:: July/August 2005 Volume 4/Number 5

It's Not Just What You Eat, But When. Yoga, Ayurveda and Weight Loss.

By Felicia M. Tomasko

“Lose that spare tire!” cried the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine. Inside statistics reiterated that nearly two-thirds of American adults are overweight, with a dangerous 30 percent classified as obese. Weight management is big news nationwide.

The numbers of people whose weight is above what is deemed healthy has been climbing steadily upward for decades. This comes with more than a modicum of concern from the public; Americans spend more than $33 billion annually on weight-loss products and services.

With aerobic exercise one of the standard recommendations, for weight loss, the question arises: How does yoga, not always considered an aerobic activity, fit into weight management regimes? Can the practice of yoga and recommendations from the medical system of Ayurveda help a person manage their weight?

Although weight management is a complex issue, there is much evidence that it can. Exercise recommendations in Time magazine’s recent cover story include a four-part balanced program and the first part of that program is to clear the mind, even before exercising the heart and building muscles. Significantly, recommendations also include taking a break to allow the body to repair and recover from the often intense, muscle-tearing result of weight lifting or strenuous exercise. The importance of including yoga in a weight-management regime has led to the proliferation of yoga for weight loss videos, DVDs as well as classes specifically tailored to those larger in size or others trying to manage their weight.

The emphasis on quieting the mind and creating balance is where yoga has a significant edge over other weight loss regimens. Current research into the physiology of weight gain and weight balance is creating a pursuit of the hormone that causes us to overeat or put on weight in the first place. This has been a starting gun to the pharmaceutical companies’ race to the prize of a magic, moneymaking bullet: the ultimate hormonal antidote, the perfect weight loss pill.

Studies investigating the satiety hormone leptin seemed initially promising as a means of manipulating or regulating weight, but have not panned out to produce the perfect diet pill. People with obesity often have higher levels of leptin, suggesting that they have developed some resistance to the hormone.

Now, attention is being drawn to another hormonal cycle in the understanding of how our bodies manage weight: our stress response. The sympathetic nervous system, our flight or flight response with its cascade of adrenal hormones, including cortisol and other corticoids, it is believed, becomes activated on a chronic basis because of the fast pace of modern lives. While these hormonal systems are critically important for activating the body and mind during times of emergency or heightened activity, many people now live in a situation where they are experiencing stress on a nearly continuous basis. Chronic levels of cortisol and other corticoids suppress the immune system, inhibit digestion, raise heart rate and increase blood pressure, among other effects.

One of the effects of increased levels of cortisol in the bloodstream is associated with increased deposition of fat in the body, particularly in the abdominal area. The dreaded apple-shaped weight gain that is believed to be more dangerous for your health than evenly distributed or pear-shaped, where weight gain is predominant in the hip region, is aggravated by stress. Elevated cortisol also increases the risk factors for metabolic abnormalities including insulin resistance and diabetes. In addition to the hormonal increase in fat deposition, cortisol seems to interfere with the balance between satiety hormone leptin and the hunger hormone neuropeptide Y, which stimulates hunger and increases eating.

Considering the weight-increasing effects of chronic stress hormones in the body, reducing our experiences of stress is therefore a significant step towards achieving healthy weight management. And for this, there is no magic bullet. It is, however, one of the great benefits of yoga.

One yoga program created to address the needs of overweight people is Gentle Yoga with Naomi, developed by Naomi Judith Offner. Offner appreciates that science is just now beginning to support what she has taught for more than twenty years, that yoga helps people manage weight not because it burns calories, but because it reduces the stress response, improves digestion and metabolism, and importantly, teaches people the critical factor of self-acceptance.

Yoga not only lessens the stress response; yoga practice, unlike other forms of movement or exercise, affects not only the physical body, but also the other koshas, or layers of our being, including the mind, emotions and the subtle or more spiritual aspects of our nature. According to Ayurvedic physician Dr. John Douillard, yoga practice moves energy through these other aspects of ourselves, creating balance in the mind, emotions and our very heart and soul. This prana, or energy of life-force and vitality, that is circulated in yoga, brings consciousness and awareness into every cell. According to yoga, this is ultimately how we can let go of accumulated tissue and manage weight. It is also how we can experience greater self-acceptance, no matter what the body looks like.

Yoga has helped Santa Barbara-based yoga teacher Anne Van de Water lose what she describes as a substantial amount of weight, and weight management is something she works on with many of her students. Van de Water believes that yoga is a means by which the practitioner can tune into the body’s own wisdom, allowing a person to access their own inner intelligence and follow its guidance which would include choosing foods that are truly nourishing for body, mind and spirit.

Yoga is not only a mechanism to reduce stress and access inner wisdom; it is also a form of exercise. And it is even a better form of exercise than those that send the body into emergency mode, as it promotes relaxation. So rather depending on a gym workout to develop strength and fitness, even a gentle yoga class can also be a physical workout. Although some vigorous classes may be too much for beginners, people with health challenges or people who are overweight, styles like vinyasa or flow classes, Ashtanga and Bikram can also provide a cardiovascular workout, depending on the person. Lack of exercise is a significant risk factor in developing many chronic diseases including diabetes and hypertension, and can also exacerbate sleeping disorders, rendering us even more susceptible to the effects of stress.

