Paying careful attention to what you are doing and how you are feeling at any given moment is a core element of the Breathing Room program. It's a concept also known as mindfulness. Mindfulness simply asks you to pay attention to your thoughts, to your emotions, and to your reactions to the world around you.

By becoming better acquainted with your mind and body, you can begin to explore your thought patterns. Unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating or smoking, can often be modified by recognizing the pattern of internal messages triggering the behavior.

The practice of mindfulness is woven throughout our Breathing Room program; however, it plays an especially important role when it comes to changing your relationship with eating and food.

When eating mindfully, you select your food with extra care. You take more time to enjoy your meals, and savor the colors, fragrances, textures, and flavors. Once you've learned to eat mindfully, you'll discover that it actually becomes difficult to over-eat or make poor food choices.

Breathing Room will also offer guidance in mindfulness meditation, which provides balance physically, emotionally, and mentally. It's recommended by hospitals and health care professionals for treating anxiety, stress, and depression.

Awareness of breath is an effective, simple technique, central to the practice of mindfulness meditation. The concept is simple-as your breath slows down, your body slows down-but it takes guidance and practice. By focusing and becoming more conscious of your breath, you can improve your health and sense of well being.

Incidentally, you may find that practicing mindfulness and mindfulness meditation has a beneficial impact not just on your relationship with food and exercise, but on many other areas of your life as well.