I’m sure you know that yoga can help you lose weight but what you don’t know is how it actually does it and how you can lose weight with yoga.
Yoga is a form of exercise and exercise can help you lose weight. However, unlike traditional exercises, yoga can help you cut pounds in unforeseen manners.
Read on to see how.
Yoga Promotes Relaxation
Although there are a lot of different reasons why people lose weight, many of them boil down to one common cause…stress. When life becomes stressful, one of the ways that people cope is by eating more food. This can result in weight gain.
Oftentimes, people find that they immediately start to lose weight when they begin practicing yoga regularly. One of the primary reasons is because it helps alleviate both physical and mental stress. When your body and mind have a chance to relax, it is much easier to avoid the temptation to overeat or to indulge in unhealthy snacks. This can help you eat a more balanced diet, making it easier to lose weight.
It’s best to practice yoga or meditation in a quiet room with a little light and plenty of comfort. This may mean that you need to get some foam rugs for the floor or some new cushions. Ensuring there are relaxing sounds is a good idea, as is having indoor water features for the home. Their sound and the way water moves air can be very relaxing and beneficial for something like this.
The gentle nature of yoga gets you in touch with your body and brings balance to your mind, promoting deep relaxation. This can help you deal with stress in a way that is much healthier and more effective than turning to food for relief.
Yoga Detoxifies Your Body
Carrying around extra weight is usually a symptom of excess toxicity in your body. If you can find an effective way to detoxify such as through the use of yoga, you may find that any excess weight you are carrying simply begins to drop away.
The liver and kidneys are tasked with removing toxins from your body. If they aren’t functioning at peak performance, it can result in weight gain.
When you begin a regular yoga practice, it can help promote detoxification. Yoga doesn’t just affect your body – it also affects your organs. This can help them work more effectively.
Deep breathing can fill your system with oxygen and can begin the process of detoxification. Certain twisting poses can also stimulate and rejuvenate the organs, helping them to work more effectively. In some cases, self-massage can also be used to promote internal healing and detoxification.
Yoga Can Help Resolve Emotional Issues
Carrying excess weight is not always just a physical problem. In many cases, it also is caused by underlying emotional forces. One way people sometimes deal with their unwanted or uncomfortable emotions is through eating.
When you experience uncomfortable feelings, there is often a temptation to reach for food. Food helps release endorphins, making you feel better almost instantly. The problem with emotional eating is that it is hard to eat enough to completely eliminate those negative emotions. Until the emotions are addressed and dealt with, they can continue to cause you to overeat, resulting in weight gain.
What is interesting about yoga is that it can often help resolve deep-seated emotional issues that have been plaguing you for a long time. By helping you to focus inward and encouraging you to care for yourself, yoga can often result in an emotional release that can help you move on with your life in a way that is healthier. There have even been stories of people bursting into tears when practicing yoga because they were finally able to release an emotion that they had been holding onto for years.
The only way to get rid of unwanted feelings or emotions is by confronting them head on. Burying them never works. Yoga provides a safe and effective way to address how you are feeling and to find ways to deal with any challenges that you need to overcome.
By making it easier to express exactly how you are feeling, yoga can help you release emotional blocks that have been keeping you from enjoying life to the fullest. This, in turn, can eliminate the root cause of emotional eating, making it far easier to lose weight.
What it really boils down to is that yoga is a powerful weight loss tool. By facilitating detoxification, promoting relaxation, and encouraging the release of negative emotions, it can help you live a more balanced life that centers on caring for your body. This includes eating a healthier diet and losing weight.