Weight loss, Yoga, Magic berries, and Illusions

One lady-friend of mine wanted to order some pills with berries (I will not put the names of the berries, links to companies selling pills, etc. – don’t want to advertise those guys). What are they promising? – Things along the lines of “do nothing, eat our pills and your body will lose weight, become healthy, clean, lean, etc.”

Because these are quite a wide-spread things nowadays (and sadly maybe more so among Yogic community) – I would like to share with you my personal opinion.

These kinds of advertisements look too good to be true. There is no magic, at least not in the weigh-loss area.
If you eat junk food and lots of it – you will become fat and unhealthy. – No matter what pills you swallow.
If you lead really unhealthy way of life and some pillows do help you – you either an exclusion out of rules (for example good genetics from your ancestors which you are destroying for your children), or you swallow really strong stuff and chances are you are killing your body even faster – even if it would help you for the moment to look less fat.
If you look closely – you will see that many of those “detox”/weight-lose programs – suggest better diet and active life (sport) in parallel with pills. Guess what does the job? – Then they select the best “examples of success” to feature in their advertisements – but those people look better because of all those other changes in their habits, not pills.
If you look even closer – you will see that most (all?) those “magic pills” were not supported or studied by any official medical organization, and no statements of the claimed improvements were verified. (read: claims are not true)
If you don’t rush to order “in the next 10 minutes” as they often encourage you – and read more on the subject in the Internet – you will discover a scary number of complains of the customer support, credit cards charges without proper way to cancel monthly supply subscription you didn’t know you are getting and all kinds of these things.

What Yoga teaches us? - To open our eyes, hearts and minds. With practice this develops beyond the time when we are on the mat and beyond of being aware of the breath. Mindfulness propagates to other areas of life and illusions disappear. Illusions like one could “fix” 20-40-??? pounds of excess fat by pills, that “doing nothing” in general could ever possibly bring us something. This is true for asanas and meditation, this is true for other areas of life.

Want to loose some weigh?

stop eating at night or shortly before the sleep
toss away junk food (today!) and never come back to it even if your friends do
eat more proteins and less carbs (far less carbs – especially if you are not actively performing athlete), eat vegetables (study your diet for 1-2 weeks – you will see what I mean)
sleep enough (both oversleeping and sleep-deprivation are bad – for weight and health in general: physical and mental)
exercise regularly – 3 times a week is better than once a week, 7 times a week – is better than 3 . If you practice once a week or even worse – once a month and eat whatever – stop fulling yourself, it is not enough.