A woman did yoga every day for 5 years. Here’s how her body and diet changed.

Klavdiya Finogina can do a pull-up, eats nutritious whole foods, and meditates daily — but she never set out to lead such a healthy lifestyle. It started with a 20-minute yoga class in 2020.

Like many young women, Finogina, a 25-year-old freelance photographer based in Toronto, felt pressure to work out to look a certain way and restricted her diet in the hope of looking thin and “toned.” Before the COVID pandemic, she went to the gym once or twice a week, where she used leg, arm, and core machines, but didn’t enjoy it.

“It was very passive, mostly just out of obligation. There was no passion involved,” Finogina told Business Insider.

But when lockdown hit, she switched to doing home workouts, mainly 20-minute abs-focused videos. One day, she stumbled across a yoga channel, selected a video, and something clicked.

“It seemed challenging enough and also fun because it wasn’t just a repetition, it was kind of a flow,” she said. It featured elements like balance, coordination, and flexibility that she said her previous workouts were missing.

Finogina was having fun and wanted to get better at yoga, so, inspired by a YouTube video about building new habits, she committed to doing 50 consecutive days of at-home yoga workouts. She felt more coordinated and it boosted her mood. “I really got sort of addicted to the lifestyle of moving every day, where that wasn’t the norm for me before,” she said.

Five years later, it’s a daily habit that she said has transformed her body and helped her change her relationship with body image, exercise, and diet, she said.

Her experience chimes with advice from personal trainers who recommend choosing a form of physical activity that you actually enjoy if you want to build a sustainable workout routine.

The personal trainer Sohee Lee previously told BI: “it’s important that you’re enjoying the exercise you do” as it’s hard to do something consistently if it feels like a chore or punishment.

Yoga for building muscle

Without intending to, yoga has helped Finogina build strength and muscle. “I definitely look more powerful. I have a lot more defined muscle,” she said.

But she measures progress according to the poses she can do not what her body looks like.

Muscle mass is important for metabolic health and helps keep us strong and mobile. By the age of 30, we start to naturally lose muscle mass, but strength training can help us live healthier for longer. More intense forms of yoga, such as vinyasa or ashtanga, can count as strength training.

Over time, Finogina selected more advanced workouts that included inversions, poses where your heart is above your head, such as handstands, headstands, and arm balances like crow pose, which require good balance and coordination. “I wasn’t yet capable, it was just a fun challenge,” she said.

With lots of repetition, Finogina got strong enough to hold these poses and felt motivated to add calisthenics and bodyweight exercises like push-ups to her repertoire.

“I recently got my first pull-up,” she said, “that was something I had never thought I could do.”

Eating intuitively helped her choose more whole foods

Daily movement made Finogina feel more in touch with her body, including noticing if a meal left her feeling full, energetic, and light or heavy and sluggish.

She described her past relationship with food as unhealthy, and was filled with guilt if she ate “too much” or had foods she thought she “shouldn’t.”

Now she eats more intuitively and gravitates toward whole foods and larger portions. “When I work out a lot, I eat a lot, and I let myself do that,” she said.

She’s found that whole grains, beans, and nuts make her feel most energized. These foods are features of the Mediterranean diet, which has been voted the healthiest way to eat for eight years running.

Exercising for fun not aesthetics

In the past, the only reason Finogina exercised was for aesthetics.

Now she loves exercising because it gives her an opportunity to connect with her body and let loose. “It’s like having a dog in a way, just let it run, just let it have fun,” she said.

This shift has helped her let go of the beauty ideal she used to strive for and appreciate her body as it is.

“With yoga, I kind of got familiar with my body, and my body had the opportunity to be itself and express itself,” she said.

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