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Practicing yoga regularly offers several advantages. It tones your muscles, reduces stress levels, improves your physical and mental state, and makes you feel confident about your body as you become more flexible and strong. But can yoga help you lose weight? The answer is yes, and here’s how it can help you stay in shape.
Though yoga doesn’t promise spot reduction, it supports weight loss by improving your self-image and bringing you better in contact with your body. It reduces stress and anxiety, which leads to stress eating, encourages healthy well-being and helps you in maintaining your weight loss.
If you are doing yoga regularly and you aim to lose those extra pounds, then here are some of the ways how yoga may help.
Yoga and weight loss
1) It can help with healthy eating habits
Doing yoga can potentially help you when it comes to mindful eating habits. A healthy eating habit is mainly referred to as recognizing cravings and controlling binge eating.
Over time, with regular yoga practice, you may even completely stop eating foods that leave you feeling bloated and lethargic. It may encourage you switch to foods that make you feel energized and fueled. Hence, all these healthy habits can help you be consistent with your weight loss and make helpful eating choices overall.
2) Practicing yoga helps manage stress levels and prevent weight gain
Stress and anxiety can make weight loss a very challenging task as it increases the cortisol level and leads to trouble with sleeping and stress eating. Unmanaged or chronic stress contributes to weight gain. However, doing yoga poses and moves potentially lowers them.
In particular, meditation and breathwork are the keys to yoga practice and both can contribute to improving your mood, boosting your energy, and lowering your stress levels.
They help reduce stress and prevent negative effects that make weight loss more difficult. In response to breathing exercises, there are various physiological changes that occur in your body and all help to reduce the cortisol level.
3) It helps to build more muscles and cuts down fat
Building strong muscles is yet another way yoga helps with weight management and weight loss. This is because in yoga, you use your own body weight as resistance, which helps you maintain balance so that every muscle gets targeted.
For instance, when you are doing a plank pose, you are using multiple muscles in your body, including hips, shoulders, legs, and core. And just after completing a plank, you may perform a downward-facing dog pose, thereby moving another set of muscles, including your shoulders, back and forearms.
All this muscle-building helps you burn more calories and regulates weight loss.
4) It boosts immunity
Chronic stress and anxiety can have a very negative effect on your immune system. When your immune system gets compromised, you become more vulnerable to health issues, including weight gain and illness.
As discussed above, yoga is considered a healthy alternative treatment to manage stress levels. Various studies have shown that there is a great link between consistently practicing yoga, especially for a period, and a better immune system.
5) Yoga improves the sleep cycle
Improper or disturbed sleep cycles are also responsible for weight gain. Yoga improves how quickly and deeply you fall asleep. This is due to the aftereffects of exercise, mental tranquility, and stress relief that yoga provides specifically.
And perhaps because of improved stress and anxiety, various studies show yoga to be a very helpful tool for improving your sleep.
6) It improves brain functioning
Different studies suggest that yoga truly is a whole mind and body exercise. It activates areas of the brain that are particularly responsible for improving attention, body function as well as motivation. All this together helps to make you strong, so you may strictly consider your diet and maintain weight.
Summary
When it comes to weight loss, however, along with yoga, you must also eat a healthy diet and burn more calories by regularly performing workouts that raise your heart rate.
Always remember that some vigorous styles of yoga may provide you with a better workout regime than the gentle ones, but if your aim is to lose and maintain weight then you will have to combine yoga with other aerobic exercises that’ll help you burn more fat.
