Healthy Beauty Shape & Style

Ever since she first saw the movie Dr. Zhivago, Barbara Moroney had longed for Julie Christie's nose -- and her 21-inch waist. Oh, and a couple of extra inches of height wouldn't be bad either. Moroney was petite, not overweight, but she still didn't like what she saw in the mirror.

After she started practicing yoga, all that changed.

"In the first couple of months, I started feeling this release of all this tension," Moroney tells WebMD. A few years later, she says, "I realized that the ideal image I had of my body no longer worked for me. The realization made me focus on how I could change."

Even in the midst of a culture that promotes dissatisfaction with our appearance, adherents say that yoga, Pilates, and other mind-body exercises can teach us respect for our bodies -- whatever their shape.

"Body image, how we view ourselves, often lacks compassion," says Steven Hartman, director of professional training at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Mass. "Many of us learn at an early age how to disconnect from our body and our body's signals. We learn not to pay attention to pain, to joy in our bodies."

Through yoga, he says, you can re-create a relationship with the body. In each pose, your attention is drawn not to how you look in your tights, but to whether you feel tight hamstrings or an imbalance in the alignment of your hips. Yoga, says Hartman "helps you have an objective awareness of the body."

Christina Sell, author of Yoga from the Inside Out: Making Peace with Your Body through Yoga, says yoga puts you in the moment.

"It's very here, very now, how you stand on the earth, how the position of the body feels on the mat," says Sell, a certified Anusara yoga instructor. "If you're focusing on the immediacy of the body's sensations and the steadiness of the breath, then the attention rests inside the body as it is, rather than in the mind and its projections and images about what is."

Moroney, who also practices the Chinese art of qigong (a movement, breath and meditationexercise), says that at age 58, she's more at peace with herself than she was at 28.

"I'm learning that the body I have is a reflection of who I am inside," says Moroney, author of Natural Body, Natural Shape: Develop a Strong Self Image, Good Health & Ageless Grace & Beauty through Yoga. "I'm more relaxed and less stressed. I see the world differently."

But it's not just mental, she says. Yoga helps you to become physically stronger, better aligned, and more flexible and that, combined with the release of tension, "causes the natural shape of the body to change," she says.

"When you look in the mirror, you begin to see a younger-looking person. You have better posture. You look thinner. Yoga puts your tummy in place, your butt in place, and reduces stress, and a stress-free face looks younger."