Can you lose weight with a daily yoga practice?
Oct 4, 2024
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Yoga has the potential to be very transformative on many levels
Regular practice of yoga promotes conscious lifestyle changes towards healthier choices, alleviating physical discomfort, improving mobility and facilitating progression in one's practice. Considering the field of weight loss/weight gain it is not necessarily true that yoga practices give direct results. We should seek to reach a complete understanding of this topic to be able to incorporate yoga in our lifestyle in the right way.
The complex influence of genetic factors, individual willpower, lifestyle and food addiction affect our body weight. Consuming a diet rich in ultra-processed foods, sugar, and fats, combined with a sedentary lifestyle, contributes significantly to weight gain. Additionally, factors such as stress, mental health challenges, including medication use for specific conditions, disrupted sleep patterns, hormonal fluctuations, and genetic factors can further exacerbate weight gain.
There is solid evidence indicating that the regular practice of yoga reduces stress management by keeping cortisol levels low, mood enhancement, emotional eating tendencies, and fostering supportive communities, all contributing to weight management and sustainability.
Moreover, yoga facilitates calorie expenditure, enhances muscle mass, and improves muscle tone. Additionally, it has the potential to alleviate joint discomfort, enabling increased physical activity and engagement in daily routines. These represent just a fraction of the many benefits associated with yoga practice on a physical level; and many studies have shown that the regular practice of yoga improves chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, reducing the need for medications that can cause weight gain.
For some individuals, stress manifests as either physical discomfort, insomnia, or psychological distress, triggering sensations of anxiety and restlessness. Stress prompts a surge in cortisol levels, Cortisol increases abdominal fat, decreases muscle mass, causes cravings for fat and sugar-rich food, and thus can lead to weight gain and even obesity..
Yoga improves general mindfulness
We all understand that indulging in late-night ice cream cravings or endless potato chip munching undermines our weight loss goals. We're aware that prioritising vegetables, whole grains, and lean produce benefits both our health and weight. However, despite this awareness, it seems insufficient to help us stick to our healthy eating plans.
One of yoga's benefits is that it improves mindfulness of the body and awareness of body sensations.
Through consistent yoga practice, our body and mind will begin to make the right choices, becoming far more aware of what is happening inside our body, even at a cellular level. Practising yoga helps create new connections between brain cells, which changes how the brain works and makes it better at learning and remembering things. It also strengthens specific parts of the brain that are important for memory, focus, mindfulness, thinking, and language skills. So to another the big question can you lose weight with a daily yoga practice, the answer is YES, but in an indirect way.
