Yoga for Healthy Eating: An Overview

by Nina

Both Baxter and I have already written a number of posts exploring the topic of Yoga for Healthy Eating. But seeing that it’s the beginning of a new year—when people often make resolutions regarding their health—I thought now would be a good time to provide an overview of the topic. Basically, between the two of us, we’ve come up with a four-pronged approach to support healthy eating:

• Understand your digestive system

• Practice stress management
• Cultivate mindfulness
• Strengthen Will Power

1. Understanding Your Digestive System

Baxter has recorded a short audio tour of the digestive system (see Audio Tracks) that you can use to learn about how your digestive system works and what happens to your food as and after you eat it. It’s especially helpful for you to learn about how your digestive system interacts with your Autonomic Nervous System and higher brain function. When you’re in a state of stress (see Stress, Your Health and Yoga), your nervous system diverts your body’s resources away from your digestive system (you don’t need to be eating or digesting your food when you’re running away from that tiger or that car that looks like it’s not going to be stopping before the crosswalk!). So chronic stress can cause digestive problems. In addition, even thinking about stressful situation can have a potential negative impact on digestion!

2. Practicing Stress Management

Chronic stress may not only cause digestive problems as I mentioned above, but the cortisol that is released can cause weight gain by stimulating your appetite (Yoga, Stress and Weight Management). So one of the most important things you can do to improve digestion and move toward healthy eating is to use your yoga practice to reduce your stress levels. See The Relaxation Response and Yoga for basic information on using yoga to switch your nervous system from the Fight or Flight response (stress mode) to the Rest and Digest response (relaxation mode). It’s not called the Rest and Digest mode for nothing!

3. Cultivating Mindfulness

Many poor eating habits are just that—habits! Practicing yoga asana with mindfulness and meditating will help you tune into your body, and not to ignore it. And as you tune into your body, you may learn about foods you are currently eating that are compromising your health (see Got Mindfulness?) or notice poor eating habits, such as eating beyond satiety (see Meditation and Healthy Eating). Cultivating mindfulness can teach you to recognize:

• which foods are good for you and which are not (not just junk food, but maybe food intolerances or allergies)
• when you are full and don’t need to eat more
• when you are thirsty instead of hungry
• when you are eating for stress, not for hunger

See Yoga for Healthy Eating for more information.

Mindfulness will also help you start to recognize habitual thoughts that are getting in the way of healthy eating. You can then work on changing your perspective (see Cultivating the Opposite).


4. Strengthening Will Power

Once you’ve identified your habits or have decide to eliminate or cut back certain foods, it takes will power to change! According the Dr. Kelly McGonigal, being in a state of stress can increase impulsive behavior and decrease will power. So practicing stress management as we describe above will help with your will power (see Healthy Eating, Stress and Self Control). However, you can also use a meditation practice to intentionally strengthen your will power.  Meditation teaches you to return to your object of meditation (your focus) and tune out distractions (temptations):

“Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness." —Dr. Kelly McGonigal

See Meditation and Healthy Eating for more information.

Tune in tomorrow to hear from Baxter on the same topic! He’ll discuss stress eating and recommend some specific yoga practices for you to support your goals for healthy eating. 

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Restorative Yoga Better Than Stretching for Reducing Subcutaneous Fat in Overweight Women

by Nina

Just a quick announcement today about some research findings I think you’ll all enjoy hearing about. Baxter and I read about a recent study, designed by Maria G. Araneta, PhD, MPH, of the University of California, San Diego, to determine whether obese women would see a loss of fat from less intense exercise instead of aerobic activity. Although not a huge study, the group sizes were larger than most of those we see in recent studies, with the yoga group of 88 having a mean age of 55 years with an average BMI of 36 kg/m2 and the stretch group of 83 having a mean age of 54 years with an average BMI of 32.5 kg/m2.

