The reason that yoga helps you to lose weight is because it is dedicated to helping your body eliminate toxins.
We are full of toxins. From the food we eat to the air we breathe to the water we bathe in, toxins invade our body daily. Toxins can be found in almost every product we use daily, from the food we eat to our household cleaners.
Toxins are stored in your body fat. Toxins cause your liver to become sluggish and to not function properly. This causes your organs to stop metabolizing fat effectively and so you gain weight.
Yoga is designed to help your body eliminate these harmful toxins.
Not only do you eliminate toxins through the various poses, but since yoga lowers levels of stress hormones and increases insulin sensitivity, your body can then go into fat-burning mode and burn food as fuel rather than store it as fat.
The best part about yoga is that since it is low impact, you can practice it at any age or any fitness level.
"Never too late, never too old, never too bad and never too sick to do this yoga and start from scratch again." says Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga.
Bikram Yoga is a yoga class that is held in a room where the temperature has been raised to over 100 degrees in order to sweat out toxins. The heat of the room also increases flexibility, which leads to a better workout.
In your Bikram Yoga class you will be led through a series of 26 poses and 2 breathing exercises, which according to Bikram work out "every single tendon, ligament and muscle, from bones to skin, inside out!" The series of postures are arranged logically so that you move smoothly from one posture to the next.
Another reason that yoga helps you lose weight is that it trains your mind to focus.
Your mind is the powerful determinant that controls whether or not you give into that cheeseburger and milkshake craving. The more you practice yoga, the more you learn to sit still, meditate and breathe and the more you will train your body and your mind. Imagine being able to quiet that little devil up there telling you to be bad and eat the processed-full-of-dairy-and-sugar-chocolate-chip-cookie-pie. Imagine that you don't even hear him anymore.
Do you eat when you're nervous, anxious or upset? Are you an emotional eater? This does not have to be your fate. This is not who you are. Imagine eliminating all of your food cravings. Imagining being able to have one bite of ice cream without eating the whole carton. Imagine yourself as skinny, youthful and beautiful as ever without a care in the world. All of this is possible by training the mind with yoga!
