Yoga for Weight Loss

Practicing yoga for weight loss is not just good for changing your body, it is good for changing your emotional well-being, too. Recently I interviewed Larry Sherman, a yoga for weight loss success story who dropped his weight from 538 pounds to 190 pounds while practicing yoga five times per week. Mr. Sherman says that his experience with yoga has been transformational in multiple ways, not just physically. Click here to read the story of Larry Sherman's inspiring weight loss.

One of the best articles about yoga for weight loss is Yoga Journal’s Why Yoga Works When Diets Often Fail. The article describes all of these health benefits of yoga:

1. Increased body awareness leads to healthier eating habits and cultivates peace of mind. Particularly for people who overeat because they are stressed or uncomfortable about something, yoga teaches them to live in the present and to experience feelings without trying to eat them away.

2. Whatever your size when you are starting, the physical practice of yoga can help the body become leaner and stronger. Blogger Kirsten Scott describes this type of success with practicing yoga, "Finding Your Muse (Exercise Muse, that is!)."

3. Yoga increases energy, improves circulation, and burns calories to help the metabolism to function better.

Yoga's effectiveness for weight loss goes way beyond calorie burning, but some practitioners do enjoy choosing styles of yoga that burn a lot of calories. An often-cited yoga study at Adelphi University found that a particularly vigorous type of yoga called Sonic Yoga can burn 5-9 calories per minute, which means a 60 minute yoga class could burn up to 540 calories. This type of yoga is aimed at fit individuals who are able to move from one pose to the next at a quick pace. Sonic Yoga is a type of Vinyasa Yoga, the general category of yoga where static postures are linked together to form a flowing sequence.

Another type of yoga that scores high on calorie burning is Bikram Yoga. Bikram Yoga is performed in a hot, humid room, and proponents of Bikram Yoga seem to love it. Others of us are a bit daunted by the thought of practicing in a room heated to 105 degrees with 40% humidity, no matter what the weight loss benefits!

People who want to explore yoga for weight loss can either find a studio where they feel comfortable, or they can begin a home practice where it doesn’t matter so much what they are wearing or how they look. For tips on building a home-based practice, check out my Yoga At Home page and my Yoga DVD Reviews.