Eating Before Yoga: What to know
Have you ever done yoga on a full stomach? If you have, you know how awful it is to be twisting or folding over a bursting belly. A lot of yoga poses, especially forward folds and back bends, actually put pressure on abdominal organs making digestion very uncomfortable and difficult.
And then there is the other end of the spectrum when you don’t eat enough before class, end up feeling light headed and topple over in your tree pose. I always get frustrated and lose my zen when this happens because yoga classes are expensive and I end up spending the majority of the class in child’s pose.
So when is the best time to be eating before yoga?
Eating 2-3 hours before yoga
It is ideal to eat about 2-3 hours before a yoga class depending on the meal. Heavy meals with lots of fat or animal protein take longer to digest, so I recommend enjoying those 3 hours before a yoga class. Lighter vegetarian meals that are lower in fat will digest much more quickly and can be safely enjoyed 2 hours before yoga class.
Eating an hour before yoga
Sometimes (let’s be serious, all the time!) our schedules don’t allow us to plan the day around when we are going to practice yoga. If you are hungry an hour before yoga class, I recommend eating something that is really easy to digest like oatmeal, date bliss balls, a mug of pureed soup, a handful of almonds or a small smoothie. Stick to small portions and stay away from foods that are high in fat or protein because they take longer to digest.
Eating 30 minutes before yoga
I am the queen of losing track of time and realizing that I’m hungry and need to eat something before running out the door to my yoga class. When this happens I grab something that is low in fiber so it digests quickly and high in sugar to give me energy. Fruits like bananas, melons, grapes and peaches are the perfect grab and go foods.
I have always been thin but once I did a 22 day fast on just pure water. I did not have to worry about when I was doing yoga. Also I had a lot more time to do yoga since I did not need to shop for food, prepare my food, eat the food or clean the dishes. They found many decades ago that fasting or calories restriction is the one proven way to become younger and extend life. Further research shows this.
For many decades I have been reading health books and they disagree on many things. But the one thing that they agreed on was that the less that you eat, the longer that you live. My latest article on fasting on LinkedIn has lots of science on fasting from the current Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, who is also a professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He says that fasting makes you smarter (improvement in cognitive abilities), stronger and younger. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204074100-36502077-new-information-on-the-miraculous-power-of-fasting
So if people miss a meal to do yoga, they do not need to worry about it. Morris Krok is an expert on this from many years ago who wrote books on it. He fasted, did yoga and was a big fan of eating mostly fruit. Some people who were too thin tried eating more food and lost weight. Then they tried eating less food and gained weight. The reason for this is that you are not what you eat, but what you assimilate.
What were the meals of those who ate more, to loose weight, vs those who ate less and gained weight. For close to a month I have been eating nutritious food (fresh fruit and vegetables, no grains and sugar) and my weight has hardly dropped. Cant figure this out.
Hi Carol, sometimes you can hit a plateau in your weight loss due to issues beyond diet such as stress or hormonal imbalances. I have different views than Chuck and do not agree with greatly reducing caloric intake and skipping meals. I would be happy to work with you to determine the root cause of your weight loss plateau. Love & Wellness, Jesse Lane