Issue: March/April 1997
Author: Gretchen Rose Newmark
LOW-FAT YOGA
Despite years of dieting and aerobic excercise, millions of Americans still struggle with their weight. Yoga can help.
My professional dream was coming true in l977. Fresh out of a prestigious clinical fellowship, I had finished nutrition graduate school with a 4.0 grade point average and found work at the medical school at the University of Southern California. Wearing a white lab coat with a badge identifying me as "Gretchen Newmark, M.A., R.D., Nutritionist," I counseled volunteers in a major heart attack prevention research program. The volunteers, all at high risk of heart attack, needed my help to learn how to exercise more, stop smoking, drink less alcohol, cut down on fats and salt, lower their cholesterol levels and blood pressure, and manage stress more effectively. In my personal life, I was running three to five miles a day and eating a low-fat, vegetarian diet. Except at night. At night I was coming home and bingeing on the foods I had denied myself during the day, driven, as many people are, by my emotions and by the struggle I created trying to abstain from foods I loved. Like most normal and overweight people, I often used food to mask my feelings of disappointment, boredom, anger, sadness, fear, or anxiety. I also used food for consolation, fulfillment, or reward. Genetically thin people could get away with it; I could not. But I had few other ways to cope with my feelings.
Despite all the miles I logged in my aerobics training and a 15-year history of dieting, my weight climbed higher than it had ever been. Since high school I had been on fad diets like the grapefruit diet and high- protein regimens. Later I tried alternative plans, like the raw foods diet and the macrobiotic diet. Now I was taking a "sound approach"-exercise and a low-fat diet-to control my weight. At USC I worked with three psychologists, experts in helping people change "health-related behaviors." I would try their techniques, such as behavior modification, on myself. To no avail. I couldn't control my eating, and I was gaining weight noticeably under my lab coat.
Only now, after years of listening to clients, interviewing people who have lost weight successfully, and reading an endless stream of scientific literature, popular books, and articles on weight loss, do I realize that all my attempts to lose weight, from the most sound to the most faddish, had one single, fatal flaw in common: Each involved attempts to force my being-body, mind, and psyche-to obey my will. I was ignoring my own needs for emotional release, good tastes, and physical pleasure. I was not asking myself why I needed to overeat or whether I enjoyed jogging. Without examining my unfulfilled life, I was attempting to force my ideas of what I "shouldn't do" onto it.
My arrogance back then was not unlike the kind of "man over nature" attitude we assume when we dam and reroute rivers, dump millions of chemicals into our food, land, and water, and deforest by clear-cutting- and then deny the connection when we suffer floods, fires, increased disease, and the extinction of many species. I believe that as Earth and its creatures have suffered from our attempts to subdue it to our will, so do we suffer when we attempt to force yet another diet or exercise plan down our throats, so to speak. But because overweight people are so disdained, even despised, in our culture, we have been willing to do anything to lose weight.
I jogged-every day for years-and I hated every minute of it. For years I would get a stitch in my side every time I ran, even though the running books promised it would go away in a matter of a few weeks. My knees hurt and eventually were permanently injured because I didn't listen to their cries. I had to ignore my body's signals to be able to run every day. And I had to run every day, I thought, in order to lose weight-and keep it off.
Now that I have successfully maintained my own lighter weight for several years, I see how our culture, the medical establishment, and the diet industry trivialize the problem of weight loss with simplistic approaches that are doomed to failure for most people. Our presumptuous insistence that it is simply a matter of convincing a person to burn more calories than she or he takes in, or to simply avoid certain foods, is, at its core, abusive.
Like many people who have "weight cycled" (lost and regained weight repeatedly), I binged on foods in part because I continually deprived myself of them. I would spend hours trying not to eat a food, finally succumb, then feel so guilty and bad that I would binge. As it often does, for me this behavior became cyclical. Gradually I came to feel such failure and self-hatred that I overate for consolation. Any weight loss program, even the most carefully designed, failed to take into account the reasons I was overeating, and was therefore doomed. But like most weight cyclers, I blamed myself and not the program.
