A simple meditation method may prevent obesity by helping teens eat healthier foods and exercise more often, a new study suggests. The research revealed that a technique called mindfulness-based eating successfully helped adolescents manage their weight by enhancing individuals' awareness of the act of food intake and physical activity.
Researchers from the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University conducted a study of 40 ninth graders in six different high schools already enrolled in health physical education classes. Participants were randomly assigned to either the 12-week mindfulness-based eating intervention program or a control group that just continued their classes in their physical education course for 12 weeks.
Participants in the mindfulness-eating group were taught breathing awareness meditation. One example of breathing awareness was leaning to concentrate on the movement of the diaphragm during breathing and paying more attention to different parts of the body. Participants in the 12-week mindfulness-eating program were also taught to increase their awareness of taste and fullness as well as movement through walking meditation guides and pedometers.
Study findings revealed that adolescents in the mindfulness-based eating group ate healthier foods and exercised more often at the end of the 12-week intervention.
The findings revealed that moderate physical activity for participants in the intervention group increased by 1.4 days weekly. However, participants in the control group actually showed decreases in their level of physical activity, averaging out to about 0.5 day per week.
Participants assessed three times during the study. Researchers found that participants in the vigorous activity frequency of participants in the mindfulness-eating group went from 2.9 to 3.6 to 4.3 days of activity each week. However, participants in the control group decreased vigorous activity frequency from nearly three days weekly to two days per week.
Researchers noted that at most of the participants at the start of the study were overweight and had bad eating habits. Study data revealed that about one in five intervention participants said they were not conscious of how fast they were eating or that they felt uncomfortable after eating too much. The study also revealed that almost 60 percent of participants at the start of the study reported a binge-eating disorder.
Teens in the intervention group also showed slight weight loss compared to those in the control group who continued to gain weight, according to researchers.
"This gives us a safe, inexpensive intervention that could be translated into a real-world program for overweight kids," explains Dr. Vernon A. Barnes, a study co-author and physiologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.
"If you can make a practice of keeping the awareness with you at every meal, this could benefit you throughout your life," he concluded.
The findings are published in the International Journal of Complementary & Alternative Medicine.
