For yoga and weight loss, what are the best simple poses( asanas) and exercises to do?

Are you sick of seeing that muffin top peering out of your tank top? Do you feel powerless to change your eating habits? I had never seen a yoga system specifically targeted towards weight loss so I was curious to see how Charry Morris’ Yoga Weight Loss System would work. The e-book is 58 pages long and peppered with pics and illustrations showing you how to do the yoga poses for weight loss and even an illustrated sequence guide is in the back.

One of my favorite things about this guide is the omission of sanskrit terms. I always thought it was intimidating to use the Sanskrit and not the English terms to describe poses. I have gone to more yoga classes than Lindsay Lohan has gone to rehab and I probably can only understand about 10 sanskrit terms, besides having heard them hundreds (some maybe thousands) of times.

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I think the free report that Charry offers is incredibly pointed. Her suggestions are in simple but powerful language aided with illustrations and photos to help you understand yoga poses and how yoga works on different systems of the body to help you with weight loss (such as the musko-skeletal, endocrine, digestive, nervous etc). Even if you don’t buy her training manual, if you are committed to changing your health and body and want to learn more about how to take control over your level of vitality and wellness, then get the free manual. Have a buddy to practice with and check in on your new habits and practice to help make you more likely to stick to it. Give yourself a reward for every goal you get to (make the reward a facial and not fried chicken).

Yoga poses for weight loss

I think the questions at the end of each module are great for dealing with people’s emotional attachment to food. I think these questions would be even more powerful if you had a group or buddy who you could check in with and be accountable to.

One of Charry’s movement sequences

I like the simple diet modification suggestions. Her style of eating is very much in line with my philosophy. Eat foods in their natural state. Substitute water for soda and juice (which will end up saving you a lot of money as well) If you read the ingredients and don’t understand what Sodium Diloryll Dichromate is then it probably is a fancy word for pure toxic crap – so avoid ingredients that sound like your 9th grade lab project.

Yoga is ultimately a state of attuned inner awareness. By heightening our awareness of how we feel when we eat or avoid certain foods, we have more mastery over our diet. You can’t control what you have no awareness over. She doesn’t try to make you eat a raw, vegan or vegetarian diet, she just emphasizes cleaner ways of eating our meat, dairy and eggs.

She give suggestions for lots of viable substitutes for dairy. One thing that I wish was stressed more here was to avoid more refined

sugar, although she does mention the evil HFCS (High fructose corn syrup). If you are going to eat soy milk and yogurt if it is loaded with sugar then you aren’t doing your body many favors. Eating something with Stevia or some other kind of natural sweetener (evaporated cane juice and corn sugar are just marketing terms for highly processed toxic white sugar or HFCS) so stay away from them. Also equally toxic are thing like Equal and NutraSweet…these things have been proven to cause cancer in mice. You’re not doing your bod any favors with these either.

If you are confused about all this you might want to read the book “Sugar Blues”. If you don’t think that refined sugar has any strong negative effects on you then go three days without any refined sugar. You’ll have to read ALOT of labels at the grocery store…sugar likes to make it’s way into all kind of non-dessert food like ketchup and potato chips . You’ll probably feel a huge shift in your level of calm and awareness. Or you can do the opposite if you are not good at impulse control. For two days, eat nothing but Fruit Loops, Dunkin Doughnuts, Ben N Jerry’s Wavy Gravy, Starbucks Double Frappacinos with extra whipped cream, Diet Coke for every meal and snack and notice how crappy you feel (and probably look).

I think the exercise about examining your food habits is quite illuminating. Every day around 3 pm I have to have something sweet….these days I usually just microwave a small bowl of dark chocolate chips. It’s not a health tonic though.

The simple step by step instructions with pictures are so helpful. I like how she shows what your hands and feet should look like in certain poses…makes a huge difference in how the pose feels and the benefits you get from it.

What I really appreciate about this yoga training manual that is not often found in others is the modifications and suggestions for people that have certain injuries. When you are in table pose you should not hinge your neck back if you have neck issues.

Charry doesn’t assume everyone can physically do all the postures so the variations are very welcoming for beginners or for the stiff and inflexible. For the balancing poses, I think it is very helpful to have the close up of the feet and toes. It’s great to see a more challenging balancing pose and also an easier modification. You’re not auditioning for Cirque Du Soleil, you just want to get in balance health-wise.

If you do buy this manual, I would recommend going to a few traditional hatha yoga or vinyasa class so you can really learn the poses with expert supervision and the teacher can help you get into proper alignment so you get the maximum benefits from the pose.

After you feel comfortable with the basic poses, then you can use this guide to help you develop and refine your own personal practice. I was too poor to pay for classes a few years back (and the time it takes to get to classes was a drag) so for many years I just did my own practice at home, sometimes with a tape or a book or sometimes with no written or visual aids.

Before you start saying you don’t have time, money, space or privacy to practice just reflect on your excuses. Are you committed to your excuses or are you committed to changing your life? What will your life, body and health be like if you continue on the health path you are now on? Take on this program for one week and see what a difference you feel. If you regularly practice yoga already, what changes in your life did you notice when you started to make this a part of your life?