Diets are often about limiting your experience. Yoga is about celebrating the experience of life. Which would you find easier to commit to?

Adapted from Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss by Suzanne Deason for Gaiam (Rodale Press).


It may surprise you to learn that weight loss is not entirely the point of this book. Yoga is certainly a means to that end, but not exactly in the way one would expect. Yoga helps you to develop a leaner, more supple body not by emphasizing a restricted food intake and targeted muscle-building, but by nurturing an attitude adjustment that paves the way for long-term change. Yoga establishes physical and mental poise in a natural, gradual, lasting and organic way. Typical weight-loss programs address the symptom (excess fat) and ignore the cause, which is essentially an imbalance caused by or manifested as any range of emotional problems, bad habits and poor nutrition. Through a sustained yoga practice, your body will change, your health and metabolism will improve, and your peace of mind and self-discipline will return.


We all know the formula for losing weight: Burn more calories than you consume. If it’s so easy, why are 60 percent of Americans overweight?

The first reason to turn to yoga is simple: Diets — at least the type of diets most -people follow — don’t work. Diets in our society are usually defined as food-deprivation regimens that promote temporary thinness. In fact, the derivation of the word diet means “manner of living,” and that’s how you should think of your “diet.” You can’t separate your behavior with food from your relationship with the rest of the world. If you are starving yourself, or cheating or being dishonest with yourself in terms of food, chances are you are doing it elsewhere. On the other hand, if you have an exciting, nurturing and enthusiastically healthy way with food, that openness and generosity of spirit will extend to the rest of your life.

We all know the formula for losing weight: Burn more calories than you consume. If it’s so easy, why are 60 percent of Americans overweight? The reason is that, although weight gain has something to do with how much and what we eat, it often has more to do with why we eat, which varies considerably from person to person.

If you’re eating to compensate for grief, dieting won’t help you deal with your loss. If you snack to calm your nerves, cutting calories won’t help you release stress. If you crave the wrong foods because of chemical imbalances, an appetite suppressant won’t recalibrate your system. If you indulge in bad habits with the excuse that your job is too demanding and you simply don’t have time to maintain a more balanced lifestyle, a frozen low-fat meal won’t help you take responsibility for your health and well-being.

Many bad habits are emotionally driven; their catalyst may be a single act of self-neglect that spirals into a breakdown in the system. By teaching you to turn your focus inward, yoga works on an emotional level to put you in touch with your feelings and to strengthen a nurturing relationship with yourself. By increasing your awareness of your body and the way you move through life, yoga can help you recognize how and why you aren’t taking better care of yourself. It can help you identify your overeating triggers and determine whether they are chemical, habitual or emotional.

Yoga also works on a biological level to offset the reactions that are set in motion when you eat unhealthy foods or foods that may be right for others but wrong for you. These foods cause hormonal reactions that can lead not only to obesity and disease but also to depression, a common trigger for bingeing. Eating “wrong” foods triggers a reaction that often simultaneously makes you crave more of the same and drives you deeper into depression.

By tracking how your body and feelings relate to food, you can find the keys to maintaining equilibrium — both emotional and biological. That’s something most diets just won’t do. Diets are often about limiting your experience. Yoga is about celebrating the experience of life. Which would you find easier to commit to?

Where do you start? Pay attention to how you feel when you eat. Remember, this is what food is for: to maintain life. It should stimulate and energize you. Do you feel alive after a meal, or do you feel bloated and heavy? Does your mouth get dry or your breath stink? Do some things make you sleepy? Reactions such as these can be signs of a food intolerance or food allergy.

If you think you don’t have food allergies, see what happens after you’ve started to clean out the clutter in your body and replace it with proper food and exercise. By eating healthfully, you will enhance your body’s ability to raise flags at certain foods. Pay attention to those alerts. Your body can convey extremely valuable information if you listen.

Your body’s chain reaction is significant in terms of overeating and weight gain. The immune response in an allergic reaction can be a catalyst to food cravings, and the chemical response itself inhibits your ability to process fat. Ask yourself what you crave. It’s usually exactly the thing you shouldn’t be eating, the food you have an allergy to. Try steering clear of it for a while, and the craving for it will probably go away. One typical example of this is being “addicted” to bread (and probably reacting to refined flour) or candy (reacting to refined sugar). As soon as they wean themselves off bread or candy, people don’t crave them anymore.

Your overeating triggers may be chemical and/or emotional, and by avoiding them, you can improve the state of your body, mind and spirit.


Forget for a moment your desire to shed pounds and drop clothing sizes. Stop counting. Let go of feeling fat.


We don’t live in a world that supports a purely whole-foods lifestyle. We don’t always have time to make sure there’s a fresh, balanced meal in the fridge. But there are many practical tools and choices that can help you reconnect with simplicity and shed pounds, too.

Listen to your body. Trust your instincts; they are intended for your survival and health. If you come from generations of overweight people, think outside that box. Notice which foods make you feel satisfied and give you energy and which foods make you feel tired, bloated or sluggish.

Take time to chew your food. Chewing stimulates digestive juices that help your body absorb food for fuel. Rushing induces cortisol release and insulin resistance, and increases food sensitivities and cravings.

Make friends with healthy fat. It satiates you and makes your skin look healthier. Go for olive oil, salmon, avocado, fresh nuts and real (full-fat) yogurt, in small portions.

Eat your poultry, meat or fish grilled, broiled or baked. In restaurants, choose dishes that follow the vegetable/whole grain/fish, poultry or meat model.

Keep fresh-frozen vegetables on hand. They have higher nutritional value than canned and make a quick complement to a meal.

Drink plenty of fresh water. If it becomes boring, flavor it with a squeeze of lemon or lime. Avoid sodas — even diet soda, which often contains aspartame, a substance shown to slow the body’s ability to lose weight. Also, excess soda in place of more nutritious liquids has been linked to osteoporosis.

As a healthy substitute for sugar, use stevia, an herb that can be found in most natural-foods stores. It has no aftertaste and has been shown to help regulate blood sugar.

Make changes in your diet consciously, and don’t go cold turkey. Cutting out everything all at once will only cause you to feel deprived, which often leads to bingeing.

Keep expectations realistic. You don’t have to become a subsistence farmer of organic fruits and vegetables. Just thinking about food as something that comes from nature to fuel and nourish your body will engender a healthy change in your choices and help you get real joy out of food again.



Adapted from Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss by Suzanne Deason for Gaiam (Rodale Press).