The Yoga rules

By Michelle Spencer

Yoga Exercises for Ideal Weight and Ideal Shape

What is ideal weight? How can you tell whether or not you are at your Ideal weight? And is your ideal weight realistic for your body type or based on some unattainable ideal flaunted in fashion magazines? Is your image of ideal weight more about an ideal shape - one which may not have any bearing to the actual shape of the body you were born into?

Is ideal weight or shape a personal, inner-referenced experience, or something determined from outside yourself? Is it something you can feel or is it based on the opinion of others, or cultural, societal ideals, or tables that tell you what your ideal weight should be in relation to your height, weight or fat percentage?

Yoga is a training ground for inner-referenced awareness, starting in Hatha Yoga, with attention to the body in various Yoga postures, and moving beyond this to naturally meeting your attitudes toward yourself and your life. For this reason, from a Yogic perspective, ideal weight is not seen as a specific, measurable number or amount relative to height, age or fat percentage, or any other means of determining your weight from a source outside yourself.

This would mean deeming outside sources as experts over and above yourself, with these outer sources determining what is acceptable for you and your body. This is disempowering because it robs you of the opportunity to exercise your inner knowledge; your inner wisdom.

Yoga is all about cultivating your internal evaluation and motivation system, based on how you feel and what you deem appropriate and desirable. Added to this is an inner strength and willpower generated through Yoga practice.

In Yoga, ideal body weight and shape are considered natural byproducts of health. For this reason, the question of what is ideal body weight naturally leads to a broader question of what is health and how to cultivate it. The order of importance in the process of moving toward ideal weight is health first, which determines how you feel and extends to how you look. This offers a sustainable solution: the stronger your feeling of health and wellbeing, the stronger your self esteem.

This, in turn, makes you less likely to allow criticism (your own, or other people's) of your body, based on unrealistic ideals, to undermine your ability to focus on attaining good health. In good health, your attractiveness and beauty shine through. And once you have achieved good health, you may discover that you are within a healthy weight range.

Michelle is a leading health and yoga practitioner who helps people experience the benefits of yoga in their everyday life, health and well being. Through practicing yoga poses and exercises on a regular basis you can achieve your ideal weight and shape more easily than through dieting alone.