Liz Neporent is a diet and fitness expert and author of “Walking for Dummies.” She regularly appears on national TV programs and is the president of Wellness 360, a New-York based wellness provider. You can also follow her on Twitter @lizzyfit.
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| Photo: Photodisc |
For all the magazine headlines touting the amazing fat-blasting powers of yoga, it’s a relatively anemic calorie burner. A typical 45-minute class burns off fewer calories than a honey glazed doughnut, hold the sprinkles. Yet, yoga can help you lose weight, just not for the reasons you might think.
Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center recently quizzed 303 people about their activity and eating habits and then cross-referenced them to see which groups had the most insight into why they ate and what they ate. It turns out that the yoga devotees were more in tune with the social and emotional reasons they reached for a honey glazed than the average couch potato, and interestingly, even more so than the folks who walked into the same gym but headed for the treadmill, bike or weight room instead of the yoga studio.
Presumably, runners and cyclists are just as concerned with how their clothes fit, but they seem to focus on pragmatic weight-loss strategies like counting calories and portion sizes versus the feelings that may trigger eating. According to Dr. Alan Kristal, the lead author on the study, these are separate skills. “When you practice mindful eating, you eat because you’re actually hungry versus responding to cues like being emotionally distressed or bored or because there is a candy dish in front of you,” he says.
Kristal says this study was inspired by the initial results of an earlier investigation done by his team which showed that doing downward dogs on a regular basis may help prevent middle aged spread. In that study, yogis who started out the decade at a normal weight gained less than the average person – 4 pounds compared to 13 — and overweight yogis actually lost weight during the same time period. Kristal suspected that the weight-loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger than the physical activity of yoga practice itself, which typically burns only about 240 calories per class. He hypothesized that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behavior.
“I think the power of yoga is in the way you learn mindfulness skills,” he says. “When you are in a yoga pose, you take it to your edge and you tend to hold it for a while. It isn’t excruciating but it is uncomfortable. You learn to observe this in a non judgmental fashion but you don’t get all twisted up in it – you observe it calmly. I think this translates to dietary habits by teaching you to feel a little uncomfortable when you want to eat for reasons other than hunger. You learn to live with these feelings and eat only when you actually are hungry.”
The study wasn’t able to tease out whether or not people who practice yoga are more mindful by nature, and certainly there are mindful eaters who never spend a single moment belly breathing. Plus, Kristal isn’t suggesting you shouldn’t count calories or eyeball your pasta portions when trying to lose weight. “Mindfulness is a skill that augments the usual approaches by encouraging you to build positive relationships with food and eating,” he says.
My 2 cents: Mindfulness is simply one more tool in the tool box. And who couldn’t use a little extra edge when trying to wrestle with the urge to add chocolate sauce to cottage cheese? Mindful techniques are best learned in classes that focus on the meditative aspects of yoga. The boot camp and cattle prod approach may sizzle more calories but won’t put you in touch with the mind and body connection that helps you come to terms with your feelings for food.
Now for your 2 cents: Has yoga helped you lose weight or become a more aware eater? Do you have any other non-yoga tricks for making peace with food? If so, tweet me. On my twitter feed, I’m giving away an advance copy of the DVD “Element: Yoga for Weight Loss,” starring LA yogi-to-the-stars Ashley Turner – it will go to the fifth person who signs up to receive my tweets. The disc doesn’t drop until the second week in September, so you’ll be the first on the block to experience this mellow, mindful yoga workout.
source: http://www.thatsfit.com/2009/08/26/yoga-for-weight-loss/
