If you’ve ever wondered whether practicing yoga can effectively make you lose weight, now is the perfect time to find out.
Although losing weight is not easy for everyone, with the right kind of attitude and discipline, it becomes less of an ordeal and more of a pleasant reality that can be acquired.Using yoga for weight loss can provide you with the discipline you need to succeed.
How Yoga Can Promote Weight Loss
1. Stimulates the Liver
Your liver has many essential functions, chief of which is to process nutrients from food that you eat. Other functions include the removal of toxins from your body, bile production, and protein building. Certain activities, such as drinking alcohol, can overload the liver. Infections can also make the liver lose its health and function poorly.
Yoga is an extremely powerful cleansing agent and detoxifier; it helps to purify your blood, and hasten fat processing by stimulating the liver. Having a healthy liver is greatly instrumental your body’s removal of unhealthy fats more easily, instead of storing them in your body.
2. Improves Heart Rate
People jog or run for a long time to get their heart rates up, believing that this makes their goal of losing weight more achievable. Research, however, has shown that this is a misconception, and is not a very good way to lose weight at all. It actually stresses the nervous system to the point of creating greater exhaustion, leading to adrenal fatigue.
For better weight loss, your heart rate should be change in intervals, and raising the heart rate should happen in very short bursts – raising it, dropping down, and getting it up all over again. Yoga can make this form of “interval training” possible.
At this point, you can check out the videos to be able to do a round of poses such as “Low Runners Lunge” or the “High Lunge.” Do this for some time and for a few rounds you will feel that your heart rate is at its optimal level, without the exhausted feeling that could get from jogging or running.
3. Develops Strength
Moving your body for shortening or lengthening the muscles will help you lose weight. Muscles are active tissues that consume fat for energy. When you build your muscles, your stored fats get used for energy. That is why strength work is very good for losing weight.
Towards this end, doing yoga for weight loss by practicing proper arm balancing positions are great because the poses engage a lot of your muscles, not just the arms or shoulders, but also your abdominal muscles, your core, and your legs.
In essence, yoga can give a full body workout, depending on your selection of the poses that you hold. Proper breathing is also key to burning more energy as you assume the poses, and that, in turn, helps to remove fats from your body.
Other Yoga for Weight Loss Benefits Include:
- Activating the internal heat in the nervous system
Cleansing the colon - Creating the right amount of pH levels
- Maintaining the right balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system
- Activating the thyroid gland
In the next article we’ll cover doing “Yoga Stretches” to get your blood flowing. If you have not done so already, be sure to subscribe to the MyFitnessNut.com Newsletter so that you can get access to the Hatha Yoga Video demonstrations and get started doing yoga for weight loss right away.
