Yoga promotes weight loss – Several studies have found that people who begin regular yoga programs lose weight. In addition to weight loss, one study found significant reductions in fat folds – in several locations – as well as body circumference. Beyond the calories burned by practicing yoga, there can also be a spiritual and emotional dimension to overweight issues that yoga addresses. This may be part of the reason that many people find that yoga works for them when prior attempts at weight loss have failed. A final way that yoga may aid in reducing overweight issues is the consciousness it can bring to eating.
Yoga also helps with the reduction of stress due to stress’s role in overeating and in the formation of fat. Yoga’s proven ability to fight stress (and lower cortisol levels) is a key aspect of its effectiveness as an aid to weight loss.
Yoga Therapy Takes Advantage of Innate Body Systems that Can Help You Heal:
Yoga masters have made thousands of discoveries through the ages that have made many modern Western doctors curious to find out how this ancient system works. The yogis didn’t so much invent these effects as uncover them and then come up with practices that exploited this built-in circuitry. Thus yoga therapy takes advantage of innate body systems that can help you heal.
It is yoga’s ability to bring awareness to different parts of the body and use that awareness to influence autonomic functions – such as heart rate, brain waves, and blood pressure – that makes yoga such powerful medicine. You can use it to reduce your levels of stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, which could have beneficial effects on conditions ranging from diabetes to insomnia to osteoporosis. You could lower your blood pressure and with it the risk of heart disease and stroke. You can learn to slow the mind down, lessening anxiety and depression. You can relax the muscles in the back and neck, potentially improving such conditions as headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome, and arthritis.
Although many Westerners come to yoga to reduce stress or improve their health, these were not the goals of the ancient yogis. They viewed yoga as a path to spiritual enlightenment. To them, better health was simply a side effect of treating your body as a sacred gift from God. Living a moral life, engaging in stretching and strengthening exercises, pranayama (breathing), and meditation were all part of the path to higher consciousness. Disease was seen as an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment and thus strengthening the body and ridding it of illness was part of that path. – Timothy McCall MD