Bangalore, August 05: The popular idiom, ‘you are what you eat’ now gets a new twist – you are how you eat. The more aware you are when you eat, the healthier you can be, new research suggests.
And the way to mindful eating is the traditional Indian practice for selfawareness – yoga.
Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful, or conscious, eating. And people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese, according to a study led by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The US study follows up on initial findings reported four years ago by Dr Alan Kristal, and colleagues, who found that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-age spread in people with normal weight and may promote weight loss in those who are overweight.
At that time, the researchers suspected that the weight- loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, meaning sensitivity to hunger and satiety than yoga.
The follow- up study, published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, confirms their initial hunch. “In our earlier study, we found middle-age people who practise yoga gained less weight over a 10- year period than those who did not. We hypothesised that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behaviour,” said Kristal, associate head of the cancer prevention programme at the Hutchinson Center.
The researchers found that people who cared for the food and their body when they ate weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression. The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating. However, no link between other types of physical activity – such as walking or running – and mindful eating was found.
“These findings fit with our hypothesis that yoga increases mindfulness in eating and leads to less weightgain over time, independent of the physical activity aspect of yoga practice,” said Kristal.
–Agencies