Did you know that people’s desire to lose weight has resulted in creating one of the biggest industries, especially in the United States? Whether we want to lose 10 or 100 pounds, there are countless programs, books, pills, and internet advertisements that promise success. However, many of these promises do not live up to their claims. In the last decade, the Federal Trade Commission has brought eighty enforcement actions against multiple companies for making false or deceptive weight-loss claims.
For many people, it is not just about improving their health. Body image can be an obsession and is often promoted in the media, making many people feel that they need to be a certain weight in order to look good and be accepted by others. Reminders are everywhere, not just in advertisements. Walking into a food market, you will see on many of the aisles low-fat, light, lean, sugar-free, and low-carb food options. Many restaurants have also jumped on the weight-loss bandwagon by providing similar choices.
If you are like many people, you want to live a better life and believe that being a healthy weight is a significant step toward improvement. Sadhguru adds clarity to this topic. He talks about how yoga can not only help with excess weight loss, but how yoga also rejuvenates the system and naturally gears you in that direction.
Sadhguru: If you are doing yoga, excess weight will definitely go. For example, when they start kriya yoga, certain people begin to lose weight, certain people begin to gain weight. If your digestion was bad and your ability to convert the food into flesh was not good, when you start practicing kriyas, the digestive fires get activated and because of the improvement in digestion, the conversion of food to flesh will be more efficient and you start gaining weight.
If your digestive fires were already okay and you start doing kriyas, once again the conversion rate will improve. But instead of turning the food into flesh, it will turn food into a subtler dimension of energy. Now, however much you eat, you will find you are losing weight. If you are practicing the kriyas, you may even find that if you eat a larger quantum of food, you still do not put on weight, you even lose weight. Or, it may be the other way around: your food quantum comes down dramatically, but still you do not lose weight. This is simply because the conversion ratio is being altered.
Yoga rejuvenates the system and brings so much sense into you that you will not overeat. Once a certain level of awareness arises in your body, your body becomes such, it will just eat what is needed for it. It will not eat anything more. This is not because you are controlling or regulating your life in any way or because somebody is telling you to go on a diet. If you do some other exercises or dieting processes, you are always trying to control yourself. With yogic practices, you do not have to control yourself. You just do the practices. This takes care of the system in such a way that it will not allow you to eat more than needed. This is the big difference with yoga.
Yoga is not an exercise form. It has other dimensions to it. But there is something called Upa Yoga – that means sub-yoga, or useful processes of doing things, which has no spiritual dimension attached to it. If you do Upa Yoga or Angamardana systems of yoga, fitness is assured. Plus, you will not need any equipment. All you need is a six-by-six space on the floor. You will be super-fit and can build your muscle and everything. The only thing is you won’t become bunched-up with muscle. A whole lot of people have become like that. They think they are fit but I think they are in a straitjacket! It is not just strength or the bulge of your muscle, but the flexibility of your body that is as important for the proper functioning of the system.
In yoga, we do not just look at the muscular strength alone. Organ health is also very important. The yogic system is evolved. so that there is organ health. Even if you have a lot of muscle, if your liver is not working properly, what’s the use? It is very important that the body is flexible and usable.
We do not teach yoga for weight loss. It is not something that you do to slim down or for your backache or your headache. Yes, those things will anyway happen – becoming healthy, becoming peaceful, loving, gentle – but these are the side effects of yoga, not the focus of yoga. You don’t have to do yoga for weight loss. You just have to eat sensibly, play tennis, or take a swim. That will keep you healthy. You don’t have to do yoga. The focus of yoga is to set another dimension alive within you that is beyond the physical. Only when that is alive, slowly the existence opens up to you in a million different ways. Things that you never thought existed become a living reality for you, simply because a dimension beyond the physical has become alive.
Plus receive a free eBook by Sadhguru
