Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight

‘Does yoga help you lose weight¹?’ – this is a central question that comes to the mind of people looking to lose weight by practicing yoga. While yoga has a lot of health benefits, the main question people try to sort out is whether yoga helps you lose weight or not. A lot of research suggests that it does!

Yoga translates to ‘union’ in Sanskrit and helps create a union of the soul, mind, and body. It allows you to experience calmness and a sense of peace. Ancestors have used it in practices like postures, chanting, and relaxation.

It is a process of freedom, power, and consciousness. It teaches us to see things clearly and understand our environment more deeply. It makes you conscious of your thoughts and beliefs and allows you to transform your soul. It also helps you form a deeper connection with nature and provides access to acceptance, gratitude, love, joy, humility, and compassion.

While these last few lines may seem very philosophical, yoga has a lot of practical purposes. It does have value in your life, not only at an emotional and mental level but also at a physical level.

Answering the question, ‘does yoga help you lose weight?’ is important, but what is also important is acknowledging the other benefits you can get with regular yoga practice.

1) Benefits of Practicing Yoga

Yoga can positively affect your body and bring welcome physical, emotional, or mental changes. Before knowing whether yoga helps you lose weight, let’s discuss a few of these advantages of yoga:

1.1) It Improves Your Posture

Consistent yoga practice can help you learn to balance and stand confidently. This will help prevent you from having bone problems. However, it is important to remember that the key is consistency; a few different classes of yoga every month and a set of different yoga poses will help you maintain r routine for yoga.

1.2) It Boosts Your Mood

Yoga lowers stress hormones and increases endorphins, making you feel better and reducing stress and anxiety.

1.3) It Makes You More Mindful

Yoga practice helps you maintain mindful eating². Studies have always shown that people who participate in regular yoga develop mindfulness towards eating habits and get more in tune with their bodies. Mindful eating helps combat binge eating and contributes to the age-old question of ‘Does yoga help you lose weight?’.

1.4) It Relieves Back Pain

Yoga, like stretching, can improve mobility and can also be recommended for chronic lower back pain.

1.5) It Can Ease Symptoms of Arthritis

Arthritis can cause discomfort and swollen joints; gentle yoga, not power yoga, can help relieve these symptoms and the pain they cause.

1.6) It Can Benefit Your Heart

Yoga can lower inflammation and contribute to a healthy heart. Yoga helps address issues like high blood pressure and excess weight, and in doing this, it can help boost the health of your heart.

1.7) It Can Help You Sleep Better

Bedtime yoga can help you get the right mindset to fall and stay asleep.

1.8) It Can Help Create a Community

Yoga can ease loneliness and give you an aura to grow and support others.

1.9) It Promotes Self-Care

Yoga helps you understand the importance of taking care of yourself. Yoga can boost your mental health, manage stress, and ensure mindfulness.

1.10) Yoga Is Diverse and Keeps You Entertained

There are a lot of yoga poses and types to keep you entertained and excited for more. Each of these moves has its advantages, and every kind of yoga helps you focus more on specific body parts.

Here’s a bit about the varieties of yoga:

• Hatha Yoga: Hatha yoga poses to increase strength and flexibility. They offer aerobic conditioning and also help maintain balance. You also learn to meditate and incorporate breathwork.
• Power Yoga: Power Yoga enhances stamina and flexibility. It also strengthens your mental focus, relieves tension, and releases toxins. Since power yoga is a rigorous workout and makes you sweat, it helps burn calories and contributes to the important question, ‘does yoga help you lose weight?’.
• Hot Yoga: Hot yoga, also known as Bikram Yoga, consists of postures practiced at a surrounding temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit, with a 40% humidity level. Hot yoga increases heart rate, allowing muscles to loosen.

Here’s a bit about the various poses in yoga, also termed yoga asanas:

• Phalakasana: The Plank pose helps strengthen your spine and abdominal muscles. It helps develop your posture and build resilience against ailments.
• Adho Mukha Svanasana: Downward Facing Dog pose stretches the hamstrings and calves. It also flexes the Achilles tendon. Since your head is lower than your heart, the blood flow to the brain increases. The downward dog pose helps relieve tension from the neck and also helps reduce headaches and deal with migraines.
• Warrior III pose: This pose helps create stability in your body, strengthens the feet and ankle muscles, improves your balance, and teaches activation for lightness.

