Let’s get back to the topic of weight loss, this time by highlighting a small but interesting Japanese study from 2010. Researchers took overweight women and had them practice a technique called “Senobi breathing” for one minute before each meal (since most people eat three times per day, that would be a total of 3 minutes per day). After doing this for 30 days, without any other changes, the women lost about 3 percent of their body weight. You can read the full study by clicking here.
Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging – an explanation of what Senobi breathing is and how to do it is coming in just a moment. But first a bit more explanation.
Why would a breathing technique lead to weight loss? Fortunately the researchers also took urine specimens from the women (as well as a control group of lean participants) and found that the lean women had a hormonal profile that is more conducive to fat burning. Specifically, the lean women had more sympathetic or adrenergic “tone,” meaning that around mealtimes they had slightly higher levels of certain stress hormones that tend to blunt appetite and lead to less efficient digestion. While being chronically stressed out of course is not good for the body, it seems that having brief spikes of certain stress hormones around meals might lead to lower body weight by lowering appetite and leading to a bit less absorption of nutrients (i.e. consumed calories end up in the toilet, rather than on one’s waistline).
The cool part of the study is that the researchers found that the Senobi breathing technique helped shift the overweight women toward having a similar hormonal profile as the lean women. In other words, just doing a one minute breathing exercise before meals helped the obese women shift their hormones into a more “fat burning” mode, which is probably why they lost a few pounds over the month of the study.
As always, caveats apply, the main one being that just doing Senobi breathing will probably lead to only a small amount of weight loss. But the technique is free and has virtually no side effects, so there’s almost no downside to trying it for a month or two. Moreover, if paired with other interventions like healthy diet and exercise, Senobi breathing could be a useful tool in helping people to reach their weight loss goals.
If you’d like to try Senobi breathing yourself, here’s how to do it:
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart (though the paper also notes that you can perform the following while sitting as well)
Raise both arms straight up over your head, gently tilt your head back, and lift your chest so that you can see the ceiling.
Inhale slowly for five seconds, then exhale for five seconds. Repeat this three times for a total of thirty seconds.
Put your arms back down for a moment.
Interlace your fingers, stretch your arms overhead, and turn your palms up toward the ceiling (same position as outlined in point 2, but now with the fingers interlaced and hands stretched toward the ceiling).
Repeat step three, which should take about another 30 seconds.
So that’s it. Perform 30 seconds of 3 slow breaths with your arms raised straight overhead (steps 1-3), followed immediately by 30 seconds of 3 slow breaths with your fingers laced above your head. Then you can eat.
Try it before each meal for a month or so and see how it goes.
