Annie’s Healthy Weight & Eating Blog

The first Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR), organized by the International Association of Yoga Therapy (IAYT), was held January 18-21 in Los Angeles. It was a gathering of yogis and yoginis, medical professionals, researchers, and those who develop and sell products to the aforementioned groups.

First off, by any measure, this conference was a great success. It sold out very quickly - I spoke to many yogis who’d wanted to go but hadn’t acted quickly enough. I believe that many yoga teachers across the country are witnessing the therapeutic possibilities of yoga in their own clientele. So the topic is ripe for discussion. And, I believe the organizers of the conference approached the frankly impossible task of finding common ground between the scientific community (the quantifiers), and the yogic spiritual practitioners and teachers (the revelers in the unknowable).

I love yoga conferences. I love to be around dedicated yoga teacher-practitioners. They put out a great vibe - as one woman said to me in the bathroom “who ARE you people? - it feels so good to be around you!” (she was attending a community college meeting in the same hotel). I was moved and ticked to attend scientific sessions that were launched with the chanting of ohm. Somehow, that both made the information presented resonate, and reminded me not to take it too seriously.

Many of the presenters provided outlines of their talks, and some of these may be helpful to yoga practitioners who were not able to attend. You can find a range of download able pdf-outlines of sessions and of breakouts at the IAYT website. You can find additional information from some of the presenters websites - those I attended who’s website info was helpful to me include Matthew Taylor PhD, PT, Amy Weintraub, Leslie Kaminoff who’s an impressively active blogger and Larry Payne PhD. Another blog that would be of interest to those of you thinking about the integrative therapies like yoga is The Integrator, John Week’s blog. I’ll do more features on some of these and other excellent practitioners I met at SYTAR.

I’ve been back from the conference for a couple weeks now, and the initial impressions have ruminated a bit. There has also been some rumblings and feedback from other attendees of the conference. A feast for thought came out of this meeting. A natural topic for this group was the development of standards for yoga therapists, and moving toward reimbursement and licensure. There were a number of warnings from clinicians (Chiropractors, PTs, RNs) that moving in that way will definitely result in more oversight, less creativity and time per client, and probably a reduction in pay scale for the yoga provider. Even as a clinician myself (I’m a Registered Dietitian), I came away thinking that perhaps moving toward licensure and reimbursement was not a good idea for the yoga community.

Feedback from the conference which I found fascinating was Megan McDonough’s observation that while most of the attendees were female, most of the presenters were male. The Kripalu Yoga Teacher’s Association listserv had a richer discussion, but you can get the cliffnotes on eSutra. It was a very male-dominated meeting, which I at first thought was indicative of more linear scientific nature of the topic. But then I thought perhaps it was because of the clique of PdD male yoga teachers who seem to have dominated the conversation - there are definitely master level, PhD-level yoga teacher/researchers out there, so yep, this should change next year. And it seems that feedback has been received by the organizers too.

All in all, a great effort, a beautiful dialogue. I’ll go to SYTAR next year.

It’s been quite a ride, being a student and teacher of yoga through the last two decades. Like riding a tsunami. At this point, yoga has washed over the country, and nearly every single family in America has been touched. Who’d ever thought that so many of our moms, dads, aunts, and preschool counsins would be doing yoga.

So, it’s really high time for the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) to hold their first Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR). A fascinating collection of clinical researchers, medical professionals, and yogis and yoginis will gather in LA in mid-January to discuss the state of this rapidly growing field.

When I first began teaching yoga, I was amazed at the quasi-health advisor role that many yoga teachers play with just a month or two of training (and those were the ones to took more comprehensive trainings). This after training for nearly twenty years to become a Registered Dietitian, qualified to skillfull counsel people on what they should eat, or how to determine therapeutic nutritional needs.

Well, things are getting better, as far as defined national certifications for yoga teachers (though many rightfully mourn what is lost with the quantification of yoga training, when it was traditionally a guru-teacher style training, and the guru followed his own track - the trackless track).

Coming back to therapeutics and the symposium, my abstract: Yoga and nutrition for weight management: a case study in program rationale and design was acception for inclusion in the program. Who-ho. I’ll post the abstrack here after the conference, as I think I need to let the IAYT have first publication rights.

Yoga therapy is a gem for those with mind-body issues, include wieght and eating issues. Having all these yogis gathering to talk about ‘what works best for this, what works best for that, and still keeping it the wonderful practice that it is’…will benefit us all.

Read more about the association and the conference at the website, www.IAYT.org.

Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, wrote one of the better digestions of the whole spinach problem in last weekend’s NYTimes Magazine. You can read the article on his website.

In “The Vegetable-Industrial Complex”, Pollen hits on the big problem - that, as poet-farmer (and underappreciated American treasure) Wendell Berry points out, when we took animals off farms and put them into feedlots, we had, in effect, taken one elegant solution - where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops - and created two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot.

It’s the American way to then address these problems with everymore technically complex solutions (Pollen says look for a call to irradiate all fruit and vegetables..), rather than waking up to the simple reality that, as far as food goes, the simple old way may be better.

You’re worth the time and energy.

Our food supply is getting more centralized and more processed by the day. What can you do? Eat local and get to know the farmer that grows your food whenever you can. If it interests you, read about the issue in the growing number of books exploring food quality. A few fascinating reads to start with include Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, (look them up on Amazon) and Pollen’s book.

What a sad state that organic spinach was the source of the latest break of e-coli. While we may never know the root cause of the outbreak, the government got decent grades for their quick response.

The USDA and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) both suggest that we refrain from eating fresh packaged spinach until the investigation has been completed. In the meantime, it’s a great time to remember again to buy local, throughouly wash all produce, and peel it when you can, cook it when you can. Would these steps have prevented the outbreak? Cooking would have, but the others, its still hard to say.

To hear more about what CSPI has to say about the outbreak, check www.cspinet.org

For those of you who’ve known for years (and years and years) that I’ve been working on a book combining yoga and nutrition for weight management, hang tight because it’s very very close to being available.

At this point, books will be available to ship in early November. The book cover is beautiful to look at (thanks for designer Peri Poloni-Gabriel of Knockout Books, www.knockoutbooks.com), and the whole package came together with the help of many many people, but Ellen Reid, (www.bookshep.com) really helped launch the project into the world. I’m eternally grateful to these women, and to many more folks whom helped me along the long road to beautiful-book-in-hand.

You can see some of the artwork and read the introduction on my website, www.anniekbay.com. And you can pre-order the book - we’ll pick up the shipping and handling of books you order now, and you won’t be charged until they actually ship. Please note that our site is soon to be up and running…as of this writing, it’s not quite up…

Much more to come…

Annie