Pranayama helps with eating disorders, dietary problems, cravings, addictions and weightloss

I have been reorganising my blogs and putting many old posts together here on this subject of Pranayama for food cravings, addictions and eating problems. Adding a part of a Chapter from my new eBook "Pranayama, Mudra, Mantra and Meditation for Health and Wellbeing."

  

When you are stressed, often you create exaggerated eating patterns, either by skipping meals or you may start overeating, for comfort or to get more energy, and then you become even more stressed because of your eating habits, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

If due to stress you start skipping meals, or you just feel not hungry because of worry and fear, or you feel you have no time to eat because you are under pressure due to deadlines, or for whatever reason you can not slow down or make time to eat, you need to calm down, you need to stop and breathe.

Pranayama can help in many ways;

You can work with four breath per minute, then get to three breath per minute, then get to two breath per minute and then get to one breath per minute. This will calm you down a lot, and you can take a break to eat then, you will be in a better place to complete your tasks, and you will be just as capable reaching your deadline, than if you did not take a break and slowed down your breathing, but with less stress, more calmly and balanced. Even just a couple of minutes of breathing exercises will make a great difference.

I have found that when I have a lot to do and am stressed, worrying if I can get everything done, or when I just feel totally overwhelmed, slowing down my breath gets me calm and more focused to complete my work on time.

Many of you when you are stressed tend to eat a lot me included, especially if you are feeling insecure, anxious, and depressed or feel you just do not have enough energy and you keep reaching for energy foods like sugars to get a quick energy boost or you drink lots of coffee which just makes you more stressed. 

When you keep eating and especially eating bad foods you then, of course, getting more stressed because you worry about your weight gain and you get frustrated that you cannot handle your exaggerated eating habits, but you stuff yourselves fully, with more food and the stress is getting on top of you.

Pranayama can help you with getting the out of control eating back into balance and even help you to lose a bit of weight. 

Pranayama Suryabhedi is a wonderful Pranayama to help with your eating habits

With this Pranayama, I lost about ten kilos overall, without going on a diet. It helped me to just get my eating habits back into balance, it reduced my binging, and it reduced my cravings, and I could just be satisfied with a normal healthy diet. 

Pranayama for restraining compulsive eating;

When you just cannot stop yourselves from having to eat and overeat and eat some more, and cannot restrain yourselves when you crave things, as you just feel you must eat. Then this pranayama will help you change your eating habits, stop your cravings and make you feel more relaxed about food and not be needing to eat all the time. 

If you really want to break a deep compulsive eating problem or an addiction to food, it is advisable to practice these types of Pranayama for ninety days. This is especially beneficial for people who have always had a weight issue, who have always been eating more than they should and who always binge eat and would like to break this habit. This can break through addiction to food or coffee etc. and make your life a bit more stress-free.

I have been able to break through my coffee addiction with this pranayama. I never really knew I had a coffee addiction until the day I wanted to stop drinking coffee. I had withdrawal symptoms for seven days. 

Stress is often caused by your worries in how you look, your insecurities, fears, phobias and so on, and when you cannot control you're eating the stress you feel is never-ending.

Identify why you have this compulsive eating problem in the first place would help you understand and when you practice any of these Pranayamas in your mind, you can let go of these issues. 

Often these overindulging eating habits are coming from your insecurities, self-worth issues and so it gets triggered whenever you feel insecure or feeling not good enough. This creates major stress. And then you have to eat some more.

For all Pranayama always sit with a straight spine and keep your eyes closed or one-tenth open with the eyes looking at the tip of your nose or half open with being grounded with the open part of the eyes and connected to your subconscious with your closed part of the eyes.

Below you can read some of my old posts I wrote during the time when the benefits of practising pranayama daily begun.

4.09.2011 Pranayama helps with weight loss

Pranayama does help with losing weight, and what I have experienced is that the weight comes off gradually and it stays down. Over the year that I have been practising Pranayama, I have lost 11 kg and have been able to keep it off. With the extra yoga I now am doing I have started to tone my body and it is just amazing that I have been able to lose all the weight I was told I had to accept because of my age and because of menopause. I had always been slim until about the age of 45 and then I just started to gain weight, even so, I exercised, walked and felt my diet was not a bad diet I still put on about 10 kg.
Now it has all gone and I am back to my slim self. I still am aiming to lose 2 more kg and then I will be completely happy. Since I had broken my back, it felt as if I had put on a bit of flab around the spine for protection and I feel this will come off when my spine is completely healed. How I believe Pranayama works with weight loss is, that Pranayama regulates the metabolism, and the assimilation of nutrients, it helps balance out the appetite and the amount of food one needs and one feels like eating. My appetite is not as huge anymore and I also do not crave all the bad foods.

