Yoga Treats Eating Disorders

From Time Magazine’s article The Year In Health,

A session of yoga for teens with anorexia, bulimia or other eating disorders may provide more than spiritual and physical boost; it could also help them get over their illness, according to a new study of 50 adolescents, mostly girls. The girls were seriously ill – nearly half had been hospitalized because of their eating disorder – and were being treated at an outpatient clinic at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital. While the non-yoga control group showed improvement, they relapsed a month afterward. In the yoga group, improvement started slowely, but a month later, the teens were showing steady gains. The researchers suspect that yoga may help by reducing obsessive concern about weight associated with eating disorders. One participant said, “This is the only hour in my week when I don’t think about my weight.” A larger study is planned to confirm the findings.

In my experience, what Yoga did for these young women, what it did for me, and what it can do for anyone with any type of disordered eating or any other addiction or habit is stop the cyclic negative thinking that imprisons the person in their addiction. It creates a new pathway in the brain, where the previous pathway kept using an addictive substance or behavior to resolve the same issue or cyclic negative thought. Yoga, in my experience, is brain training and produces a more disciplined mind, primarily by teaching it how to be still.

Just watch, yoga will be scientifically proven to prevent and cure a whole host of physical ills, addictions, psychological diagnosis and conditions.

Two great resource for yoga (including free world-class yoga practices) include Hillary’s Yoga Practice and Elsie Escobar’s Yoga Kula.

For more information about how the brain creates pathways and the phenomenon of addiction watch What The Bleep Do We Know.