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You’ve got your weight loss goals, you’re completely committed to your weight loss journey, and you’re ready to see real change. But the high stress, high speed, and high anxiety weight loss workouts feel a bit intimidating. What if there was a way to lose weight in a calm and peaceful manner? Using yoga for weight loss may be the secret to your success!
There are two ways in which yoga is good for weight loss: Indirect benefits and direct benefits.
There are two main forms of yoga. The first form is purely meditative yoga. This includes the more relaxing yoga elements, like asanas pranayama or hatha. These focus primarily on specific yoga positions that can be held in a relaxed and comfortable manner for a long period of time. They allow you to focus almost completely on the breath and meditative thoughts. So is purely meditative yoga good for weight loss? Yes! One study done by the NIH found that even these more relaxing forms of yoga did lead to weight loss, whether it was directly or indirectly.
All forms of yoga, including meditative yoga, increase your mental clarity and help you to connect with yourself on a deeper level. When your mind is clear and you feel connected to yourself, you are more capable of making healthy decisions throughout the day. The mental clarity and connection can help you avoid stress eating, it can improve your overall mood, it can help you remain committed and more consistent, and can reduce your overall stress levels. When the body feels stressed over long periods of time, it can actually trigger a survival response and send the message to hold onto all of your fat reserves. When the body and mind is less stressed, that survival response will calm down, and allow you to lose more weight. All of this combined will absolutely help you in your weight loss journey!
But perhaps the most important indirect way that yoga is good for weight loss and overall health, is the ability it provides you to fully love, embrace, and accept yourself for who you are today. Radical self-acceptance is one of the least utilized, yet most powerful, tools we can use for self-improvement. Love and acceptance are much more motivating than shame and guilt. When we can be grateful for the current body we have; when we can accept how we look and how we feel in our own body; when we can fully love ourselves as we are; then our power to change grows exponentially. Jeffrey Borenstein, President of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, said the following:
“Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth. Self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness. Self-love means taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others.”
When we truly love ourselves, we are more able to focus on taking care of our bodies. Which means we will be more motivated to lose those pounds for all the right reasons!
There are also more physically demanding forms of yoga, such as Vinyasa flow or Ashtanga. They require more intense movements and flows. These forms of yoga are guaranteed to increase your heart rate, get you sweating, and improve your muscle tone. This type of yoga will create more fat-burning mechanisms in your body, and help you to lose weight in a more direct way. But the high-stress, high-speed, and high-anxiety that is so often a part of weight loss programs, such as cross-fit, is never a part of yoga. So you can rest assured that your weight loss goals are attainable in a peaceful and calm environment. Will it still take focus, commitment, and consistency? Yep. But anything worth doing is not going to be easy.
Yoga, in any form, may be one of the best kept secrets in the weight loss world. Its benefits go far beyond simply losing pounds. The many benefits of yoga can include:
Self improvement, including weight loss, is a journey that deserves to be recognized and celebrated. Let us help you track and celebrate your progress with our elegant Weight Loss Tracker Board. You can personalize it however you’d like! If you have a specific weight loss goal, just let us know, and we’ll customize the board to fit your needs. Whether your weight loss journey includes yoga or not, we’re here to cheer you on. Day by day and pound by pound, you’ve got this!
Check out these youtube yoga tutorials for beginners!
If you’re not sure about yoga, but not quite ready for cross-fit, why not try some hiking? Hikes are available virtually anywhere you live, for any hiking ability! And if you’re local to Colorado, you could always start a new bucket list of climbing all 58 of the Colorado 14’ers!
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