18.07 2011 Pranayama changes your eating habits

When practising Pranayama, it is hard to fit your practising into a busy lifestyle and making sure your stomach is empty when practising. When I am under a lot of stress and feel the need to do some Pranayama during the day to calm myself it has become important to me that I had to change my eating pattern.
Instead of grazing through the day, I have breakfast at about 8 am fruits, cereals, nuts. then Lunch at 12 .30 which means I can do a few Pranayama before lunch. I do Agnisar and Nadi-Sodhana a half hour before lunch just 5 sets of AgniSara and 10 cycles of Nadi-Sodhana and this helps to calm my mind and to help with my digestive system. I have a good size meal for Lunch with lots of Vegetables, Beans, Lentils etc. then I have my last meal around 5 pm or even 4 pm as often I teach classes from 5 pm to 6 pm.
So my stomach is empty again by 9 pm and I can do some more Pranayama to help with calming the mind and a good night sleep. There are ways to prepare foods in advance, heating it up first thing in the morning then put pot with food into a Wondersack or Kochsack which is a bag that you can put your pot with hot food or soup in it and it carries on cooking in the bag for about 8 hours without needing a stove or microwave or oven. This is a good way of taking a good meal to work. Work out a system that helps you to fit in the Pranayama without causing stress.
To have an early dinner was hard for me at the beginning, but now I am used to it and it is no problem. It is so much healthier for the body not to have a big meal late in the evening. It helps with sleeping too. People that wake at 3 am and can not get back to sleep, would benefit greatly if they had their last light meal no later than 6 pm. Also if you learn not to snack in the evening, you can easier lose weight, and reduce body fat without being on an actual diet.

25.06.2011 Changing negative eating habits

When I started practising Pranayama 10 month ago, I made big changes in my eating habits. I stopped eating meat, eggs, white sugar, white flour, fizzy drinks, alcohol and over time I also gave up coffee, made cutbacks with cheese and chocolate. This weekend it was my birthday and a friend backed me a light lemon cake. I tried again a coffee and eating this lovely lemon cake.
I felt I could easily indulge once a year and the lemon cake was light. I only just realised of course this cake has a lot of white sugar and icing sugar. This is why I am sitting on my computer writing as I can not sleep, I am so tired but I can not sleep. I feel nauseous and to me, this proves again that Pranayama works. I will not overindulge anymore and I will not be tempted by cake and coffee,
anymore. It feels so toxic to my body and I do not like it when I can not sleep. In the past, I went on many healthy diets and then allowed myself to indulge just once in a while,  but I always slipped back into old eating habits I never experienced adverse effects from overindulging before. Pranayama has changed my body, it does not want to go back into old ways, it does not want negative foods anymore, I am so glad I had this experience as it shows me the amazing effect Pranayama has it changes things at the root. It helps and makes it easy to go healthy and stay healthy. It makes it easy to want to eat healthily, it shows me how bad these negative foods really are and what they do to our bodies. I do hope these toxins will be out of my system soon. White sugar and icing sugar are bad. I do not have any problems with brown sugar or honey or any natural sugars. I do look forward to healthy foods again tomorrow.

2017 I am now not as strict anymore in what I am eating, I am still vegetarian but eat eggs again but only, free range and organic eggs. I may eat a bit of meat in the winter time, but not very often at all. My coffee drinking is mostly under control, as I love a cup of coffee I do drink it when I feel like it but it is not an addiction anymore. But I am very conscious of what I eat, and do not eat any processed foods and avoid certain brands for environmental and animal welfare reasons.

19.06.2011 Coffee addiction

I have given up coffee I think it would be about 4 months ago and just in the last couple of week, I have had quite strong cravings for coffee. Maybe the colder weather has set this craving off. I decided to give into it and have a coffee, but I did not like it at all. I felt this was quite strange. I was looking forward to this coffee and then it tasted yukky, I had to tip it out. So the craving is still there the taste for coffee has gone. It is great as this helps me not to become addicted to it again. I now do not even want to taste it. I am sure the craving for it will eventually disappear too.

