Yoga for overweight: a useful tool

Coming across yoga for overweight can be a blessing these days. In a society where obesity and overweight are considered an epidemic, there are multiple reasons for this contemporary problem. The most common reasons are dietary habits and a sedentary lifestyle. 

Although there seems to be a new wave that focuses more on a healthy lifestyle, overweight is definitely a concerning matter in this century. Being yoga an amazing tool to work the body and mind, yoga for overweight can be a convenient method in many cases. Keep reading and find out more!

Yoga for overweight: get to know yourself better

Understanding yoga for overweight starts with understanding better overweight in itself.

Stating the obvious, dealing with overweight, becomes even harder due to society shame attitude. Remember that this is one of the first challenges to face. Being overweight is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, heart disease, and some types of cancers. Obesity makes back problems more likely to happen and can contribute to injuries to ankles, knees, hips, among other vulnerable parts of the body.

And, of course, overweight is connected with depression and low self-esteem. On the other side, all the process of weight loss can be very damaging as well. The stress associated with some nutritional imbalances and yo-yo dieting can be even riskier than simply being fat.

What is yoga for overweight?

After understanding what overweight implies, we can start going deeper on how yoga fits in. Yoga can be helpful in a big number of ways. We are going to go through some of them.

Burning calories

Obviously, yoga burns a lot of calories, an important step to start dealing with obesity. As for other conditions slow and soft yoga practices might be the most adequate, when it comes to weight problems, strong practices like power yoga or Ashtanga might be the most suitable. Yet, the important is to start, because even with more subtle practices the weight starts dropping, because yoga for overweight is much more than just burning calories.

Yoga introduces us to a very important concept of self-exploration. That means, recognizing our thinking patterns, our body responses to different situations, emotions, repeated action and consequences over time.

Improving self-knowledge

Yoga brings intimacy with ourselves, and that might be something new and big, for many! That opens an opportunity to study the self and the relationship with food and body weight. 

Yoga is all about the present moment, which is the complete opposite of the mindset about weight loss. It doesn’t work with goals, or the idea of the future, instead it’s all about staying in the now. 

Yoga, contrary to other physical practices, doesn’t have an aesthetic intention, and at the same time, presents slow results. On the downside, it’s necessary to build a strong and patient mind in order to keep up with the practice.

Yoga for overweight must be a tool in parallel with nutrition advice and other therapies depending on each personal story and current situation. It can become progressively stronger, improving results with time. Despite that, the most important is to focus on the mind, since it’s from the mind that we can control our actions. Get it a try and good luck!

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