Yoga and Weight Loss

Understanding Yoga and Weight Loss

For many considering trying yoga for themselves, there is usually several questions about the true health benefits of yoga. Chief among these questions and with good reason is usually, does yoga actually aid in weight loss?

At first glance, it only makes sense that a yoga newbie would look at the practice and makes assumptions that yoga is simply too slow paced to burn the calories needed to obtain weight loss. On the other hand, you have those who have practiced it for years who swear by its effectiveness for shedding pounds.

While everyone’s body type and metabolism are different, and what may work for some doesn’t necessarily work for others, yoga is proven to be an extremely powerful tool for those seeking to drop some weight. Here’s why.

Yoga tends to inspire a change for most practitioners in addition to the actual exercise. People usually gravitate to healthier diets and lifestyle choices. The freshness they feel from the practice can for many knock off the cobwebs of their life, such as daily frustrations, low points in mood, exhaustion, etc. In a nutshell, people who practice yoga are by and large happier and more relaxed. So it only makes sense that if you’re feeling good about yourself you are more apt to want to maintain that sense of wellness. This is a key factor for successful weight loss because, as anyone who has tried to drop weight knows, it’s not just about shedding the pounds it’s also about aligning your life in a way that keeps the weight from coming back.

To understand the mechanics of how a yoga practice and weight loss are connected, it is important to grasp the elements of personal health which make yoga what it is, an exercise of the body, mind, and soul. This triad is what separates yoga from physical training such as jogging or weight training at the gym.

When your mental and physical system is in harmony things just work more efficiently. This goes with anything in life and just makes sense when you think about it. Here are some examples of how this works.

The Body

For those unfamiliar with the practice, yoga has hundreds of postures in an almost endless number of sequences. Each of these offers several benefits for building muscles, stretching, and burning calories. An under-recognized component of yoga’s benefits is that it is also a powerful means for detoxifying. This aids weight loss because of the eradication of the excess junk in the body that slows down the internal processes.

The Mind

Those who stick with a yoga practice tend to see the world in a new light. Many practitioners refer the feeling to being “turned inside out.” In other words, yoga is a total mental and physical transformation for the practitioner.

Yoga people often claim they become more aware, gaining a higher grasp of consciousness and connectedness. This helps the practitioner detach from unhealthy habits and bad decisions. There is a sense of liberation from the hamster wheel of the stories one tells oneself keeping them in unhealthy, destructive cycles. This usually leads to making better choices about what you put into your body, resulting in added weight loss.

The Soul

It is a very common reaction for those inspired by their new yoga practice to begin to cut out factors in life that just aren’t cutting it anymore because of the sense of your invigorated by a new spiritual nature. This clarity aids in the truth that life has a deeper meaning than just the daily grind. Unhealthy habits are one of the core factors keeping most people from weight loss, and plainly put, yoga helps people realign in a way that makes identifying these habits easier.