The truth is that yoga won't target your saggy or fat belly for weight loss. Nothing will. The idea that you can get your body to burn fat from one particular area is called spot reduction. It's a debunked fitness myth. However, the poses in yoga can help you lose weight from your entire body -- which includes the fat on your saggy stomach.
How Fat Loss Works
You lose fat by creating a negative calorie balance. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores the extra as fat. When you burn more than you eat, your body perceives that as a famine and breaks into emergency fat stores. As it burns that fat for energy, you lose weight and the fat goes away. What part of your body it burns the fat from happens at random. There is no correlation between what body part you work out and the location of the fat cells you burn.
How Yoga Works
Yoga is a traditional form of exercise and meditation originally from India. In a typical session, participants in a yoga class move through a series of postures that use body weight to develop balance, flexibility, strength and endurance. Although it's not a cardio-heavy exercise option, like jogging or cardio kickboxing, you can burn between 300 and 350 calories in a one-hour session, according to HealthStatus.
Resistance Training
Yoga is a core-intensive workout, meaning that a majority of yoga poses will tone, strengthen and firm the muscles in your abdomen, obliques and lower back. This will not accelerate the fat loss on your belly. However, it will tighten up the muscular frame that fat hangs on. This can give the illusion of fat loss -- and a very real reduction in your waist measurement -- during the time you're waiting for the calorie burn to strip away actual belly fat.
Loose Belly Skin
If you lose weight from your belly, you are sometimes left with saggy skin that lost its elasticity when you were overweight. According to IFitandHealthy, you can restore some elasticity with exercises that gently stretch the skin. Many yoga postures do exactly that, including bow pose, bridge pose, cow pose, fish pose and locust pose. These exercises alone may not eliminate all of your loose skin, but it's a place to start that doesn't involve expensive creams or invasive surgery.
Support Activities
If you burn 350 calories in yoga, then eat a 400-calorie snack, you won't lose your belly fat. As with most exercise programs, yoga works best for weight loss if you combine it with a sensible calorie-restricted diet.
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