Could Yoga Help Treat Your Eating Disorder?

Yoga can be a health practice, a spiritual practice, or both. Yoga consists of a series of postures called asanas. Some people who have practiced yoga for many years can perform them with ease. Some people can't perform some asanas at all no matter how hard they try. Whether you are an expert, a beginner, or your yoga is purely aspirational, doing yoga can be beneficial in managing health issues, including eating disorders. But when certain spiritual aspects of yoga are neglected, some people who live with eating disorders find that yoga makes their symptoms catastrophically worse.

How does yoga improve health?

• Researchers working with retirees in Boca Raton (Florida) found that even when arthritis in the legs and lower back prevented practice of traditional yoga, chair yoga resulted in lower pain scores and higher functionality scores on an objective measurement called the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC). Volunteers who did chair yoga for three months could walk faster with less pain and with a more nearly normal gait. However, the benefits of chair yoga didn't continue once the Boca Raton volunteers stopped doing it regularly.
• At least 22 clinical trials have confirmed that chair yoga relieves depression. The magnitude of benefits of chair yoga is comparable to the improvement attributable to antidepressant medication.
• Researchers at the Division of Yoga and Physical Sciences, at Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana in Bangalore in India have found that both traditional yoga and chair yoga increase response to acupuncture.
• Researchers have tested both English- and Spanish-language versions of chair yoga instruction and found that both versions help older people deal with depression, find more energy to be mobile, and engage in greater social interaction.
• Chair yoga has been shown to be helpful in treating depression and fatigue in women who are getting chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Chair yoga isn't "real yoga". It's a collection of movements inspired by "real yoga". But even when you're not doing the "real thing", you can expect some benefits from yoga.

But just going through some motions generally is not enough to help directly with an eating disorder. For treating eating disorders, it's necessary to use a fuller version of the asanas that involve a lot more standing and stretching. However, there is evidence that traditional yoga is very helpful for many people who have eating disorders.

How yoga can help people who have eating disorders

When you do yoga, you "just do it". You don't spend your time in your yoga session thinking about how you will have better control over your appetite or you'll gain weight or lose weight. You have to pay a lot of attention to achieving the postures of your yoga routine. But if you do that regularly, there's a growing body of evidence that your yoga practice can make dealing your eating disorder easier.

• One study gave both female and male young people aged 11 to 21 a combination of standard medical care for their eating disorder plus individualized yoga instruction for one hour just once a week for eight weeks. Yoga didn't make a huge change in weight. The anorexia patients gained a little weight, but not much. The binge-eating patients lose a little weight, but not much. But just an hour of yoga every week reduced anxiety, depression, and preoccupation with food.
• Researchers in Belgium looked at the data from eight studies of cognitive behavioral therapy for eating disorders, and concluded that cognitive behavioral therapy plus yoga is more effective for relieving eating disorder symptoms than cognitive behavioral therapy alone.
• Clinical trials have found that yoga is helpful for normalizing weight in EDNOS, eating disorders not otherwise specified. It is especially helpful in reducing weight when there is a need to reduce weight.

The common thread of dozens of studies is that yoga is helpful for people living with eating disorders when it is combined with standard medical care, but there is a significant downside for people who have eating disorders who do yoga without also getting standard medical care.

What can go horribly wrong with yoga for people who have eating disorders

Yoga tends to reward perfectionism. Many people who have eating disorders are perfectionists. When people who deal with an eating disorder focus on yoga as the only treatment for their condition, symptoms sometimes get tremendously worse. Someone who has anorexia who substitutes yoga for food can get much sicker. Someone who has a binge-eating disorder that is triggered by injury to self-esteem and who just can't stretch enough to do certain poses may be triggered to eat even more. There have even been people who died from their eating disorder after they became obsessed with yoga.