The Effectiveness of Reducing Stress Based on Mindfulness on Irrational Thoughts and Promoting Positive Thinking in People Who Want to Lose Weight

Obesity and being overweight are emerging as important problems worldwide. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based on reducing stress on irrational thoughts and promoting positive thinking in people who want to lose weight.

Methods and Materials: 

The current research method is a semi-experimental pretest-posttest type with a control group and the population studied in this research included all obese women who were referred to nutrition clinics in Ardabil city, using available sampling, all the subjects who Paid attention to Ahvaz irrational beliefs questionnaire and positive thinking scale of Ingram and Visniki (1998) had problems related to irrational beliefs and positive thinking, a sample of 30 people was selected and randomly divided into two experimental groups (15 people) and control group (15 people) were divided. The experimental group underwent mindfulness training based on stress reduction during 8 one-hour sessions (one session per week). At the end of the training, the posttest was performed on two groups, the data were analyzed using multivariate covariance analysis (MANCOVA).

The results showed that mindfulness-based on stress reduction was effective in reducing illogical beliefs (F=142.72 and P< 0.01), and increasing positive thinking (F=9.95 and P<0.01).

Therefore, it can be concluded that practitioners in the field of treatment and education can help to reduce problems, irrational beliefs, and positive thinking in obese people by using mindfulness training based on stress reduction.