Some people are skeptical about using yoga to lose weight. One of the misconceptions with yoga as a viable means of exercise is that it’s not going to give you the same workout as jogging, or something that’s designed to help your cardio feel the burn. Ask health and fitness experts, and they’ll tell you that using yoga to lose weight is actually one of the best things you could ever do for your body.
Yoga to Lose Weight
There is a certain kind of slowness to yoga. There are a lot of deep breaths. Because of these things, people have a hard time believing that yoga can actually lead to weight loss. The trimming and toning yoga can actually do for your body is considerable. At the same time, yoga can also promote beneficial qualities to your spirit and mind. This means that not only can you use yoga to lose weight, but you can also use it to battle stress and anxiety.
The number of calories burned with yoga varies. You can expect to eliminate as many as 180 to 360 calories in a given hour. The particularly ambitious can try Ashtanga or Vinyasa. Either of these is known as power yoga. It’s also possible to combine yoga with another activity (dancing or kickboxing techniques are popular choices), and push your calorie-burning numbers even higher.
Speaking of power yoga, did you know that a 90-minute session can burn a substantial number of calories, while flushing various toxins from your system with deep-breathing exercises? It’s true. Your standard power yoga session can also eliminate water weight, and enhance the overall performances of your lymphatic system and organs. Let’s also not forget that because yoga works so beautifully as a means of centering the mind and spirit, you’re attacking depression and anxiety in a very naturalistic, wholesome way. It’s a workout on every possible front.
Yoga to Lose Weight – Gently
However, you don’t need to go the intensive route, in order to use yoga to lose weight. A much more gentle yoga session can be extremely useful for your weight loss goals, too. Restorative, gentle yoga can help with weight loss, by putting your parasympathetic nervous system to work. This is the system that controls how you breathe, how you digest food, and the state and health of your hormones.
Your hormones are in fact one of biggest beneficiaries of a gentle yoga session. Over the course of our busy day, we put a considerable burden on our hormones. Putting the parasympathetic nervous system to work can give those hormones, as well as the rest of your body, a badly-needed rest. When your body gets this kind of rest through the parasympathetic nervous system, your ability to digest food properly improves dramatically. As most of us know, proper digestion is one of the cornerstones of losing meaningful weight.
If you need more evidence of what you gain from yoga to lose weight, consider the idea that when you slow your body and mind down, you learn to distinguish between actual hunger, and the desire to eat that generally comes from things like depression and anxiety. As you begin to get better at knowing the difference between these things, your stress-eating, one of the most common reasons for weight gain, should drop considerably.
There are even certain poses that can stimulate your endocrine glands, and kick up the rate of your metabolism. A good pose to try in this regard is the shoulder stand and fish.
The opportunity to try yoga to lose weight is yours. One of the great things about yoga is that it doesn’t require a huge commitment on your end.