Today we’re talking with Dr Claire Hennigan (@Real Yoga Doctor) about Yoga as a method of restorative practice, an exercise and even a way of life.
Yoga is a practice that I talk about a lot in the new book “Eat to beat illness” as a mind body intervention that I believe is essential for our busy modern lives.
In this episode, we cover the following:
- Yoga as a stress relieving strategy
- Inflammation related changes
- Immune system effects
- Community aspect of yoga
And you can find all of this information and more at www.thedoctorskitchen.com and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter for weekly science based recipes and listen to the end of the pod for a summary of our discussion.
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We give so much of our day to other people and caring for others that we often forget to look out for ourselves and ways to keep us well, and I think to be able to treat people, that we first need to be able to treat ourselves well
Dr Claire Hennigan
Fascinating stuff from Dr Claire. Today we talked about how yoga can be thought of as therapy for things like chronic stress - something that we see as GPs super super commonly. And its also very clear to us that loneliness is becoming an absolute epidemic.
As a stress relieving strategy - yoga is a perfect exercise, but others such as Pilates and Qigong, can be just as effective.
We also talked about how yoga can balance inflammation as well as positively impacting the expression of your genes.
Some small scale research has demonstrated that yoga can improve your immune health as well, by increasing the availability of certain cells that are responsible for maintaining your fighting availability against infection.
The research that we also talked about on the show is linked below for information.
And lets not forget the community aspect of yoga. Not only can you do yoga as an individual practice, but it is also encouraged, especially in the early stages of your practice - to do this as part of a group and to go to a few classes. Of which there are many available - not only in high end studios but also in church halls and similar locations all up and down the country
If you’re interested on hearing more about what Claire is up to with Real Yoga Doctor, please click on the links here which will take you to the relevant social media pages.
