Yoga Teacher Training Forum

Yoga and Weight Loss

Excess weight gain has become a phenomenon in today's age. The factors could be lifestyles, stress, emotional, wrong food habits, lack of exercise, thyroid problem etc. Its a fact that within yogas ability to create total well-being, lies its ability to reduce excess weight through burning calories, boosting metabolism and encouraging a healthy lifestyle.

Yoga is not a quick fix, but can be an excellent long-term holistic approach to loosing excess weight and keeping it off. Not only that, yoga creates many other positive changes: improves self-esteem, increases mental focus, reduces stress, promotes flexibility and increases strength and balance.

Yoga has a powerful stimulating and strengthening effect on the endocrine organs and thus can boost metabolism to burn more calories. The twisting and compressing of the yoga postures massage the internal endocrine organs regulating their function and improving local circulation. But even with yogas effect on metabolism, the age-old weight loss formula of reducing calorie intake and increasing calorie output is still important to follow.

Twisting poses, back bends, forward bends and inversions are used to stimulate the endocrine system and boost metabolism. If the weight gain is due to a hormonal imbalance poses that affect the thyroid in the neck will be helpful: camel, shoulder stand, rabbit, plow, and bridge.

Practicing the Sun Salutations will be especially helpful in boosting the body's metabolism as will moving quickly (vinyasa) between any series of poses. Do not attempt a fast paced vinyasa until you have achieved a basic understanding of the poses. Being significantly overweight may cause difficulty in forward folding poses and inversions, you may want to avoid or minimize these at first.

The standing poses, especially the warrior and lunging poses are used to strengthen and tone the muscles, build endurance, warm the body and increase caloric output.

The standing poses are empowering and grounding, and regularly practicing them increases self-confidence and self-esteem. Use Kapalabhati and Ujjayi Pranayama to help warm and energize the body and further boost metabolism. Practice Kapalabhati before or after your yoga practice, and use Ujjayi with vinyasa and holding yoga poses.

Incorporating a yogic diet and lifestyle will create a holistic weight loss program and positive long-term change. A modern yogic diet is high in fiber, whole grains, legumes and vegetables; and low in fat, animal protein and processed foods.

A yogic lifestyle encourages awareness and consciousness, compassion, self-knowledge, and the practice of the principles of right conduct and lifestyle of the yamas and niyamas. Yama, respect for others, includes nonviolence, truth, honesty, moderation, and noncovetousness. Niyama, positive self-action, includes purity, contentment, discipline, self-study, and devotion.

There are too many easy, quick, and cheap foods. All of these are bad choices that you can find at any drive thru. If your hungry it is easy to pull over to get take out for a burger, fries and a shake. To offset this, it would be best for most people to carry a trail mix that consists of dried fruit, nuts, and granola. There are some that have small chocolate or yogurt pieces too.

This will not carry you for more than an hour or two but by then you might be eating a healthy meal. The point is to have something that cuts the hunger until you can make a better choice at home. Most of us love to eat sattvic food, but not all the time. It is just too cooling of a diet in the winter time.

How many of you can exist on celery sticks and for how long? There are a few diehards, but I for one love to eat, so walking around with veggie sticks and hommus in my cooler all day is not an option.

Om Shanti,