Yoga has long been known to increase flexibility and reduce stress while uniting your body, mind, and spirit. But does all that “OM”-ing and bending have a significant impact on weight loss?
Losing weight is simple in theory, but much more challenging in practice. To lose weight, a person must burn more calories than they consume, in other words, eat less and exercise more. Practicing yoga certainly qualifies as the exercise component of this strategy, as yoga challenges the body’s muscles and connective tissues to consume energy in order to do the poses. Eating fewer calories can be accomplished by reducing simple sugars like candy, soda, chips and non-nutrient dense foods. While the math is clear on paper, once you begin your yoga practice with weight loss in mind, your mind can often turn to a thousand other distractions to pull you from your weight loss goal.
This is precisely where the other mental benefits of yoga step in to help with weight loss! Practicing yoga helps to increase your sensitivity to your inner signals such as hunger and cravings. There are physical components to both of these sensations, but true hunger to feed our body’s basic needs is a totally different experience than craving foods that do not nourish us. Yoga helps to slow you down mentally so that you can learn to distinguish between the urge to eat, and the emotional impulses that sometimes drive us to eat to quell our feelings. Yoga can help us to discern what we are truly hungry for, and knowing what makes us tick internally can help us to lose weight by making better food choices.
Because yoga also helps us to be totally present, we can also use mindfulness while we are eating, paying attention to the taste of food, and learning how to savor our bites instead of wolfing our food down unaware. Yoga teaches us to feel true satiation, instead of feeling stuffed.
On the physical level, yoga is a terrific calorie burning exercise that strengthens and tones every muscle of your body, waking up deep muscles that you never knew existed. By recruiting all of the body’s muscles and using them to move the body in dynamic and static stretches, yoga uses more of the body more intelligently than many other exercise modalities. Couple that with correct breathing, proper posture, and relaxation techniques, and you have a system that acknowledges your total health every time you practice. Stressed out body’s are overloaded with cortisol, which packs on intra-abdominal fat. The stress reducing properties of yoga help you relax more effectively so that fat cannot accumulate.
The physical changes from yoga are evident immediately, your muscles burn, you begin to sweat, and you feel looser and relaxed for hours afterwards. But it’s the mental transformation that really keeps the weight off. A mind tuned in to the body’s deeper thoughts and feelings about itself, is a mind that is no longer willing to accept extra weight, or excess mental baggage.
