Lifestyle changes show weight loss benefits
It is common knowledge that yoga corrects posture and calms the mind and body. However, opinions are divided on whether yoga can help you lose weight. Health and medical media Recently, ‘Health Everyday’ presented why yoga is useful for weight loss and explained, “It’s not just because you burn calories on a yoga mat that you lose weight.”
“If you do yoga right, it will change your lifestyle,” says Judi Bar, yoga program manager at the Cleveland Clinic Center, who is certified by the International Association of Yoga Therapists and the Yoga Federation. Explain that lifestyle changes will increase physical activity, reduce binge eating, manage stress, and help you lose and maintain weight.
Judy Barr’s team published a study in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine in July 2013 that found that yoga is associated with weight loss and maintenance. The results showed that yoga reduces back and joint pain, expends more energy when consuming more exercise, improves mood, reduces stress, and has an effect on weight.
Another study published in a special issue of Yoga Prevention and Treatment in 2016 analyzed data collected by interviewing 20 adults who said they had lost weight through yoga. Five factors that lead to the conclusion that yoga helps with weight loss are: ▲ change to a healthier diet ▲ influence of the yoga community culture ▲ physical change ▲ psychological change ▲ the belief that yoga weight loss experiences are different from weight loss experiences in the past.
Judy Barr cites three reasons why yoga can help you lose and maintain weight.
1. to eat consciously
Meditating on the mind on the yoga mat is linked to eating habits. Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and director of research at the Yoga Alliance said he would feel if the food made him feel sluggish or bloated.
A study published in July 2015 found that yoga led to changes in eating behaviour, including eating less fat and eating more fresh vegetables, whole grains and soy-based foods.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology looked at 159 women who regularly did yoga or aerobic exercise, and found that yoga practitioners were significantly less likely to disrupt their eating patterns than those who does aerobic exercise.
2. Helps manage stress
Stress affects weight gain. Yoga can help lower chronic stress levels. This is due to breathing and meditation training.
Dr. Sundar Balasubramanian, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said, “Yoga breathing helps people with chronic and other ailments to energize, improve their mood, and lower their stress levels.”
“Stress can make it very difficult to lose weight because it raises cortisol and can make it difficult to sleep,” he explains. This is where deep breathing helps. Dr. Balasubramannian said, “Breathing exercises cause physiological changes and, in particular, reduce the amount of cortisol in the body.”
3. It helps build muscle.
Carol Krucoff, a Duke Integrative Yoga therapist certified by the International Association of Yoga Therapists, said, “It’s often thought that you need to train with weights to strengthen your muscles. However, yoga also uses your own body weight as a form of resistance. It becomes a full body workout as you try to keep your balance.”
Imagine you are still in the plank position. You will use the muscles of your shoulders, core, hips and legs to support your body. Perform another pose, activating other muscles in your arms, shoulders and back. Krukoff said this burns calories.
In June 2016, the results of 30 experiments with more than 2,000 participants were published in the journal ‘Preventive Medicine’. The researchers concluded that yoga reduces the waist-to-hip ratio in healthy adults and may lower body mass index (BMI) in people who are overweight or obese.
