How To Lose Weight Doing Yoga:
Can You Lose Weight With Yoga?
Yes, absolutely. Yoga requires you to use your body weight to perform poses, which help strengthen and tone the muscles. During a yoga practice you burn calories, and a regular yoga practice will strengthen you mentally to help curb emotional eating. The ability of yoga to bring together the body and mind is the key reason why it is so effective for healthy weight loss.
Practicing yoga for weight loss is an especially good choice for beginners looking for a low-impact exercise option.
What Is Yoga?
Yoga is a physical and mental practice that help you focus on your breath to feel more connected to your body. In yoga you are connecting your breath with your body’s movement and the transition between postures. In contrast to high-intensity impact training, yoga will leave you feeling refreshed instead of wiped out, loose and flexible instead of tight.
The Five Factors That Affect Weight Loss:
A regular yoga practice supports your physical and mental development and can be very effective for weight loss. Yoga works in many different ways to support your weight loss goals to achieve a healthy weight that is maintainable. It’s not just about the calories you burn on the mat.
There are five factors that contribute to effective weight loss, and yoga helps with all of them.
- Nutrition
- Physical exercise
- Daily stress levels
- Sleeping patterns
- Lifestyle habits
Yoga encourages a lifestyle change that increases your physical activity, reduces emotional eating, and help to manage your stress which in turn helps with better sleep and weight maintenance.
1. Nutrition
Calorie-burning:
Losing weight is all about being in a calorie deficit. If you burn more calories than you take in each day, then you’ll lose weight. You can achieve this deficit by eating fewer calories or burning more calories through exercise. Your body probably needs a lot less than you usually consume, and often we eat out of boredom, anxiety, or procrastination.
How to achieve a calorie deficit?
- Eat less or smaller meals.
- Eat more nutritional foods by removing overprocessed food from you diet.
- Highly processed foods, tend to be high in calories and low in nutrients
- Limit your intake of sodium, added sugar and unhealthy saturated and trans fats
- Substitute high-calorie foods.
- Burn more calories by being active or exercise
To lose fat and preserve muscle mass you need to follow a calorie-restrictive diet high in protein and do resistance training, this will help you preserve and build muscle.
Exercise alone without dieting makes losing weight hard. Weight loss occurs when you burn more calories than you consume.
Remember: You Can’t Out-Exercise A Bad Diet
If you find yourself struggling with healthy eating, don’t let that stop you from practicing yoga. In time, yoga may actually help you make better dietary decisions during the day.
2. Physical Exercise:
Yoga isn’t really considered an aerobic exercise, but there are some styles that are very physical. These weight bearing moves increases your heart rate and builds muscle. Practicing yoga will help develop muscle tone and improve your metabolism, which helps you burn calories even after you’re done exercising.
More active styles of yoga will burn more calories than a gentle practice and build muscle. Building muscle is one of the corner stones of an effective weight loss plan. But yoga improves weight loss in many different ways and a strenuous practice might not be the best option for you. It is more important to follow a weight loss plan that you can maintain rather than losing the weight in a shorter amount of time.
Muscle Retaining:
Many times, when you are losing fat, you are also losing muscle mass. Because muscle burns more calories than fat, losing muscle can make it even harder for you to lose weight because your metabolic rate (the number of calories you burn at rest) decreases. Yoga can help you maintain your existing muscle mass and strength levels thought the isometric exercises you perform during your practice. Practicing yoga regularly is a great way to prevent the muscle losses that often accompany weight loss, making it easier to keep meeting your weight loss goals.
3. Daily Stress levels:
Stress can be one of the main contributors to your weight gain. Chronic stress contributes to weight gain in many ways, and yoga can help lower your stress levels.
The physical benefits of Yoga, combined with stress management can help a person to lose weight and maintain good physical and mental health.
When you are chronically stressed your body produces higher levels of the stress hormone called Cortisol. Cortisol assume you are in distress and increases your body’s fat storage, keeps you from sleeping properly and increases your appetite. This may leave you craving sugary, high calorie foods.
A relaxing yoga practice can help you deal with stress in a healthier way and even avoid it, and the related weight gain, altogether.
Incorporating breathing exercises may reverse some the negative effects cause by chronic stress and will improve your mood, lower you stress levels and increase your energy.
Parasympathetic nervous system:
During the day your body is often in the so-called fight-or-flight mode. Practicing yoga stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates breathing, digestion, and hormones. This helps you slow down internally, by balancing your hormone levels, repairing muscles, and resetting the digestive process. All of which aids in weight loss.
4. Sleeping Paterns:
Practicing yoga improves the quality of your sleep. And sleeping better leads to faster weight loss. If you practice regularly whether it is a gentle or rigorous practice, you’ll start to fall asleep faster and sleep deeper.
5. Mindfulness:
A regular yoga practice develops mindfulness. It helps you to become more aware of what your body needs, and how different foods and lifestyle experiences affect your body and mind. It also helps you to stick to your diet plan and scheduled yoga practice.
Moving through different yoga poses increases your awareness of your body, and that can support other effective weight-loss habits.
Maintaining mindfulness on and off the mat is what can make yoga more effective for weight loss than other forms of exercise.
- Mindfulness may help you to better avoid unhealthy foods and comfort eating.
- Mindful eating is recognizing hunger cues and limiting binge eating. It will also help you notice when you are full.
- Yoga help you recognize your body’s signals such as the difference between hunger and cravings. You get true hunger to feed and nourish your body. And craving junk food to feed some emotional need.
How often should I do yoga to lose weight?
Try and practice as often as possible, at least three to five 1-hour sessions per week. This can include restorative yoga sessions. As a beginner you should start slow and work your way up to a more challenging yoga practice. This will allow you build the necessary strength and flexibility to avoid injury.
As long as you don’t begin to feel the effects of overtraining, you can do yoga six or seven days a week as part of a weight-loss program, especially when you incorporate gentle restorative yoga to reset your body for another vinyasa or Bikram class.
Which type of yoga is the best for weight loss?
Some Yoga Styles are better suited for weight loss, but restorative yoga styles can also help you reach your goals it might just take longer.
If you already have some experience in yoga, you can try Bikram, Hot Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga. They involve increasingly difficult poses that gets your heart rate up and burn more calories. You can give Vinyasa Yoga a go if you are a beginner.
In comparison, slower styles of yoga like Hatha or Yin Yoga requires much less physical effort and thus burns less calories during your practice.
Can yoga help you lose belly fat?
This is a common question and I’ll give you the short answer. The answer is yes you can lose belly fat with yoga. BUT not in the way you think. You will lose fat all over your body. No type of exercise can make you lose weight in just one specific area of your body. But on the flip side, by getting your abbs toned it will make your mid-section seem slimmer.
The takeaway:
By making small and gradual changes and setting modest weight loss goals will make you more likely to stick to them. Remember, the benefits of yoga extend far beyond just weight loss.
If by doing yoga you have improved your physical health, your self-image will automatically improve, even if you haven’t lost that much weight. Give yourself some credit and keep working at it.