Along with her co-authors Matthew A. Allison, MD, MPH, Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD, and Alka M. Kanaya, MD, Dr. Araneta presented the results at the 73rd Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association in Chicago (June 21-25). And their findings showed that the restorative yoga practitioners lost significantly more subcutaneous fat over the initial six months of the study period, and kept losing it during a maintenance period with less direct supervision! This is important because all the women participating in study had metabolic syndrome, which the Mayo Clinic defines as:

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions — increased blood pressure, a high blood sugar level, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels — that occur together, increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome affects 44% of the U.S. population older than age 50. And reducing abdominal fat may help reverse the syndrome.

Although the team is still reviewing the data, they’ve speculated that one explanation for the difference between the effects found with restorative yoga and stretching may be that restorative yoga reduces levels of cortisol. As Timothy wrote in his background post Stress, Your Health and Yoga, cortisol levels rise during times of stress and is known to increase abdominal fat. And in Baxter’s post Cortisol and Good Health Baxter wrote about the dangers of prolonged periods of stress and high levels of cortisol. I wrote specifically about the relationship between stress, cortisol and weight management in my post Yoga, Stress and Weight Management. So we'll be very interested to see the follow-up studies.

In Baxter's post on cortisol, he actually recommended restorative yoga along with yoga nidra as stress reduction—and cortisol-lowering—solutions. However, meditation (see Starting a Meditation Practice) and supported inversion poses (see All About Supported Inverted Poses) are also helpful. For a complete overview of how to use yoga to switch your nervous system from the Stress Response (Fight or Flight) to the Relaxation Response (Rest and Digest), see The Relaxation Response and Yoga.

In her presentation, Dr. Araneta did not recommend restorative yoga as a replacement for aerobic activity; instead, she said this “complementary” practice could provide a means of gentle movement for those severely obese patients for whom other activity is not practical. But as I wrote in Restorative Yoga: An Introduction, restorative yoga is a complementary practice that benefits all of us.

If you haven't already, check out Baxter's video of the classic restorative pose, Reclined Cobbler's pose! 

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Yoga, Stress, and Weight Management

by Nina

Chocolate-Almond Candy Heart by Brad Gibson

Are you planning to relax over the holidays? Because if you’re not and you are worried about gaining weight, perhaps you should set aside some time for yoga.

You see, I’m helping Baxter with research for his upcoming workshop on Yoga for Healthy Eating at the San Francisco Yoga Journal Conference in January and I’ve learned exactly how stress can induce weight gain. Of course, we all know about so-called “stress eating,” but I wanted to know why that happens (I’m like that, you know, always wanting to the whys and hows as well as the whats). And I found that it’s due to the combination of hormones that are released in our bodies when we’re under stress.

These hormones include  adrenalin, which gives us instant energy, along with corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) and cortisol. While high levels of adrenalin and CRH decrease your appetite at first—we usually don’t have much of an appetite during a crisis—the effects usually don’t last very long. That’s when the cortisol—whose job is to help you to replenish your body after the stress has passed—kicks in, increasing your appetite and driving you to eat more. And because most of us no longer expend extra calories while in the acute phase of stress (we’re no longer actually fighting or running when our “fight or flight” responses are triggered), we don’t really need to replenish our food stores. So the increased appetite results in, you guessed it, unwanted weight gain.

In addition, while we’re under stress, we typically have an impulse to do something, to move. So unless you respond to your impulse to move with actual physical activity—yoga asana, anyone?—eating often becomes the activity that relieves the stress.

This is why both relaxation and exercise are recommended for reducing your appetite. When you use yoga or meditation to trigger the relaxation response (see Stress, Your Health, and Yoga), your parasympathetic nervous system reduces the levels stress hormones in your body. Exercise is also excellent for stress reduction as it, too, triggers the release of biochemicals that counter the negative effects of stress hormones. In addition, exercising will satisfy your impulse to move and hopefully prevent you from turning to food as a way to relieve your stress.

My prescription for preventing weight gain during the holidays? An active yoga practice followed by conscious relaxation (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga). And if you’re short on time, try even 10 or 15 minutes of conscious relaxation.

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