• Dhanurasana: Bow pose improves posture and combats the effects of sitting for long hours and slouching. It also helps deal with kyphosis and abnormal curving of the spine. It relieves back pain and stretches abdominal muscles, chest, shoulders, hips, and quadriceps.
• Trikonasana: Trikonasana is one of the easiest yoga asanas, but the stretch in the groin makes it a bit painful. It strengthens your hamstrings and stretches the hips.

It is often easy to undermine the value of yoga practice compared to high-intensity extreme workouts. However, while both have their advantages, it is important to find a balance and practice them because while high-intensity workouts can help boost your energy and release feel-good hormones, yoga can also help you lose weight.

As visible from the above points, yoga poses and regular yoga practice does wonder for your posture. Here’s some information on how yoga can fix your posture: How to Fix Your Posture with Yoga.

2) How Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight?

These three points determine whether yoga helps you lose weight fast.

2.1) Mindful Eating – How Can It Help You Lose Weight?

As mentioned earlier, yoga’s biggest advantage is it helps you practice mindfulness. Mindfulness includes holding a posture for a long period, connecting with how your body feels, and monitoring your breath. Paying attention to your body and mind helps you learn mindfulness.

This mindfulness can be transferred to your eating habits. Mindful eating involves recognizing cues of hunger and avoiding binge eating. Avoiding foods that have negative effects, like making you feel lethargic, is also a practice included in mindful eating. Mindful eating also focuses on eating foods that make you feel energized.

Yoga for weight loss can help you change your eating behavior and get you back to healthier eating by cutting back on fat and including vegetables and grains. Studies have also shown that people who practice yoga are less likely to have eating disorders.

2.2) Yoga and Stress – How Can Managing Stress Lead to Weight Loss?

Yoga can help lower chronic stress levels³, so exploring stress management and yoga becomes important in discussing how yoga helps you lose weight.

Breathing and meditation contribute to improving your mood and lowering stress. It is important to focus on stress to lose weight because stress causes cortisol to rise and makes it difficult to sleep. Deep breathing and meditation can undo these negative effects of stress and contribute to losing weight.

2.3) How Can Muscle-Building Lead to Weight Loss?

Many weight loss efforts, involving losing fat but paying equal emphasis to gaining muscle tone, go a long way.

You use your body weight in yoga, like in resistance training. Your whole body is working to maintain balance and, in doing so, is contributing to toning muscles.

Yoga poses can also be used after a cardiovascular workout. For example, if you’ve just worked out your legs by squats, switching to the boat pose for thirty seconds can activate another set of muscles and build muscle tone. Studies have also shown that restorative yoga classes can improve glucose levels in overweight women.

3) Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight? – a Conclusion

Yoga helps you in a variety of ways. It helps manage stress, helps focus on your balance, correct your posture, and lose weight. No matter your shape or size, a good yoga instructor can help you make the best of yoga’s long-lasting benefits.

However, you may find slower changes in your weight as compared to other forms of physical activity. You may need to devote months of regular yoga classes to see a difference in your weight. While the pace of change in yoga may be slow, its additional benefits surely make up for it!

Now that you know the answer to the question, ‘does yoga help you lose weight?’, don’t wait another second! Enroll yourself in yoga classes and watch as your emotional, mental and physical life gets a welcomed change.

1. Ross, Alyson, et al. “A different weight loss experience: A qualitative study exploring the behavioral, physical, and psychosocial changes associated with yoga that promote weight loss.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2016 (2016). ↩︎
2. Bryan, Stephanie, et al. “Yoga, mindful eating, and weight management.” J Nutr Ther 2 (2013): 173-181. ↩︎
3. Harkess, Kaitlin N., et al. “Brief report on the psychophysiological effects of a yoga intervention for chronic stress.” Journal of Psychophysiology (2016). ↩︎

Last Updated on August 17, 2024 by Sathi