Yoga is Good for Weight Loss, Right?
By: Afra Janarious
Tags: Weight Loss, Women, Fitness Tips, Yoga, Health And Wellness

Are you thinking about starting yoga this year to help lose weight?

Are you hesitant to commit without being sure of how much of an impact yoga will make? I think it’s reasonable to wonder, particularly given the regular depiction of yogis as uniformly trim and fit young women. Do only thin people do yoga? Or does yoga make us into thin people?

As a practicing physician, whenever I have a question like this, I look for the answer in a few places. If it’s a simple, factual question like, “What is the most appropriate treatment for vitamin D deficiency?” I turn to medical databases of information like Uptodate for the answer. If I run into a tricky question where the evidence is murky and the answer can’t be found in a database, I look elsewhere. In these cases, we turn to the medical literature, or scientific publications.

The question of yoga and its benefit in weight loss is one of these thorny questions.

In seeking to answer this question, I scoured the medical literature and came across a meta-analysis seeking specifically to determine the benefit of yoga in managing overweight and obesity.

A scientific review of the benefits of yoga on weight loss…

Unfortunately, the individual studies included had significant internal limitations. For example, the sample size of the studies was small, the duration of study was short, and there was inconsistency in the style and frequency of yoga practice. This is a significant limitation because yoga is the intervention. That’s like studying the benefit of a drug to treat a disease without attention to dose or treatment time. Drawing hard, accurate, and reproducible results would be challenging. I’m not sure how reliable the results are, in other words, even from a meta-analysis (study of a study) reviewing these experiments.

With that rather large grain of salt, what did that meta-analysis show?

In a nutshell, studies support the hypothesis that yoga helps with weight loss and weight maintenance in normal weight and overweight people.

Researchers inferred that yoga helps with weight loss through several mechanisms.

Yes, each yoga session does create real energy expenditure (calorie burn!). This alone is not responsible for weight loss.

In addition, the researchers found that people who did yoga also did more exercise outside of yoga that could help with weight loss and maintenance. They believed that yoga itself was responsible because of reduced joint or back pain.

And last, researchers postulated that the mindfulness enforced by regular yoga practice improved mood, reduced stress, and thereby created better regulation of food intake. The fact is, controlling calorie intake is an indisputable way to lose weight.

Keep in mind, the studies included in this analysis included wildly different populations. One small study included teenagers randomized to one group who did eight weeks of yoga and another group who were supposed to do no exercise at all. While neither group lost weight, the yoga group lost 4% body fat percentage.

In another group of teenagers, this time obese teenage girls, 16 weeks of yoga led to 5 lbs of weight loss.

Another study looked prospectively (which is considered a more rigorous type of scientific study than looking retrospectively) at both overweight women and normal weight women. They found that women who did 30 minutes of yoga at least once per week for four years had less weight gain: 3 lbs lower for normal weight women and 18 lbs lower for overweight women.

I’ll write that again: one study found overweight women who did 30 minutes of yoga ONCE per week gained 18 lbs LESS than a similar population who did not perform yoga.

While these are modest benefits (after all, 3 lbs can fluctuate in a normal woman week to week), I think right now the evidence is still insufficient to decisively conclude about the impact of yoga. As an optimist, I wonder if yoga’s impact might be much greater than these results show.

The Bottom Line on Yoga and Weight Loss:

The practice of yoga can contribute to your weight loss plan by increasing your mindfulness, reducing pain, and even burning calories. Be sure to incorporate yoga into a your plan for optimizing flexibility, strength, and weight management.

Originally published on thejanuarycompany.com

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