Healthy heart diets, simple meditation practices and technology keep our hearts healthy. Relieving stress, relaxing our bodies and slowing our minds strengthens our hearts.
One of the benefits of learning how to breathe and relax is we can better manage emotional eating. It’s estimated that 95% of people who lose weight do not keep the weight off. I think that’s because they don’t do the psychologicaland emotional part of it too.
The emWave from Heartmath helps with the psychological component and is a key to lasting weight loss success.
Healthy heart diets are part of the wholesome heart healing remedies that includes meditation. Diet is an important pillar in heart health and is why doctors, dietitians and fitness professionals insist on eating heart healthy foods.
It is a well-known medical fact that variations in cholesterol levels are directly related to differences in our diets. This has led health experts to focus on cholesterol control as part of heart medications, starting from childhood. Indeed, foods that contain perilous fatty acids and trans-fats should be avoided and these lessons should be instilled in all family members from childhood.
As we grow older, the inclusion of meditation as part of the healing process becomes more important as we develop our own internal controls in managing our diets. Emotional eating can be a problem for many of us as we seek to use food to make us feel better, and then eat foods that are not heart healthy or just over-eat.
Meditation can help us reduce stress without depending on food to feel better. Learning how to meditate or do simple breathing practices described on this site can help you replace comfort food with comfort emotions.
The American Heart Association Nutrition Center is a great resource for healthy heart diets information.
The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute recommends the Dash Diet as a way to keep blood pressure in check and cholesterol.
The practices taught on this website will help you achieve more personal balance which will be reflected in your improved eating habits. There are different types of healthy heart diets and the one you choose to follow can be your own choice based on what you are best able to stick with.
I have had some good success over the years following the Atkins low-carb approach. Many people don’t understand how that diet works but it has worked for me, helping me to focus on certain types of foods to eat and to stay away from. It has brought my cholesterol down to healthy levels, and given me energy throughout the day without the crashes associated with eating high-carbohydrate foods.
Meditation has also helped me to recognize my emotional eating triggers. Sometimes I will just sit down for 5 minutes during the day when I’m feeling hungry and do some basic breathing practices. The urge to eat will pass, or I will just drink a glass of water or find something healthy to snack on. Without this kind of balance I would be more prone to binging on available snack food, which is not always the best thing to eat.
Eating heart healthy meals should start from childhood if we are to best control the buildup of cholesterol around our hearts. The American Heart foundation reports that at least ten percent of the youth population between twelve and nineteen years of age has medically high levels of cholesterol. Obesity is rampant in both the adult and child population. This represents an epidemic that we are all part of and responsible for in some way.
Research has shown that simple modifications in diet can go a long way in reducing cholesterol levels. It is therefore very important that the pattern of eating heart healthy meals be established early in life, making it a habit in order to keep our hearts healthy, as we grow older. But it’s never to late to make a change and learn how to stop emotional eating.
As we continue aging, part of our broad health plan should include reducing stress levels in our lives. It is a well-established fact that emotions and stress are reflected in our eating habits. A stressful person tends to eat carelessly. In fact, anxieties and stress tend to pull us toward eating foods that are less healthy. A peaceful and meditated (not medicated) life goes a long way in alleviating stressful situations, the consequences of which are unhealthy eating habits.
Cultivating the habit of healthy heart diets gives you self-assurance and you seemingly achieve more out of your efforts. This ability to achieve more gives you more confidence in yourself and empowers you to be more optimistic and more positive towards life.
Peaceful feelings and inner calmness will arise during your meditations and bring what Norman Vicente calls success – the peaceful blooming in one’s environment. Healthy eating patterns are part of healthy lifestyles, which in turn leads to further peace, joy and satisfaction with your life.
Namaste!