Fortunately, exercise specialists are changing their tune. No longer do they insist upon a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least three or four times a week. Faced with the grim statistics showing that few Americans actually sustain a regular exercise program, these specialists began to reconsider what constitutes a healthful activity. Now they emphasize physical activities their clients enjoy-like gardening, yoga, golf, dancing-and encourage them to participate as fully as they wish. After all, any physical activity of any intensity, frequency, or duration, is better for overall health than avoiding exercise entirely. Although I grew up believing that jogging and aerobic exercise were what I needed for weight management, yoga was the therapy that ended up working the best for me.
Yoga Helped Me
The revelation began in my first hatha yoga classes. During my clinical fellowship, a pediatrician and a clinical social worker, both of whom I admired, told me that I should try hatha yoga. I saw photographs of yoga asanas in a paperback book and couldn't understand why anyone would practice it-it wasn't aerobic! But I signed up for a class offered through the Redondo Beach Parks Department.
I found myself among 40 students on a cement floor with a teacher demonstrating postures while holding a hand mike, hardly an ideal start. At the end of my second or third hatha class, during Savasana, I had the first experience I can remember of just feeling OK. That subtle feeling of well-being was what hooked me. I didn't know it then, but it was my pursuit of that state of well-being that would help me gradually achieve my permanent weight loss.
It was later, in another yoga center, that I first consciously noticed my body's sensations. My yoga teacher, Raghavan, who had a wonderful, hypnotic voice, whispered, "Just feel the air going in and out of your nostrils." It didn't seem like much at the time, but I recall the experience vividly, because it planted seeds that helped me make peace with my body and food. It was the small beginning of a much-needed partnership of my mind and body. Soon I was taking yoga class three times a week. Yoga helped me learn to recognize the physical effects of stress and anxiety and move them out of my body with my exhaled breath. Like many beginners, I tended to hold my breath in an asana, especially in standing poses and inversions. It took about a year before I began to sense, especially in poses that required strength, how diaphragmatic breathing both gave me strength and released tension from my body. By noticing how my body felt in asana practice, I began to notice throughout the day if I was holding tension in my shoulders, jaw, hands, or any part of my body. Asana practice taught me to notice how I held my body and breath, as an indication of my emotional state, and it gave me practice in letting go.
Yoga also taught me "impulse control," the ability to feel an urge and delay acting on it, especially when I found myself in asanas that were difficult or awkward. Years of running had tightened my hamstrings, so forward bending poses like Pachimottanasana or Uttanasana were painful. Yet despite my desire to escape, I stayed still in the asana, breathing and noticing the reactions of my body and mind. I learned slowly over time to be with discomfort, "breathing" through it. And very gradually, almost imperceptibly, I also learned to tolerate uncomfortable emotional states without running toward the refrigerator to grab food I wasn't hungry for. I began to enjoy my body for the first time. The challenge of developing balance, flexibility, softness, and strength gave me a way of relating to it I had never known. I started to appreciate it for its health and ability. Learning challenging poses like Headstand and Handstand gave me my first opportunity to master something physical, and my self-esteem increased as I became adept at something I enjoyed. The upper body strength I developed made me feel more powerful in the world. I slowly began to accept that, for my height, 115 pounds was a healthier weight than my previous goal of 105. By accepting my body's genetic "set point" weight, I eliminated the stimulus to starve and then overeat.
Yoga, Hunger, and Satiety
Yoga had more to teach me. I had learned in nutrition school to recommend food plans that restricted calories or fat, reflecting the "calories in vs. calories out" approach to weight loss. Restrictive diets do not reflect the way our bodies work or that our body weight is influenced strongly by genetics. Studies of adopted people show that they resemble their biological families, despite the influence of environment and role- modeling from their adopted families. We can affect our genetic set point by how we eat and exercise, but only somewhat. Most of us will never resemble the genetically rare, tall, very slender people idolized in film, television, and magazines.
Moreover, for many people, part of maintaining weight loss is learning to tune in to the body's subtle signals of hunger and satiety. For most overweight people, eating only when hungry and stopping when the body is satisfied will result in the body slowly returning to its natural set point weight. But most people who have attempted to control their weight through dieting are too terrified to allow their bodies to decide when and how much to eat. They literally don't trust their bodies.
