Making peace with your body with Yoga

Losing weight is not just about doing some physical exercise and eating right. It is a process of deeply looking at your life, your work, your relationships, your internal and external environments and clearly seeing if these things are weighing you down or fulfilling you. Weight loss is traditionally approached as a physical "issue" and tends to be addressed only in that manor focusing on physical means, diet and exercise without attention to the individual's emotional and spiritual needs. Diet and exercise are valuable information, of course, but they do not get to the ROOT issue of why a person is overeating. Weight loss is an emotional and spiritual issue, and needs to be approached with emotional and spiritual means.

Yoga helps change the relationship of your mind to your body, and eventually to food and eating. Yoga is an exercise that stimulates and fulfills you mentally, emotionally and spiritually, as well as physically. When you feel fulfilled on ALL these levels, it increases your sense of self worth, so therefore you have less of a need to overeat or abuse your body and weight loss begins to occur naturally.

Yoga is a complete cardiovascular, aerobic, strength, flexibility and fat-burning workout. Bikram hatha yoga is the form of choice for most professional athletes, celebrities, models and medical professionals than any other style of yoga. Power yoga is an Americanized version of traditional yoga techniques. Instructors believe that it can offer all the fat-burning benefits of an aerobic workout. While traditional types of yoga are based on breathing techniques paired with static poses, power yoga combines meditative breathing with faster, more active movements. The result is a complete aerobic workout.

Yoga asanas or postures strengthen and stretch your muscles, toning the whole body. The regular practice of stretching, twisting, bending and inverting the body squeezes the internal organs, cleansing the body of impurities including the build-up of excess fat. Yoga asanas increase the circulation of fresh blood and oxygen through the body, ridding it of toxins and diseases. A few of the yoga asanas encourage lethargic glands to improve their hormonal secretions. For instance, the thyroid gland has a large result on the weight as it influences metabolism of body. Yoga enhances the action of the thyroid gland to improve fat metabolism and convert fat to energy and muscle. An individual will not just reduce fat but also have vitality and better muscle tone. The overall result is a chemical balance in the body leading to weight loss.

A minimum of 10 classes per month is recommended to get the benefits yoga. As a beginner, it takes three classes for your body to learn the proper approach to the postures, and ten classes for your body to begin to work with postures.

 

Yoga makes you more susceptible to change – so if you are thinking you want to change your lifestyle, you want to change the way you think about food, you want to get over destructive eating patterns, yoga will help give you the spiritual connection to your body that can help you make those changes.