What Yoga Will Do For You (If Overweight)

First, let’s quickly address the word “overweight”. Over what weight, exactly?

And the answer is: over the weight that, when measured in kilograms and divided by your height in square meters*, is sufficient to put your body-mass index (BMI) into the “overweight” category of 25+.

^{*No, your height doesn’t come in square meters, because it’s a height not an area, but that’s the formula anyway.}

BMI is not very useful (see When BMI Doesn’t Measure Up if you’re unfamiliar) but unfortunately, it’s been used for a sufficiently large amount of research that new research becomes difficult without referencing the old research that depended on BMI, so we’re stuck with it for a while yet.

Fun two-part fact about BMI before we move on:

• If, by some accident or incident, you unfortunately lose a leg, your BMI will go down considerably (because your mass will be quite a bit lower)
• If, by some accident or incident, you unfortunately lose both legs, your BMI will go up considerably (because your height will be quite a bit lower)

BMI is a fabulous, highly functional system.

Enough about BMI. What about yoga?

Two things generally held to be true:

1. Body fat above a certain level is not good for your health
2. Yoga is good for your health

So, how well do these things go together?

Let’s start with the obvious question: is yoga good for weight loss?

And the answer is: no, not really

Or, at least, we were not able to find any particularly strong evidence to support it. While there were countless tiny studies with shoddy methodologies published in fringe publications making claims such as “self-reported weight loss after a year met the threshold for significance”, when we narrowed our search to only systematic reviews, suddenly there were only a few pages of results, and most of them weren’t actually relevant (i.e. they merely contained the keywords but in other contexts).

Two were relevant, of which, one didn’t have the full text available (only an abstract that was lacking certain little details such as… the results), and the other one, well…

❝Out of 445 records identified during literature search, 30 trials with a total of 2173 participants were included. No effects on weight, body mass index, body fat percentage or waist circumference were found❞

In other words, they also got the countless tiny studies that we found, carefully went through them to remove the worthless ones, and found 30 out of 445 that met appropriate standards, and those 30 studies that were robustly-conducted found no clear benefits, and the strongest positive conclusion they could draw was the benefits couldn’t be ruled out preliminarily, and that it was safe.

Read in full: A systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of yoga on weight-related outcomes

So, what can it do?

Researchers (Dr. Widya Wasityastuti et al.) did a meta-analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials (2,689 participants) examined yoga’s effects on cardiometabolic health in adults in the overweight or obese categories of BMI, using outcomes like blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, inflammation, and antioxidant markers.

The results, in few words:

• Blood pressure effects: yoga was associated with a reduction in systolic blood pressure of 4.35 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure of 2.06 mmHg
• Cholesterol effects: yoga produced modest improvements in lipid profiles, lowering LDL cholesterol by 0.08 mmol/L and increasing HDL cholesterol by 0.06 mmol/L
• Other metabolic markers: yoga “may” improve glucose regulation, oxidative stress (redox balance), and inflammation, but the evidence for these outcomes remains uncertain

Note that “may” is scientist-speak for “we haven’t proven it doesn’t”

This means, of course, that the biggest deal here is the blood pressure reductions.

This is quite in line with what we wrote about here: What Most People Don’t Know About Blood Pressure

As for Dr. Wasityastuti’s paper, you can read it in full here: Impact of yoga on cardiometabolic health in adults with overweight or obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Want to learn more?

You might want to swing by:

Which Style Of Yoga Is Best For You?

Enjoy!