How harnessing your chi can decrease those scale numbers

September 9, 2016 Ashley 0 Comments

You’ve probably heard about how yoga can help you lose weight.

So, recently, when a qigong studio emailed me about an upcoming class, I wondered:

Can harnessing my chi (or qi – whatever you like) make me lose weight – like yoga does?

(“Time to burn that fat, lit’rally – with this solar orb I’ve plucked from the sky.”)

The reasons for why yoga works are pretty obvious. It’s calming. You’re moving around a lot. Plus, deep breathing is meant to be happening for the entirety of it. So, sure, that can’t help but have a positive effect on circulation and digestion. Indeed, both of those things are crucial to weight loss. Better digestion equals excellent elimination (that’s just a fancy word for crapping), while improved blood flow means matchless fat burning capacity. And, indeed, both of those things are common denominators between both yoga and qigong.

And while both are also meant to be infused with the meditative aspect, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes go an entire half hour of my Vinyasa flow focused on everything from office gossip to mentally inept ex boyfriends. It’s easy for me to get distracted, forget that it’s not just about being a literal poser, and even break the first rule of yoga club: breathe peacefully, dipshiz.

With qigong, on the contrary, the moves themselves are so subtle, yet deliberate, that you don’t have a choice. You have to focus not only on what you’re doing, but on slowing everything down. Because you’re moving (but slowly so) the whole time, you’re forced to meditate on maintaining momentum – but keeping the pace of it tranquil – all the while. There’s no pose holding. There’s no rapid transitions. And, in that way, it can carry over to real life – where you remain calm while wandering through it.

Which this sloth paced ballerina samurai demonstrates beautifully:

This may seem unrelated to weight loss, but it’s actually linked on an extremely physical level.

How? Because all those meditative aspects of qigong that gift you with a sense of serenity are the result of your hypothalamus getting affected in a massive way. However, although the hypothalamus handles your “feels”, that’s not all it does. It also’s responsible in part for (…wait for it…) managing your hunger levels. In other words, by flipping on your own sentimental center’s switch, you can also flip off the one responsible for morphing you into pre-hibernation mode munch monster.

(Disclaimer for femme folk: may work less well circa the time of your monthly rouge deluge)

And… for the final reason:

Because this practice catapults you to in-the-moment-ness, Qigong teaches you patience. And what the Om has patience got to do with weight loss? Everything. One of the most formidable foes to fat eradication is our desire for instant gratification. The false entitlement based hope that just because we hate something enough, it merits immediate results.

Especially when we’re deviating from what we want to be doing in order to lose weight.

(“Do I look like Taylor Swift yet?”)

That’s the thing that makes us give up before we’re even a quarter of the way to awesomery.

By cultivating equanimity, that stubborn little shiz that lives inside our brains and demands immediate supermodel bod status, slowly dissipates. And we begin to love the road trip to Schmexy-ville (instead of indulging the whole “watched potbelly pig never gets slender” syndrome we tend to have). The bonus? It still happens. But we don’t spend the stretch between now ‘n then resenting ourselves and everyone around us for being a bit more buxom than we’d like to be.

Interested?

Try a local studio to see if qigong can ring the gong on your bad habits and make you a slimmer winner.