Slim Calm Sexy Yoga: 210 Proven Yoga Moves for Mind/Body Bliss

Association survey of more than 1,800 people, 43 percent of respondents admitted to overeating or to eating unhealthy foods in response to stress. And women were more likely to do it than men were.
    Take a minute to wrap your head around the concept of “your body on stress.” Stress is like your own personal bodyguard that launches into defense mode in the face of a threat. At the center of this effort are your adrenal glands, which protect you by unleashing the hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
    As the fight-or-flight hormone, adrenaline gives you an instant megashot of energy so you can face down a conflict or get away from it altogether. But cortisol is more like an overprotective mother whose sole mission is to feed and nurture you. And it’s the reason you want to stuff your face during a freak-out.
    Cortisol’s effects are hard to miss: It makes you want to eat everything in sight, and the easier to digest, the better. That’s because it requires foods high in fat and sugar, energy sources your body can access fast. Some scientists believe that cortisol also messes with the signals that control appetite and feelings of fullness, which is why being stressed out may make you crave dessert even after a big dinner. Storing up reserve energy (in the form of excess poundage) was supremely helpful back when stress was about life or death, and when we burned through thousands of calories collecting food, building fires, or fleeing scary beasts. Not so much anymore, now that stress is more about sitting at a computer plowing through a mammoth to-do list.
    To make matters worse, when stress causes your cortisol levels to stay chronically high, it can have long-term detrimental effects on your weight. That’s because the hormone encourages your body to store fat—in your belly especially—rather than burn it. It’s how nature makes sure you don’t starve when food is scarce and that you have backup energy stores for handling life-threatening situations.
    Problem is, abdominal fat has both a greater blood supply (an express lane for cortisol) and more receptors for the hormone. Corti-sol also reduces the production of testosterone, which is essential for muscle building. Chronically lowtestosterone can cause you to lose muscle mass, which ultimately slows your metabolism.
    Exercise, including yoga, is proven to reduce cortisol levels and weight. In 2005, researchers measured cortisol levels in female volunteers who then participated in 3 months of yoga classes. Afterward, the women had significantly lower cortisol levels compared with women who didn’t do yoga. And a study published in the journal
Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine
found that people who practiced yoga regularly for 4 years or more actually gained less weight over time than those who did no yoga. What’s more, the overweight subjects in the study managed to lose weight over a 10-year period.
    You’d be pretty well set in the slim department if yoga’s weight-loss influence stopped there. But the fat-fighting power of yoga goes even further. Perhaps the most lasting and far-reaching benefit of yoga is the awareness, or mindfulness, it teaches you. Once you make yoga a regular part of your life, you’ll notice a newfound awareness of your body and mind. And from that awareness blossoms an intuitive sense of your abilities and limits, along with what’s good for you and what’s not. For instance, you begin to know when to push harder in a pose and when to back off, as well as which foods to eat and which ones to avoid.
    In studies on what causes obesity, researchers have found that overweight people often are clueless about their eating and exercise habits; they tend to underestimate how much they eat while overestimating their activity. (Sometimes I think it’s just easier to blame something you can’t control than to recognize what you can and take action to address it. How many times have you heard a friend say, “I have a slow metabolism” or “I have fat genes”? Maybe you’ve even said it yourself.)
    The
New England Journal of Medicine
once published a fascinating study on this phenomenon. Researchers tracked the diet and exercise habits of people who claimed they couldn’t lose weight even though they cut calories. The upshot was that the volunteers had dramatically underreported their calories by 47 percent and overreported their activity by 51 percent. And when researchers compared their ability to burn calories