Why mindful exercise is essential for lasting weight loss

Following a diet will help you lose weight and following a diet plus engaging in intense exercise will help accelerate the proccess.

But...

Unless we really tune into our bodies as the truth telling miracles that they are, we cannot keep weight off in the long run without following a rigid and externally driven weight loss plan. And most people can't live rigidly for very long and often propel themselves in the opposite direction of said rigidity once off a strict program. The good old pendulum swings in extreme directions.

Yes it does feel good to lose weight but it feels even worse than before to gain back hard earned weight loss. That's why I imploring you to adopt a weight loss paradigm that involves mindful exercise.

Engaging in mindful exercise will help keep us in the present moment. When we live in the present and don't let ourselves dissociate or what many refer to as 'fall asleep at the wheel', it's much harder to fall back into negative coping strategies. And overeating and letting go of self-care is often the first sign of dissociation. If we commit to regular mindful exercise, we get several wake up calls in a week that will help us tune into our bodies and, as a result, tune into how we are feeling, our stress levels, our fears, anger or pain.

The definition of mindful exercise to me is much more broad than many people might agree with. Currently, most people consider mindful exercise to be things like yoga or pilates. But for me, mindful exercise is anything that requires us to pay attention to what our bodies are doing is a very specific way and tune into what muscles are doing the work. It requires mindfulness in our movement patterns and most often, repatterning of unhealthy movement patterns that keep our bodies stuck in improper alignment and sometimes subsequent pain or tension.

There are so many options outside the yoga and pilates arena that are now available. Most personal trainers provide mindful exercise is they are asking us to tune in, slow down and think about how we are doing something.

So if you're not a pilates or yoga type, you can engage in mindful exercise with weightlifting, running, cycling depending on how mindful the coach is encouraging you to be.

Our bodies tell us what we really need all the time we are awake. They tell us when we need to eat, when we are full, when we need to rest or sleep and when we need to burn off stress. We just get so caught up in living busy lives or convince ourselves we need to run around like chickens with our head's cut off that we don't stop and listen. And maybe many of us don't want to listen because then we would have to change something about the way we are living.

Like most people, I battle with letting stress get the best of me. I have very intelligent ways or coping strategies that let me tune out sometimes but I turn to different strategies to become conscious again so that I don't stay asleep for too long.

For me, mindful movement can be a focused strength workout, a fast paced interval based run, yoga, or simply sitting still to meditate. It takes work to stay on a path of staying awake. But if you're trying to lose weight and want to find a new way that will help you keep weight off, the only way is being more mindful and a great in road towards this in mindful movement.