Yoga is experiential. When you practice, you gain loads of benefits ranging across increased vitality, strength, flexibility, weight loss, and spontaneous joy. The poses were designed through trial and error with direct attention to results in the mind and body. This was long before we developed complex scientific measures and tests that disconnected our health approaches from direct, holistic experience. Many years of practice has given us a system of total body and mind health that also connects and grounds us in our lives, and aligns us with our intuition, creativity, and awareness of ourselves and the world. It's almost too simple to believe, leaving plenty of room for the development and evolution of skepticism. How can something so simple be so effective?
The evolution of food and yoga in modern culture have faced similar trials and hardships. When scientists learned to analyze vitamins contained in food, people decided we could ditch the natural food source as a whole, and insert vitamins and other bonus materials into "food-like substances" - a description given by my hero Michael Pollan.
According to the FDA, these nutritious food-parts inserted into anything that could be mass produced and ingested would make us healthier, stronger, smarter, and better people. It obviously didn't work. We've paid the price as a culture the hard way: early death due to heart disease and diabetes, quality of life lessened by obesity and depression, and possibly the most difficult to stomach, the rise of childhood obesity. Real food has become a luxury in many homes, replaced by the cost-effective chicken nugget. It's emotional and difficult to blame families with limited budgets for choosing low-price fast food, rather than spending hours learning how to cook and shop for fresh, real, and often higher-price food. But the cost of unhealthy food choices, both in medical bills and all-around feeling bad, is too high to keep making the same mistakes. We have to support, encourage, and help each other take our health back.
Yoga in modern culture has faced similar development challenges to food and nutrition. Yoga originated as a total body and mind health system that works. But similar to the distracting mass appearance of food-like substances in the last couple of decades, the waters have been muddied around yoga. Authentic yoga gets us healthy in our minds and bodies. We don't need a gym membership, weights, exercise machines, or boot camp. Somewhere along the evolution of fitness we decided health should be much more complicated than it needs to be. We gave our power away to exercise equipment gimmicks, swamis, and power-driven yoga leaders - which has lead us away from what yoga is all about. Yoga is powerful. It puts you back in touch with you, where all the good stuff is. When you practice you feel great, become healthy, and are put back in line with your intuition and awareness.
Eating healthy food and practicing yoga will get and maintain your body at the weight that it should be naturally. Scales and diet pills not necessary. We're stuck as a culture. We collectively need to lose the weight. You Huffington Post readers I'm assuming are conscious individuals working toward compassionate, healthy living and spreading your knowledge to help others. If you're reading this you're probably "in shape" or you know what to do to get there. In an attempt to stop preaching to the choir here, I encourage you to take what you know and help someone who needs it.
This is a simple yoga routine suitable for beginners (and everyone else) aimed at promoting body awareness and weight loss. Pass it around to friends, family, or any one else you know who could benefit from a push from a friend in the right direction. It's up to you to make a difference so we can stop focusing on the latest weight loss or food fad, and keep our attention on just being healthy. It all begins here.
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I especially enjoyed your comments about not needing gym memberships, weight machines or boot camps. It really is best to keep it simple, including the food we consume - fresh food that we cook ourselves. I appreciate the concerns about the "healthiest" food being the most expensive, but having a small vegetable garden in the backyard saves a fortune in the long run and does not take up much space. Where there is a will, there is a way.
Many thanks for a wonderful article and great video.
Peace and much love
Lara Jane
Founder of the Ultimate Lifestyle Project
http://ultimatelifestyleproject.com/spiritual-quotient
As part of the flight/fight/freeze survival response, your Psoas can trigger chemical and neurological responses associated with weight gain or loss.
Keeping your Psoas supple, responsive and juicy is key (it is the filet mignon!)
Constructive rest is simple just roll on your back, with knees up and feet on the floor, the width apart of your hip sockets in the front of the pelvis - leave your arms to the side or resting on your belly.
Whereas a stressed Psoas can interrupt and signal hoarding and associated with weight gain, releasing Psoas tension allows for a resilient spine and equally important a more coherent sympathetic/parasympathetic neurological and chemical response. . .
Re the routine shown here.... in my view it's a good introduction to yoga. Whether you're in shape or not, if you're new to yoga, this is a good start.
That said, if your objective is to lose weight or get very fit, you'll need to do more than this routine. You'll need to increase the intensity of your exercise.
Drop into a gym today, and then again in 6 months, then in a year... odds are that few of the people observed there will have improved their fitness level. The main reason is that they don't increase the intensity of their exercise; rather, they maintain whatever they got comfortable with.
The studies on this topic consistently show that to improve fitness, you must consistently challenge your muscles, aerobic capacity and flexibility (the three pillars of fitness) by changing your routine and incrementally increasing its intensity.
So, thanks Tara for this beginners routine. For those of you who start here, don't stop here... keep on challenging yourself.
Yep
jgarma
www.GarmaOnHealth.com
In yoga we are always working toward the "edge" that place where you're in slight discomfort (really feeling the pose) but not in pain, and NEVER losing the breath.
When I was regularly practicing, I was in the best shape of my life, but I was always pushing myself. I'm an ashtanga practitioner, so I was trying to work my way through Primary Series. Almost got there before my first son was born.
Just a testimony to the fact that yoga can be all you need if you're always reaching for the "edge."
I've found Callenetics to be another essential part for me. It seems as I've gotten older, it become MORE essential. I also find hiking to be another part that is essential. When I manage to get all three done on a fairly regular basis, I feel and look FABULOUS! I'm 63, 5'4", 118 lbs. size 6.
Yoga as a means of weight loss is. . .ludicrous.
On the contrary, I'm in the worst shape I've ever been in, in 50 years of yo-yo dieting and weight loss/gain. I would have welcomed a little more substance in this article.
I felt a little insulted and spoken down to. As an avid Huff Post reader I guess I must be educated, thin, responsible, enlightened, wealthy enough to buy a pair of Tom's shoes, and [insert anything else here].
Turns out I'm not fit and would welcome some very beginning information on yoga and a very beginning instructional video. After watching almost the entire video I realized that what might be one sized fits all yoga for most, does not fit me. Much like my clothing.
Intermediate and advanced yoga practitioners don't need this information or this video, so who, exactly is it for?
You should select different music for your videos - grinding guitars and pounding drums somehow just doesn't go well with a flowing yoga practice
Many Huff Post readers fit that bill, but I'd be willing to bet that many more do not. Please do not make assumptions that most Huff Post readers are all of the above.
Just provide good information about how to get or stay fit.
I love Bikram. I tried other yogas and found them to be very frustrating because I'm not particularly flexible, but with Bikram, I saw progress early on, and therefore stuck with it. It's great for sculpting your core and it's a much better antidepressant than Wellbutrin or Lexapro. The sweating is great for my skin, too.
By the way, be sure to try coconut water to stay hydrated. I swear by it as to many of my fellow Bikram practitioners.