Yoga with Adriene is not a Prescription for Health
Yoga does not help you combat long covid symptoms and should not be suggested as a tool for weight loss
This essay has been in the works for a few weeks and I am super proud of how it turned out. This is about medical negligence and why yoga is not a prescription for illness recovery or weight loss. If you’re a fan of Yoga with Adriene, be warned: I talk about some problematic behavior on her part.
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A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me this image of a tweet. The caption reads, “Was prescribed yoga and was told to lose weight and exercise after being diagnosed with Long Covid Dysautonomia. Was told ‘I am a know it all’ and that I wasn’t trying hard enough. The doctor said a disability letter would not be written. I was treated like absolute garbage.”
On the Rx paper he received, you can see the author’s name up top, while in the open space where he might have been prescribed medicine or given medical advice, instead it reads “Yoga by Adriene”.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Yoga with Adriene is the most popular yoga channel on YouTube, with nearly 13 million subscribers.
I have plenty to say about her and why she, specifically, might have been the yoga teacher prescribed by this doctor.
But first, let’s talk about the bigger issue:
Yoga and exercise are not legitimate prescriptions for illness recovery.
They can be fantastic tools for overall health and general wellness. There’s lots of scientific evidence, as well as anecdotal evidence, to back that up.
So let’s dive into those benefits first, because they’re not the same across the board.
Yoga and exercise have somewhat different impacts on the human body. While yoga can fit under the larger umbrella of exercise, yoga is typically low impact and in most cases, doesn’t fit into the categories of cardiovascular exercise or strength training. Plus, some folks bristle at the idea that yoga is even called exercise at all because they consider it a spiritual practice that happens to contain some gentle movement.
Generally speaking, the benefits of yoga are in the realm of the mind-body connection. Yoga can reduce stress and may have some impact on reducing anxiety. Additionally, yoga can improve brain functioning — like increased mental focus and neuroplasticity. Yoga can also reduce inflammation, although it’s not going to have the massive, life changing impact that proponents want it to have. And lastly, yoga can improve balance, flexibility, and if you’re starting from little to no movement, can increase your strength marginally.1
The umbrella term “exercise” contains a wide variety of movement, from walking your dog to powerlifting to swimming to Billy Blanks Tae Bo and, as previous mentioned, yoga. So the benefits of exercise are more wide ranging, as well — mainly because what you do and how often you do it will determine the impact of exercise on your body.
Exercise can increase your muscle mass and bone density, particularly if you are doing resistance training (aka lifting weights and specifically ones that actually put pressure on your muscles and bones, increasing progressively over time).
If you are doing more cardio-focused exercise, you might increase your cardiovascular health by strengthening your heart, increasing blood circulation, and reducing arterial inflammation, all of which reduce your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Regular movement, whether it’s yoga or something else that falls under the broad definition of exercise, can give you a greater appreciation for your body and can contribute to more positive mental health (although should not be a substitute for medication or therapy). Consistent movement can increase body awareness and body confidence. Mostly, movement can simply feel good in your body, if not while you’re doing it, usually after.
I also want to add that weight-loss or “maintaining a healthy weight” are frequently listed as benefits to all types of movement, yoga included. This bothers me because weight has very little to do with overall health. You’re welcome to argue with me about this one, but that’s likely motivated by fatphobia. If you’d like to get educated about why body size is not an indicator of health, please head over to the
substack and podcast or the Maintenance Phase podcast, or both.More importantly to me, the purpose of movement is not to lose weight, nor is it the most effective way to do so, even if that’s what you’re after. I’ll get more to that point later.2
For now, I share all of this to say that while movement has some incredible benefits, it’s also not prescriptive. Movement, including yoga, can be an incredibly positive and beneficial part of your life, but it’s not a substitute for quality, compassionate, and educated medical care when you need it.
Yoga won’t clear up your skin or heal your gut or detox your liver, despite what you might have read in Light on Yoga. And it definitely won’t prevent you from getting Covid or cure Long Covid related illnesses, despite what many red-pilled wellness influencers on instagram might make you think.
It’s also important to note that although movement and diet are a part of your overall health, they are just a relatively small part. Much greater are social determinants of health like where you live and/or where you are from, your income, what kind of job you do, your education level, your relationships, your level of privilege, and your genetics.3
Health is also relative, but that’s a much, much bigger conversation.
