Meditation can help you recover from eating disorders


One of the hallmarks of eating disorders is intense emotion. One way to cope with it is through meditation. And there are many forms of it. For example, a technique called transcendental meditation (TM) seeks to quiet ordinary thinking patterns, often through the use of a mantra repeated over and over.

"Mindfulness" meditation will teach you how to guide your attention to your inner sensations, using breathing, body sensation, and movement. Breathing techniques can help calm you and restore mental balance between thoughts and feelings.

While not the cure, these meditative approaches do have evidence - randomized, and controlled clinical trials - backing up their effectiveness. For example, in one study of 202 people, 55 and older, researchers found that TM decreased death rates by a quarter, and mindfulness meditation, while not quite as potent, nonetheless significantly reduced death rates from heart problems and cancer. Other studies have shown meditation's success in extending longevity.

Psychologists Jean Kristeller and Ruth Quillan-Wolever, speaking at the Academy of Eating Disorders annual meeting in 2004, discussed the promise of mindfulness meditation as a treatment specifically for eating disorders. And women with bulimia who participated in a six-week clinical trial of guided imagery reduced their bingeing and vomiting, felt better able to comfort themselves, and improved their feelings about their bodies and eating.

To explore how this works in more detail, psychiatrist Thawatchai Krisanaprakornkit, who runs the Meditation Therapy Clinic at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, offers an eight-step program. It helped ease the anxiety, moods, and symptoms of distress in patients suffering from depression and anxiety. In fact, patients who practiced tended to sleep better and reported better relationships with their families.

While depression and anxiety disorders are not eating disorders, they share some similar symptoms with the former. "In eating disorders, fear and dread are the phenomena of the mind at the moment," Krisanaprakornkit notes. "If the patients can be better aware, they can manage better. They can regulate better."

Meditation is not for everyone, as evidenced by high dropout rates in the clinical studies that have been published. However, because it is rarely harmful, why not try? The only caution is that meditation should not be used instead of other treatments, especially when an eating disorder is severe.

"We urge meditation to be used with group support, guided imagery, physical exercise," says James Gordon, chairman of the 2002 White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy in a press release published by the Cochrane Collaboration in Washington, D.C. "It's too much of a burden on meditation to use it on its own."

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This article was sent to us by: Penelope Gauplan at 09162010

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