Fishman Loren MD - Yoga for Weight Loss

Yoga

for Weight Loss

Loren Fishman, MD

WITH

Carol Ardman

TO THOSE WHO GENEROUSLY
SHARED THEIR SUCCESS STORIES WITH US,
AND TO ALL THOSE WHO DECIDE TO USE YOGA
AS A TOOL TO CREATE A HEALTHIER FUTURE

Yoga

for Weight Loss

T HINKING ABOUT LOSING WEIGHT do I need to do it, can I do it, how to do itcan be worrying, even scary. At least thats how it has been for many among my family and friends. One way to figure out how to lose weight is to break the process down into small, meaningful segments. Then these small chunks can be tackled one at a time. Like the Romans of old, we can divide and conquer. Yoga is particularly adaptable to this approach.

Thats what I aim to do in this book, which is for people at any level of experience. What the beginner needs is an overall concept of yoga, and this can also happily remind the experienced practitioner. What follows is mostly about yoga poses, or asana, but does not begin or end there. If you were or are undecided about whether you need to lose weight, here are some things to think about that may help you make a decision and, if necessary, a change in your attitude or your lifestyle.

In spite of persuasive evidence that overweight is inadvisable from medical, social, economic, and aesthetic points of view, the people in many countries are getting rounder. Millions upon millions dont seem to care about the negative consequences. The question is, Why? If we understand why so many people are not moved by the facts, we may get an idea of how to help.

When I tried to understand from the evidence how all these different factors did not deter more people from overeating, I found two powerful currents uniting into a mighty stream. One is evolutionary: the urge to eat. The motivation to find something edible is an extremely deep and critical one. Obviously, without it few creatures have a chance to survive, let alone procreate. The other explanation is social: Eating is often a social or even recreational activity. And on top of that, growing, baking, marketing, and selling food are obvious ways to offer something people want. Reasonable creatures that we usually are, we look for ways to produce things that our fellow beings want, in order to give our work value, be it on the farm, in the home, or at the market.

So it seems to me that these two conditions, one promoting the survival of the creatures with strong appetites, and the other prompting us to supply the food these creatures really like, have resulted in an almost irresistible coupling of the motivation to eat what is available, with a tremendous worldwide industry to make available the most tempting foods possible. No wonder that our waistlines have grown in tandem with our control over naturefrom irrigation to gene modification. We humans have learned over the centuries to supply ourselves with almost irresistible satisfactions for the desires that have developed and amplified in us over millions of years. But then how does one acquire any mastery over this desire, which gives us both the motivation and the means to be so unhealthily, unsocially, uneconomically, and unaesthetically satisfied?

History gives us examples of humankind resisting strong, evolutionarily honed impulses: Social opprobrium and the law stop us from acting out the inappropriate ideas or fantasies put in our heads by very attractive clothing on people of our desired gender. In this case we use willpower or fear of the consequences. These methods of curtailing natural desires have, however, failed quite spectacularly in the case of eating. Conventional means of curbing this desireoutlawing large sugary soft drinks, raising consciousness about fried food, reasoning about diabetesare too feeble to win against the strength of human appetite. What types of motivation might work?

The abstract ones. People will even die for their ideals. Religious teaching and political mandate have made the very strongest urges, the sexual ones, go into prolonged suspended animation. Yoga is not religion, but yoga can awaken the spiritual impulse, possibly a sentiment strong enough to counter the desire to eat more than one should.

Yoga is theistic, but it has no clergy, no hierarchy, and no churches, temples, or mosques. It has been said that yoga concerns the essence common to all religions. At any rate, the spiritual impulse is alive and thriving in so many yoga practitionersatheistic and orthodox alikethat it can hardly be a coincidence. Sensing the sanctity of the world, and especially of ones own body, is key to the success of yoga in weight loss. The reader will encounter a detailed discussion of this below. But that is not all yoga offers.

Yoga also offers methods to straightforwardly use your own physiology to reduce your appetite and govern your other functions such as metabolism and sleep, which gives you a veridical sense of mastery over yourself. As the noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, The human body is the best picture of the human soul. Effective bodily control is a potent inducement to both self-discipline and a deservedly increased belief in your own self-worth.

Practicing yoga yields a familiarity with yourselfa working knowledge of your own bodythat is not easily obtained elsewhere. First, yoga has been shown in innumerable studies to lower anxiety and the effects of stress, which, for many, naturally lead to overeating. If you get to know your own body through yoga, you learn how to regulate stress and its beneficial as well as harmful consequences. In this book I delve into both well-known and rather esoteric physiological ways that yoga cuts down your actual physical appetite and boosts your metabolism. Before this writing, some of this information hasnt, so far as I know, been related directly to yoga.

This makes three basic ways in which yoga holds promise for those who would like to or need to weigh less:

1.Ways to improve your respect for yourself and your world

2.Specific physiological ways to reduce your appetite

3.Systemic ways to improve your metabolismthe process your body uses when it changes the food youve eaten into energy or stores it as fat

Positive outcomes like the ones youll find described throughout this book occur when all three of these methods combine synergistically.

Y OGA MAY BE the most effective and innocuous means of limiting or reducing your weight. It not only curtails your appetite in significant ways and improves your ability to generate energy from what you do eat, it also raises your self-esteem, boosts your confidence that you can do what needs to be done, and, possibly most important of all, gives you a sense of the sanctity of your own life, both physical and nonphysical. It is this almost moral, possibly spiritual feature of yoga practice that can infuse you with the motivation needed to overcome so formidable an adversary as the intense, sometimes irresistible, desire to eat.