I felt that way until I started yoga. When I began to trust my body's signals about how long to hold a pose, or how deeply to go into it, I began to realize that my body knows more about its true needs than my intellect does. Conventional weight loss plans share the disadvantage of trying to superimpose a structure or regimen on our lives rather than teaching us to make choices based on what will help us feel best.
I ate with no internal cues about when to eat or how much. I ate because it was noon, because I smelled delicious food, because I saw a food ad, because every one else was eating, or because I was trying so hard not to eat. Like many people who have weight cycled I had no idea when I was hungry or satisfied.
And I had to learn to trust that if I began to eat when I was hungry, I would stop when I felt satisfied, and that if I stopped eating when I was satisfied, I would allow myself to eat again when I felt hungry. I also had to admit that trying to eat a diet with 10 to 15 percent fat did not provide the satiety I needed from food. Eating 20 percent of my calories as fat worked better for my body, because I didn't feel so hungry. This learning process took time, and yoga, which taught me to heed my body's messages and trust them, helped profoundly. I also discovered that the physical discomfort of overeating became more obvious, because awareness makes all sensations more apparent. This made it easier for me to choose to stop eating before the point of physical discomfort.
Trust is also an important factor in learning to distinguish a true craving for a food from a whim. When you have a "whim," you think about eating something, but soon forget it. Because I had rigidly deprived myself of "goodies," I needed to learn when I was truly craving a food, and learn to trust myself to eat it. I found that if I craved a brownie and denied it, I might eat several bowls of brown rice, and other "good" foods, only to stuff myself with brownies later on.
Enjoying a brownie when I really crave it prevents my bingeing on them. To have a healthy weight, it makes sense to honor true cravings for foods, which occur infrequently, and ignore whims. In yoga practice, I first became aware of the parade of thoughts that flit through my head. I learned how ephemeral a desire can be, and how persistent a true craving is. Hatha yoga taught me mindfulness.
To truly enjoy a food, we must eat it mindfully, paying attention to its taste, texture, and other sensual qualities. Eating a small amount of food mindfully is much more satisfying than eating lots of food without paying attention. Often people eat so quickly that they never notice how a food tastes or how they feel while eating it. Yoga taught me the awareness I needed to make lasting changes in the way I eat.
Food is an immediate source of gratification and sensual pleasure, one I couldn't forcibly remove without finding a satisfactory replacement. My yoga practice, not an instant answer but one that required a great deal of effort, gives me genuine sensual pleasure that stays with me long after my session ends. Rather than the self-loathing that followed a binge, the gratification that I get from yoga comes from taking good care of myself.
The yoga practice of asking "How does this feel?" eventually helped me discover what I truly want and need in other areas of life. Occasionally what I need is food, but sometimes what I need is a nap, a walk, or to cry on a friend's shoulder. Without trying, my appetite for "junk foods" diminished as the mindfulness of yoga taught me to observe, with less judgment, how my body feels after eating it. Likewise, studies show that people who learn to maintain a healthy weight typically have a support system of people they can turn to for companionship, intimacy, and encouragement. Yoga classes gave me a community of health-conscious people who take good care of themselves. That also nurtures me. Looking back, I realize that learning to maintain a healthy body weight required me to grow emotionally, physically, intellectually, and with conscious awareness. It took time, more patience than I thought I had, and a great deal of trial and error to find what worked for me.
Had I looked to yoga as merely a treatment for my weight problem, I might have become discouraged and never realized the profound nature of the changes it helped me make. But because it reached me on so many levels, yoga helped me on my journey to a healthy relationship to my body and food as nothing else had.
In the end I had to be willing to listen to my own voice, and it was yoga that introduced me to that voice and taught me to trust it more and more. Yoga is, at its heart, a superb means of getting to know ourselves, from the breath to the mind to the bone.
Gretchen Rose Newmark is a yoga teacher and nutritionist specializing in weight management and eating disorders in Portland, Oregon.
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