the body starts consuming its own tissue as an energy source. Fat burns first. But if a person does not have fat (or has very little) like an eating disorder sufferer, the body start burning muscles and other body tissues. And that is a dangerous process. It can lead to dystrophy and caxechia – the syndrome is what a person looks like who has just come from a concentration camp we have all seen the pictures. Please Remember: moderate exercise is great; I don’t mean running 10 miles a day. But you need to make sure that you have something to burn – not just burn your muscles and brain tissue as an energy source.
constructive way. Find and follow your main purpose in life.
onsible for their anorexic-bulimic behaviours. There are pathways for binging-purging, for starving, for taking laxatives and diuretics, over exercising etc. When you start learning new constructive thing – like for example, how your brain works, its anatomy and physiology etc. – you actually will produce new neuronal pathways in your brain which will take the place of your old pathways and replace them.
means we are the only ones who can make decision and exercise our own will.
environment. This will pull your attention away from your eating disorder and help you to develop new neuronal pathways in the brain – different from what the eating disorder has created. It can also help to produce more good chemicals in the brain (neurotransmitters) which are responsible for your attention span. More attention will make your learning of new things easier.
r or what politicians say are true. Have your own opinion. Remember that media makes billion of dollars every week to program people’s mind by displaying woman’s body images that are impossible to achieve by any normal person. Most diets and other health care products which claim to improve your health don’t work or work on a placebo effect only.
rally eating disorder sufferers are withdrawn from others and prefer to spend time alone with their eating disorders. By
state of mind. I recommend you even to find jokes about weight and food , laugh at it and look at the funny side of it. For example, when you see the funny side of being anorexic or bulimic you will change your attitude to your abnormal behaviour. Laughter also improves hormonal status in the body – which normally suffers in anorexic-bulimic people. Laughter also helps to release good chemicals in the brain which can change your brain for the better.
to people and receive the love back. I am not talking here just about romantic love (although this is the love too). I am talking about love as a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment.