The Wisdom of Ayurveda

Ayurveda is the traditional medicinal system native to India that shares common philosophical underpinnings. The two traditions are often described as “sister sciences” because of their shared roots and interconnectedness. Yoga, although it is a stand-alone system of attaining liberation and integrating mind, breath, body and spirit, is utilized as a therapeutic modality by Ayurveda. And Ayurveda provides the teachings and practices to cultivate health of body, mind, breath and spirit.

Ayurvedic physician and author Dr. John Douillard, has extensive experience in the use of Ayurvedic principles for weight management. He finds a number of techniques beneficial for helping people maintain a healthy weight. Not surprisingly, many of these are also focused on our body’s physiological response to stress. From the Ayurvedic perspective, he says, counting calories is not as useful as the crucial practice of changing daily eating patterns. In his book, The Three-Season Diet, he outlines and elucidates not a fad diet, but a method for developing a healthy relationship with not only food and eating patterns, but with the body as a whole.
One of the most significant recommendations Dr. Douillard makes is to encourage people to change when they eat, even more than what they eat. Based on dinacharya, the Ayurvedic understanding of the cycles of the day, our agni, or digestive fire is at its highest at midday. Therefore, eating the biggest meal at lunchtime, when the digestion is strong, helps our bodies to most efficiently utilize the energy taken in, rather than pack it into storage.

Dr. Douillard also discourages people from grazing throughout the day. “Everyone thinks eating all the time is the best way to lose weight.” This is counter to the recommendations of many nutritionists who suggest that eating small meals throughout the day assists in weight loss because it maintains regulation of blood sugar and prevents the body from storing fat, as a constantly grazing body is always burning the food on hand first.

Although grazing does maintain blood sugar, Dr. Douillard says it does so only as long as the body is not required to strain or perform endurance activities. Furthermore, Dr. Douillard also says that eating off the proverbial buffet line prevents the body from burning accumulated fat or stored toxins, because it is always being fed small amounts of food. Ironically, he says, “The grazing diet came from body builders trying to put on weight.” And those same grazing body builders had to drag themselves around the health club, exhausted and tired.
These recommendations are not just idle suggestions in Douillard’s practice. In order to assess the effectiveness of this regime, he completed a study with a group of participants trying to lose weight. Rather than counting calories and dieting, their regime involved following a specific, yet flexible routine. Feeling satisfaction was also an important component of each meal. Participants ate breakfast, one that was large enough to carry them through to lunch without hunger or the need for snacking. Then they ate lunch, in the middle of the day, and made it the largest meal of the day. Lunch was required to be satisfying enough to preclude the need for an afternoon snack. Supper was big enough for people to feel satisfied before bed. Between supper and breakfast the following morning, there was a natural period of fasting, stimulating the body to burn toxins and fat.

People in the study lost an average of 1.2 pounds per week. They experienced lower self-reported levels of anxiety and fatigue, and described a greater sense of wellbeing, merely by changing when they ate.

Douillard takes a three-pronged approach to food: how you eat, when you eat and what you eat. How you eat is essential; it is important to stop and enjoy a meal in a relaxed fashion. When you eat on the run, in the car or while standing in the kitchen, it sends the message to the rest of the body that an emergency is at hand. So we all too often eat under stress, as evidenced by modern research surrounding the physiological effects of heightened stress. When we do that, we are telling the body that we had better store as much as possible under the body’s mattresses to prepare for the worst. Eating proportionally more of the day’s nutrition at lunchtime, as mentioned above, is the second ingredient of the three-pronged approach.

The third component, what you eat, includes recommendations to choose foods seasonally. Many seasonal foods balance the particular doshic imbalances of the time of year. For example, the greens prevalent in the spring help cleanse and detoxify the body during the heavy, wet, mucousy kapha season, while the fall apple harvest helps the body to purge the heat from the accumulated summer months of increased pitta (fire). The plethora of fruits available in the summer season, like watermelon, light and sweet, balance pitta while it is increasing. Winter’s root vegetables, eaten warm, soothe and calm cold vata (air).

When managing weight, it is important to also address the body’s underlying imbalances and to have compassion for one’s individual constitution. A person with a strong and beautiful, yet larger, kapha frame may not be able to be as thin as someone with a more naturally petite vata body type. So the mind-set needs to be changed, and the all-important component of self-acceptance, no matter one’s size or body type, is to be cultivated.

Yoga practice is an integral component to an Ayurvedic approach to weight management. Not only does yoga help to decrease our overactive response to the stress inherent in the world around us, yoga increases the efficiency of our digestion, assimilation and elimination, and improves circulation of the lymphatic system, which decreases systemic stagnation.
While an Ayurvedic and yogic approach to weight management does not include counting calories, it does include paying attention to food, to breath, movement, and most importantly to reduce the debilitating effects of stress hormones on the body. And even more significantly, yoga provides a means for self-acceptance and knowledge of the more essential aspects of our nature not found in a diet book or on the reading of a scale.

Felicia M. Tomasko is an Ayurvedic practitioner, yoga teacher and writer based in Santa Barbara, California. She can be reached at feliciatomasko@yahoo.com.

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