Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight? Here’s What The Experts Say

woman doing yoga

Yoga is all but guaranteed to improve one’s mood and possibly a lot more. 

Some polling data shows that 83 percent of participants were in a better mood after doing yoga. And 43 percent felt very happy afterward. 

At least on some level, all people are looking for something that can make them happy. Yoga makes people feel happier. 

But yoga is more than tights and mats. It’s an activity that requires movement, focus, proper breathing, endurance. Not to mention flexibility. 

All of these things drive towards weight loss (also a thing that makes people happy most of the time) through activity.

But does yoga help you lose weight?

Even those that fall into the skinny fat category, need some kind of physical activity to trim off the fat and help strengthen the body. 

Let’s run through what the experts have to say about yoga and weight loss. 

What Yoga Actually Is 

Yoga is a Sanskrit word that literally means “to unite” or “to yoke.” The commercialized and Americanized version of the exercise many are familiar with is born out of ancient Hinduism. Yoga is just one aspect of a wider philosophy and practice.   

The series of poses, breathing exercises, movements that Americans call yoga are a means of unifying a person’s physical, emotional and spiritual self. 

In more scientific terms, we call this self-awareness.

Why Self-Awareness Matters in Weight Loss

The Harvard Health Blog writes that weight loss is not hard because of changing what we eat. Rather, it’s hard changing why and how we eat.

“Very few of us eat solely based on hunger cues. We also eat to soothe anxiety, sadness, or irritation,” Ronald D. Siegel, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said in the June 2018 post. 

Increased internal mindfulness helps people identify common patterns of emotional eating or mindless fulfillments of pleasure. Very little of most people’s eating, especially overeating, is because of hunger, Siegel said. 

Once patterns are identified, they can be changed. But emotions and impulses come in waves with those patterns. They are often triggered rather than random. 

But those waves are temporary and can be ridden out and soothed with mindfulness activities like breathing or meditative exercises.  

These waves of temptation are literally the body seeking a trigger to release pleasure hormones. They calm and soothe various types of anxiety and stress in the brain. All of that drives unhealthy eating. 

An Integrated Approach

The Mayo Clinic is a Rochester, Minn.-based integrated nonprofit hospital an physician practice system, one of the most respected in the world. 

The reason why the health system is so successful is that it was one of the first to take a collaborative approach to treat patients. Doctors of various specialties work as co-equals on teams and technology and information is standardized. It short, it’s all integrated. 

Wendy Hanson, a public health expert, wrote for The Mayo Clinic that yoga integrates three tools of wellness into one practice that work well enough on their own. 

The movements relax the tension and strengthen the body. The breathing and meditative focus clears the mind and helps achieve inner peace. 

It’s poetic in a way that the practice of yoga itself is united as a practice in how it helps people deal with the mental aspect of health. 

The mental health newsletter from The Harvard Medical School in May 2018 states that the mental and physical benefits of yoga are essentially synonymous.

“The evidence is growing that yoga practice is a relatively low-risk, high-yield approach to improving overall health,” the newsletter states. “By reducing perceived stress and anxiety, yoga appears to modulate stress response systems.”

Yoga Is Aerobic Activity, But…

Yoga’s not the most impactful aerobic activity for weight loss. 

It is indeed an aerobic activity. It’s an extended activity that stimulates cardiovascular activity, per one definition.

Dr. Donald Hensrud writes that an hour of yoga will burn 183 calories, a brisk walk will burn 314 calories and water aerobics will burn 402 calories in a person who weighs 160 pounds. 

Despite not being a barn burner (or buns burner), it is a massive benefit in the ways covered in the previous section. 

“If you want to do yoga, the smart play is to include it in an exercise plan that includes aerobic activities, such as biking, jogging, brisk walking, water aerobics or swimming,” Hensrud wrote. 

But the catch will all those activities is that they require equipment, special locations or to be done outside. It’s very likely that those will be limiting factors for most people, at least some of the time. 

Yoga is a 24/7/365 anyplace activity. The only thing preventing someone from starting yoga is learning the poses and have a few feet to stretch out. 

Yoga as a Gateway

It’s also very easy to get started with yoga. Just learn and understand the poses. There are two ways to do that: join a group or go it alone. 

Is an instructor needed or are classmates a plus? Or, is privacy the goal? Answers to those questions will guide the location discussion. 

Looking ahead, the first benefits of yoga is increased flexibility. 

A study of college athletes finds that yoga increased flexibility in measured body parts. That might seem obvious. But there is a very subtle point to be made here. 

College athletes are already in incredible shape and are already much more flexible than most people. That study showed that yoga can even increase the flexibility of people may already be at what is thought of to be their performance. 

Flexibility is at a premium especially in starting off a fitness journey. 

Increased flexibility can decrease the likelihood of some of the most common workout-related injuries — strained back, strained hamstrings, pulled groins, shoulder injuries, and hip flexor strains. 

This makes yoga an ideal first exercise routine since it helps prevent workout roadblocks. 

Where Do I Begin?

Before going pell-mell into a head-to-foot pose or a destroyer of the universe pose (seriously, look it up), look into beginner yoga.  

Yoga’s basic tenet of unifying also applies to people’s time; it’s most effective when done several times a week. 

Make time for it. Not doing so is a dead-on-arrival move for fitness. 

Here are some basic poses to learn as you get started and how to get into them.

A quick note: there is no problem with modifying some of these poses slightly to accommodate needs. Work into the full pose over time if that is possible. But be sure to keep the pose intact for the needed amount of time. 

Downward-facing dog: You’ve seen this one. Start on your hands and knees. Straighten your arms and legs. Push your hips up and back while keeping your feel flat. Keep your head, neck and arms aligned with your back. Keep your back straight. If there is a need to bend, flex the knees. 

Upward-facing dog: keeping your hands under your shoulders. Extend your arms. Flatten the tops the feet on the ground with legs extended and drop hips to the ground. Look upwards and tighten your shoulder blades with your chest high. 

High lunge/Crescent lunge: step forward with one foot and step back with the other in a wide enough stance to feel balanced. Don’t go too wide. Bend the front leg at the knee and extend the back leg at the hip as much as you can and drop your hips. Go as deep as possible; don’t go deeper than parallel with the front leg. Extend arms straight out with hands extended. Keep hands at shoulder width and in line with your head held as high as possible. 

Keep your spine, neck, and arms up, perpendicular with the floor. Hold for a few seconds and then switch legs. 

The warrior: take a similar stance as the lunge. Extend arms with hands open until they are straight and parallel with the legs. Reach one arm forward and the other back with the same side as the foot. Point the toes of the front leg forward and the toes of the back leg out to the side. Keep head and spine aligned and look to the side with the flexed leg. 

Hold for a few seconds and switch which legs are flexed. Remember, the flexed leg has toes that point forward. The back toes point out. Look over the flexed leg. Keep arms flat; don’t let them sag.  

Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight? 

The answer to the question does yoga help you lose weight – it does. Yoga helps people engage the physical, mental, emotion and/or spiritual elements of the self with many benefits.

People feel happier. Stress is mitigated. Mental clarity follows yoga. The activity itself is good exercise and can keep people on track by preventing injury. 

Did we miss anything? Are you an expert yogi? Hit the comment section below.