15.05.2011 Food cravings

When I started practising Pranayama, I also changed my diet to a vegetarian diet. Over the past 9 months I have been eliminating bad foods from my diet, coffee which was very hard for me to give up, but now when I get offered a coffee, I am happy to say no thank you just a cup of hot water, please. Because I am on a very tight budget it had taken me some time to find good nutritional foods that were inexpensive, but good quality and giving me a sense of feeling satisfied and full. So my diet looks like this now. In the morning I have a bowl of cooked fruit with whatever is in the season, I cook and add spices like ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. To the cooled cooked fruit, I add some oats, some Goji berries, some dates and walnuts and currants or raisins and some milk.

For lunch I eat lots of vegetables in season, I grow as much as I can myself and shop locally for what is in the season. For me, I avoid cauliflower, tomatoes and capsicum. I use only on rare occasions, potatoes, rice or pasta. The veggies I cook with lentils or any beans, my favourite Azuki and pinto beans, but I use all varieties of beans. I use spices like turmeric, coriander, fennel, dill, fenugreek, and fresh herbs from the garden.

For dinner, I have vegetable soup with toast, wholemeal homemade bread with grains e.g. pumpkin and sunflower and sesame seeds. In the summer I do not eat soup but I have the wholemeal bread with cottage cheese, beetroot and sprouts. I have researched the nutritional values of these foods and found that it has all the nutrition, minerals and vitamins necessary. Walnuts are packed with omega 3, Lentils and beans have the proteins and iron. Broccoli has the calcium and so have many other green vegetables. I grow a variety of vegetables, broccoli different types of cabbages, Kale, Celeriac, courgette, spinach, carrots etc. In the summer I add a lot of berries to my break first.
If possible I do not add sugar to the fruits if I need some I use brown sugar only. I use only a small amount of olive oil for cooking. I have been able to get lots of walnuts locally as many people have trees but do not eat as many as I do so these are great. So I can eat a very healthy diet for a small budget. I feel not hungry, I have no cravings for chocolate, coffee, chips, salty foods or any other foods I use to love. I have tried these sorts of healthy food diets many times before, but after 2 or 3 months, have always gone back to not so healthy foods. Since practising Pranayama, I really wanted to eat healthily and I can not get myself to eat all these other bad foods. I use to think I was eating reasonably healthy, but now I feel my old diet was not that healthy at all. I stopped all the fatty cheeses and foods with artificial colourings, preservatives etc. I found when I organise myself it is not that hard to cook for myself healthy and nutritional foods. I feel so much better for it and practising Pranayama has made all this change so much easier.

21.03.2011 Diet changes come naturally

When practising Pranayama, the diet changes came naturally. I always was a big meat eater even so I did not like the thought of animals having to die. I sometimes even craved meat. When I started practising Pranayama, I thought it would be a good thing to become vegetarian but worried it would be difficult.
But it was amazing how easy it was not to eat meat anymore and now I am vegetarian for the last seven month. I have not looked back and I have never had any meat cravings again. I can not be tempted with meat and I wonder how I could ever have eaten meat. So no meat no fish no poultry. and no eggs and I feel great.
The other things to give up when practising Pranayama are alcohol and soft drinks, there were no problems as I never liked them. But my only struggle has been coffee. I always wanted to give up coffee, but coffee was the only thing that helped me with my headaches. Since my headaches have been better I had made several attempts to quit coffee but then headaches would return., I realised I was addicted to coffee. Two weeks ago automatically I stopped drinking coffee and so far it has not been a problem, no headaches no coffee cravings it just happened automatically.
I believe it is as if I am ready now and with practising Pranayama it helped me to come to this point. Every day when I practice my Pranayama, I get so excited and observe what is happening to me and in my life. It brings about change naturally without force without hard work, one has to just let go and move with it and be patient with the process. This made me realise that there is no need to give up anything forcefully, the change to a healthy and natural diet comes naturally when the time is right.
I have seen this now in some of my students who are slowly but surely making changes in their diets naturally and without any problems. Relax into practising Pranayama and everything just comes together as it needs to.
It is not a must, its a choice!

26.02.2011 Weightloss

Since doing the Pranayama, in the first 4 months, I have lost 7 kg, and have now been back to a weight I have been in my 20s and 30's. I did not go on any diets, but doing the pranayama's, it balances the body, the metabolism and digestive system and it certainly helps in bringing the body weight back to normal.
At first, I felt doing Pranayama would be hard and getting into a routine would be difficult, but the quick results and feeling overall better made it easy to keep it up and making it part of my life.No other healing modality has given me the results that practising Pranayama gives.
With my homoeopathy, I now focus more on working with animals as they can not do the pranayama, but for people, I would recommend pranayama as the best choice for getting healthy on all levels and being able to stay healthy.