The Unexpected Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice on Your Diet
You don’t need to make a conscious effort to eat healthily when you practice Ashtanga Yoga; mindfulness will naturally steer your diet in the right direction.
Many beginners learning Yoga have questions about diet. Should I become a vegetarian? Vegan? Does it matter? Can I eat what I want?
While most Yoga teachers preach for a vegetarian diet on philosophical grounds or out of respect for tradition, some unfortunately venture on the territory of food dogmas. However, the question benefits from being left unanswered. Each person will inevitably figure it out for themselves and eventually make the choice to take full responsibility for what they eat.
Ashtanga Yoga is an extremely challenging and rewarding style of Yoga practice with huge mind and body benefits. It builds stamina, strength and flexibility, but many advanced practitioners agree that the greatest benefit of the practice is its focus on a mindful approach and the effect it has on your psyche. There is an incredible amount of discipline, inner strength and intense focus required to perform the four series of traditional Ashtanga Yoga.
Ashtanga differs significantly from other styles of yoga in several ways
Ashtanga is a rigorous and structured style of Yoga that follows specific sequences of postures, each posture linked to the next one through breath in a continuous and dynamic flowing motion, similar to Vinyasa.
The difference is that in Ashtanga Yoga, you perform a fixed series of postures in a sequential and linear manner. The rigidity of this approach allows progress to be clearly perceived each day, because repetition makes you mindful of how your body and mind react to external and internal influences, and how the quality of your practice fluctuates from one day to another.
In the traditional way of teaching, called Mysore — from the name of the South Indian city where modern Ashtanga Yoga was developed by the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in the late 1940s — practitioners are expected to perform the memorized series independently at their own pace while the teacher corrects and adjusts each student whenever necessary.
In contrast to modern western style Yoga classes that are monkey see, monkey do, where students focus on the teacher and try to reproduce random poses, in Ashtanga Yoga the practice is focused inward, on the breath and on the subtle perceptions of your mind and body. This form of practice is much closer to the way Yoga has been taught traditionally in India for centuries.
Ashtanga Yoga incorporates internal energy locks (Bandhas) and continuous movement aligned with deep breathing that creates intense internal heat, sweat, purification, extreme flexibility, strength, and balance. The practice promotes independence and personal accountability because each student is expected to take responsibility for his practice, and face his own demons.
“Yoga is for internal cleansing, not external exercising. Yoga means true self-knowledge” — Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
Mindfulness is the key
Mindfulness. It’s a pretty straightforward word. It means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment through a gentle, nurturing lens, without judgement. It might seem trivial, except for the annoying fact that we so often veer from the matter at hand. Our mind takes flight, we lose touch with our body, and pretty soon we’re engrossed in obsessive thoughts about something that just happened or fretting about the future.
The inner struggle is the first obstacle that Ashtanga Yoga students learn to face. The practice is hard, sometimes fear inducing. It’s physically and psychologically demanding because of the inner focus and constant mindfulness it demands.
My first Ashtanga Yoga teacher, Lino Miele was one of the few Western students of Pattabhi Jois in India the early 1980s. He often describes Ashtanga Yoga practice as “The Yoga of the Breath” and “Meditation in Movement”.
Mindful versus Mindless Eating
One of the side effects of the intense inward focus that you have to maintain during the 90 minutes that a typical Ashtanga practice requires six days per week, is that you become aware of the most subtle sensations within your body; pain, tension, discomfort, especially in your lower abdomen and pelvic area where breathing and energy locks are at work.
Ashtanga practitioners become lean because any excess body fat soon becomes a physical hindrance, and you become painfully aware if your diet is unhealthy or if you have eaten the wrong foods the night before.
After a few months of practice, many students of Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series experience a new level of connection with their body. All of a sudden, students become acutely conscious of inner sensations that were previously vague and taken for granted. Some people describe it as “being aware of everything my body has absorbed and how it reacts to food”.
Some of the more intense sitting postures like Marichyasana D or Supta Kurmasana are almost impossible to execute unless you are lean, and you have fasted for at least 10 hours prior to practice.
As a consequence, the mindfulness qualities developed during the Ashtanga practice extend to your eating patterns. You don’t need to be told what to eat because you become aware of what your body absorbs, what it needs, and how it reacts to food and to emotional eating patterns. Bad food choices at dinner are experienced first hand the morning after on the mat.
Mindful Eating becomes an integral part of the practice. You learn to reconnect to innate wisdom about hunger and satiety and regain a more balanced relationship with food. It empowers you to make healthier choices, unlike dieting, which can lead to feelings of deprivation.
When you become aware of what your body needs, what it thrives on, and what you need to avoid, no food dogmas are necessary.
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