Yoga For Fat People

For the past few weeks, I've been feeling tense and achey.  Some days were better, some days were miserable - overall just icky.  This morning, I woke up feeling much better than I had over the weekend and decided to take some proactive measures to stop feeling so all around blah.  I've been wanting to get into yoga for a while now, so I searched Netflix, found some yoga work out videos, and set out to stretch my muscles and get in touch with my internal organs.

Now, I had no allusions that I would be gliding through poses with the greatest of ease.  I knew that it wouldn't be easy.  I took 2 warm yoga classes last year and I knew it was challenging, but I wasn't sure how much of the difficulty was attributed to the 98* room and how much was attributed to my own awkwardness.  I was pretty sure that I wouldn't end up on the bathroom floor, white as a ghost, clutching the toilet wondering when I would pass out (true story and basic summary of my first warm yoga experience), but I wasn't sure what to expect.

So, I rolled out my awesome green yoga mat, pushed play and did my best to go along with the moves.  For the most part, I did okay.  However, once you get into some of the moves, it is very difficult for a size 18 body to maneuver.  For example, please review this picture I snagged off of Google:

See her taut little body nicely folded in half?  Very easy when you don't have a gut in your way.  When this yogi does this pose, you can see whatever is behind her.  When my much more tubby body tries this, it is a sea of rolls, boobs, and squished blubber.  Having boobs doesn't make this any easier either.  They are just in the way.  If you have a belly pooch, like I do, any move that involves bending over or planking is just super hard.

I felt really good afterwards, despite being a little sad that I couldn't do all of the poses correctly.  I kept saying to myself "they need 'yoga for fat people' videos." So I decided to google it - there are a ton of pages about this and I found some helpful modifications.  Hopefully if will continue to get better!  I can only hope.

To be fair, it's not only my excess body fat that makes yoga hard.  I am a giant bag of medical issues.  First, I have a several fibroid tumors on my lower spine/pelvis, on my L4-L5 and my L5-S1.  Basically, right here:

This makes laying on my back uncomfortable at times, and during some of the poses I thought I was going to pass out.  It happened to be on each of the poses where she said "Feel all of the blood rushing through your spine".  Turns out my tumors don't like the blood rushing down there.  Ironically, I get the same feeling when I drink liquor.

Also, my neck is kinda messed up, which makes sitting up straight and elongating my spine kind of hurty.  See, a normal neck is supposed to be curvy, like the second picture below.  My neck is like the first picture below.  It's fixable, and I've seen a chiropractor about it once before, but I just haven't gone to the therapy for it yet.  It's on my "to-do" list.

So I will continue to try yoga, but I think I'm going to have to make some adaptions, supplement with cardio and hope that yoga gets easier as I lose weight.  It can only get better, right?!