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

broken-out skin.
    Even though she knew exercise could help her deal with stress, Verena always hated working out. “I tried the gym, even a personal trainer, and couldn’t stick with it,” she says. But after she started at Strala in August of 2008, her attitude changed. “The classes are challenging, but they’re easier to stick with because we have fun,” she says.
    After a month or two of coming to class regularly, Verena noticed a visible change in the quality and tone of her skin. Her minor skin irritations and breakouts vanished, and her energy levels started to skyrocket. “Yoga makes me sleep like a baby,” she says. “So the bags under my eyes need less and less concealer.”
    Verena also credits her newfound devotion to the yoga lifestyle with helping her eat more healthily and make all-around better decisions that affect her health—and, by association, how she looks. “I like going to class so much, I started scheduling my social life around it,” she says. She goes to four or five classes a week, which leaves only one or two nights for social plans—which is a good thing: “I drink less, sleep more, and have a whole lot more time to myself.”
    IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY
    Verena is a great example of someone really understanding and achieving the benefits of yoga at a young age and making healthy lifestyle adjustments as a result. Why wait for your body to break down before you start to take care of it? Yoga can keep you looking good and feeling great your whole life, so it’s best to start as early as you can.

CHAPTER 09
healthy
yoga
Save your sick days with health-focused routines

    I want you to pause for a moment and think about what it means to be healthy. Being healthy is about more than washing your hands after touching a doorknob or making sure you get a fluu shot. It’s bigger than taking a multivitamin, slathering on sunscreen, or visiting your gyno once a year.
    Of course those things are absolutely important. But being healthy is also about simply feeling good on the inside. And feeling good on the inside leads to enjoying your life, achieving your goals, and looking good on the outside. Although good health is not glamorous in the same way as a slim body, a sexy attitude, or gorgeous skin is, without it, your chances of attaining any of those ideals plummet.
    Thousands of years ago, yoga was developed as a system to improve and maintain health from the inside out. The ancient yogis in India fine-tuned it through years of trial and error using their intuition, powers of observation, and senses. Unlike in conventional Western medicine, the ancient yogis didn’t believe a person was necessarily “healthy” if nothing appeared “wrong.” Instead, you were truly healthy if every system in your body—from digestion to immunity to circulation—was functioning at its best. And that’s precisely what they developed yoga to do: to optimize the body’s everyday operations so that they’re balanced and aligned—and can work the way they’re intended to. The end result is a therapeutic practice that supports health and well-being by steadying and quieting the mind with meditation and breathing, combined with physical movements and poses.
    Today, science is using its own language and methodology to explain the same benefits that ancient yogis observed. A recent search on the US National Library of Medicine databases yielded more than 1,300 scholarly articles on the subject of yoga. And the findings are worth every ounce of your attention.
    There is real evidence that yoga boosts immunity, improves mood, corrects imbalances that cause pain, and lowers blood sugar and blood pressure. There is compelling proof that it regulates hormones (including cortisol, the culprit in so many health issues from anxiety to weight gain), reduces disease-causing inflammation, even balances your circadian rhythms so you can get the rest you need to keep your body in top shape. These discoveries are exciting and offer solid hope for anyone who wants to lead a healthy lifestyle and sidestep serious illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and depression; for anyone who deals with pain on a regular basis; or for anyone who simply has an occasional run-in with a seasonal allergy or a hangover headache.
    Great advances have come from scientific study, but it’s not the only tool at your disposal. In fact, as the yogis discovered through thousands of years of experimentation, we have a full set of our own