A question recently came to my mind with regards to food and yoga. Many yoga practitioners avocates going vegetarian.
Is vegetarian the eventual way to go for yoga practioners?
For me, I do not think I can be a vegetarian for real. I love my meat too much to completely give it totally up. I have actually given up pork and any related pig stuff. ( yeah, no bacon, no pork knuckles, plus no tons of chinese local food for me either ) Now I am giving up my next meat : Duck and Mutton. These 2 meats are not really my favourite in the first place.
I hope I can at least reduce my meat choices to only chicken, beef and seafood. I think this will be more than sufficient for a normal person. I can go vegetarian for one or two days but not like always. I am really a foodie… I cannot give up good food!
Hence the constant battle with weight problem since young.
I heard that if you go vegetarian, you will become more flexible. I wonder if it’s true?
Food for thought…
June 29th, 2006 at 2:17 am
My experience is that practicing yoga will gradually change the eating pattern. After 1+ year of relatively intense Bikram, I eat more veggies
and prefer ligher meals… I don’t know whether there’s correlation between
flexibility and veggie food, but I think by avoiding toxics from meat-digestion (especially seafood), the body will be relieved.
As another good news for weight watchers, though this is not my original intention for doing yoga, I dropped 10 pounds in one year.
July 2nd, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Indeed weight loss is an added bonus for us! I lost 3kg after 3 months of intense practice(long leave from work) of hatha and power yoga, averaging around 2 classes each day and have been keeping it off until now. During the 3 months of intense practice, I realised that like you, I changed my eating habit as one cannot eat a full meal before a class. And so it helped me to lose weight.
But once I am back to my normal workday and able to attend only 1 class per day, my appetite increased instead but luckily I did not regain the weight.
I agree that my body will probably thankful to be relieved of the meat/seafood diet at times which is why we have detox regimes to clear the body of “muck”. But often I find without eating meat, I feel weak and even more hungry. Arrrgh.
It does not help either that Singapore is a food paradise!