If you want to understand how yoga can help your damaged metabolism, you’ll have to remember one sentence:
It’s all about your hormones, baby.
When you are stressed, your body secretes a hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol is the most damaging hormone in the body.
It breaks down your muscle tissue, hair and bones.
It kills brain cells.
It causes you to gain weight around your midsection.
It makes you insulin resistant, hungry, tired and depressed.
Got it?
During conventional exercise such as running, spinning classes, high intensity training and the like where your heart rate continuously exceeds 100 beat per minute, your body secretes lots of cortisol.
Is it fun?
Yes or maybe.
Is it good for your metabolism? Not if you are one of the 20 to 30 percent of people under the age of 35 or 70 percent of people over 35 who have a damaged metabolism.
Many people look at exercise as a matter of calories in, calories out.
Burning calories certainly does have an important role to play in weight loss, but long term, if you focus on including exercise in your weekly routine that heals your metabolism you will not have to struggle with your weight.
I’m 56 years old and I happen to have a skin-tight purple suede leather dress in my closet that I bought when I was 30 (that’s 26 years ago) and it fits just fine. My secret? I have taught yoga for the past 20 years and I have learned how to maintain a healthy metabolism.
How do you know if you have a damaged metabolism?
- You have trouble losing weight
- You have difficulty maintaining a healthy weight
- You are insulin resistant
- You feel fatigued all the time or have been diagnosed with adrenal burnout
- You have degenerative diseases of aging such as heart disease, diabetes or arthritis
- You have a history of dieting, over exercising, eating disorders or fasting
- You have been living on junk food, not exercising and thought the aging process would not catch up with you
- You eat very little exercise daily and your scale won’t budge
Here six yoga tips I recommend to heal your metabolism:
- Practice shoulder stand. Watch the FREE video here. I have written numerous newsletters on shoulder stand variations and how to heal your thyroid with shoulder stand, including a restorative variation everyone can do lying over two yoga bolsters. I can also teach you the fine points of how to do this safely and effectively in a private appointment.
- Enjoy Fish pose.
- Include sun salutes because they not only burn calories, they balance your nervous system. When you get stuck in stress, you get stuck in the sympathetic side of your nervous system. Watch A Series at this link. Follow B Series at this link. Learn C Series at this link. Play with a C Series variation at this link or try this other variation. Finally, you can do D Series sun salutes.
- Relax with legs against the wall pose because if you practice 7 to 10 minutes it can clear your stress hormones for the entire day. Look at a picture and read an article about how to do this at this link.
- Follow my routine for restorative yoga at this link. Does restorative yoga burn lots of calories? No! But now you know it’s all about your hormones, right? What restorative yoga does from a metabolic point of view is restore balance to your nervous system so that your body can heal itself. You don’t rebuild when you are stressed, period. If you are a highly stressed individual, and who doesn’t have stress these days, then including a restorative yoga routine at least once a week can do wonders for your mood, energy and hormonal balance.
- Finally, you can practice my Eight Minutes to Inner Peace Breathing Exercises twice a day to release the stuck energy that keeps you wound up and stressed. Take eight minutes in the morning when you first get out of bed and practice again before sleep.
Although all yoga is good, certain forms of yoga are better for healing your metabolism than others.
If you are practicing hot yoga or vinyasa flow, you may not be getting the metabolic benefits that you could from a practice where your heart rate remains below 100 beats per minute and you learn how to move, breathe and be connected to your body in a calm, relaxed manner.
The bottom line is that you feel breathless while practicing yoga, you may be burning calories but you aren’t healing your metabolism. You should be able to breathe through your nose with your mouth closed.
I’ve often noticed that women who practice yoga age especially well. At yoga conferences I have noticed that long-term practitioners in their 70s often have bodies any 30-year-old would envy.
In addition to teaching yoga for the past 20 years, I am also a certified Schwarzbein practitioner, which means I have studied with Dr. Diane Schwarzbein, M.D., a hormone expert, to teach you how to heal your metabolism naturally.
If you want more information about how to heal your metabolism, overcome insulin resistance and adrenal burnout, read my recent Amazon No. 1 best seller, Unlimited Energy Now, or set up an appointment to find out the most efficient steps you can take to improve your body.
Want to find out more about how your metabolism is working or could work a little better? Call me today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@unlimitedenergynow.com. I can give you an assessment so you will understand in great detail what’s going on in your body. Then we can discuss the positive steps you can take to heal your metabolism naturally.