Can Meditation Improve Your Relationship With Food?
We’re in the second month of 2022, which means many people who made restrictive diet-centric New Year’s resolutions in January—swearing to never again let sugar pass their lips, vowing to “eat clean” and only consume single-ingredient foods, doing keto for real this time—are potentially feeling like failures for their lack of weight loss and/or “willpower.” If you’re raising your hand, find comfort in this: Evidence shows that most diets don’t actually work when it comes to long-term weight loss (and can be harmful to your physical and mental health too). But in more encouraging news, there’s an alternative—an invitation to hop off the diet treadmill, make a different kind of fresh start, and commit to something radically different: developing a healthier relationship with food and your body through the complementary practices of intuitive eating and meditation.
That’s the premise of the Anti-Diet Course, a recently launched meditation program on the Ten Percent Happier app that’s specifically tailored to help people heal their relationship with food and learn how to start intuitive eating—a holistic, evidence-based framework for eating. Intuitive eating is the ultimate anti-diet. The series is hosted by certified intuitive eating counselor Christy Harrison, R.D., author of the book Anti-Diet, and app cofounder Dan Harris (who started practicing intuitive eating after interviewing Evelyn Tribole, a cofounder of the philosophy). Each session of the Anti-Diet Coursefocuses on one or two of the 10 principles of intuitive eating, pairing a brief educational conversation with a short meditation (led by Harrison) to help listeners contemplate and embody that principle.
Excerpted from Self
