Helping you achieve better health, strength, balance, and flexibility through yoga

Can you lose weight doing yoga?

Learn whether and how yoga can help you lose weight.

Yoga is a form of exercise, so it can be used to lose weight. However, losing weight – or more precisely body fat – is all about expending more calories than you consume.

So while you can use yoga to lose weight, you should combine it with a good diet and nutrition to be able to get the full benefit of reducing your body fat, since yoga is not the best exercise to lose weight.

Running can be considered one of the best exercises to lose weight and burns many more calories than yoga. For example, a person who weighs 71 kg (157 lbs) would expend approximately 132 calories doing 30 minutes of yoga, while that same individual would expend 288 calories by running for half an hour.

Having said this, running typically targets the lower body and the muscles of your core, while yoga generally targets the entire body. In addition, you can build strength and flexibility doing yoga, while you would have to add stretching and weight training to your running schedule to build the same.

So while yoga is perfect for building strength, flexibility, and balance using nothing else but your own body weight and a yoga mat, do not expect miracles from it where losing weight is concerned. If you want to lose weight, you need to combine yoga with a balanced diet that is not high in calories.

Many yoga practitioners tend to be thin, but often times this thinness is not the result of the yoga itself, but from the things they eat and/or their metabolism. You do not have to be thin to do yoga; however, thinness does help you do yoga postures that require you to make your body very compact.

In addition, because several yoga poses require you to lift your own body weight, the heavier you are, the more difficult it will be for you to do these exercises. The other side of the coin is that you will have to build a tremendous amount of strength to be able to lift your own body weight, and as you get lighter, so will the exercises.

In summary: Combine your daily yoga practice with a good diet, and you should be able to lose weight. Not at the pace as you would if you went out for a run 3-4 times a week, but you will eventually get there and the result will be a leaner, stronger, and more toned body than you would have otherwise achieved by only running.