The truth is, as a yoga and movement professional with 20 years of experience, I have absolutely no business diagnosing health issues or injuries. My expertise is in designing classes and movement programs that will support a broad range of people in the pursuit of getting stronger, increasing their mobility, and simply having a consistent movement practice that makes them feel good.
I am not a doctor or a physical therapist and I am very clear on this with my students. While I have studied anatomy extensively, there is a limit to what I can do, legally and ethically.
Not all yoga teachers take this approach. Many will diagnose various ailments, usually physical and generally in the realm of muscular or skeletal issues, although some of the superwoo teachers will diagnose emotional or spiritual issues, too.
When I used to teach in person at studios, people would sometimes ask me if I could figure out what was going on with their shoulder or their hips or their neck or their back. And while I was trained to do certain diagnostic exercises to ascertain various physical ailments, I never really did them.
Instead, I’d usually say something like, “I can make a general guess, but if this pain/discomfort persists, I suggest going to a doctor to get a proper diagnosis. Depending on what the doctor says, I might be able to help, but you also might be better served by a physical therapist. I can refer you to a few, if you need me to.”
All that said, since I am not a medical professional and I can’t diagnose, I can still use my friend google and get an idea of what a person’s physical limitations might be with a given illness or injury.
So I googled the term, “Long Covid Dysautonomia,” to get a basic idea of what this patient was dealing with. Turns out, some of the symptoms of this condition include, “dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, headache, syncope, labile blood pressure, exercise intolerance, and brain fog.”4
I’m not doctor, but I am an expert in movement. And I can tell you that doing almost any type of yoga or even walking while chronically dizzy isn’t something I would recommend. And that’s just the dizziness. Can you imagine being told that you just need to exercise more to handle your symptoms of “exercise intolerance?”
And just in case you don’t know what “syncope” is, because I didn’t, "it’s a tendency to lose consciousness for a few moments, spontaneously. Also known as fainting.
I also googled treatment options and weight loss wasn’t even in the top 5 suggestions, although it was suggested by this doctor.5
So not only was this doctor negligent, but they used body shaming tactics on someone who was suffering from a very real, debilitating illness rather than giving them helpful or even intelligent medical support.
I know that fat liberation and anti diet advocates won’t be surprised by this news. But it still infuriates me to see it.
And it makes me just as mad to see yoga and exercise weaponized in this way.
What’s equally frustrating is that it’s not uncommon for movement to be used as a tool for both shaming people for how their bodies look and coercing them into taking action to change how their bodies look.
While I expect this ideology from more traditional workout practices, if I didn’t already know how insidious fatphobia is, I wouldn’t expect it from yoga. From the outside looking in, yoga is meant to be gentler and lower impact. Many people come to yoga for stress relief and for greater flexibility, not to burn calories.
And yet, if you google “yoga for weight loss” you’ll get a lot of results. And who do you think is at the top of that list? If you guessed, Yoga with Adriene, you’d be correct.
She’s not the only yoga teacher on YouTube who has “yoga for weight loss” videos. Boho Beautiful (2.98 million subscribers), SarahBeth Yoga (1.73 million subscribers), Brett Larkin (585 k), Tara Stiles (320k), Akshaya Agnes (219k), and Sadie Nardini (141k), all have multiple videos on their YouTube channels that promise weight loss, fat burn, fat melt, and waist slimming. For all of these teachers and several more, these classes are typically the highest viewed videos among all of the classes on their channels.
However, Yoga with Adriene is the most successful and visible by miles, with more than 4x as many followers as the next most popular channel on this list.
Adriene Mishler, the teacher and co-founder of the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel, is beloved in the online yoga world. Make even the tiniest critique of her teaching and expect to have legions of adoring fans coming to her defense. She is well known for her catchphrase, “find what feels good,” as well as saying that yoga should be free for everyone. Equally beloved is her dog, Benji, who appears in nearly all of her videos since 2015.
I’m not here to talk about the quality of her teaching. I believe Mishler does good work in the world and helps many people, which matters a lot to me. As far as I can tell, we both do this work for similar reasons.
That said, I think it’s important to call out the reason she became so famous in the first place and question why these videos still exist on her channel.
Mishler started her Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel back in 2012, when online yoga was barely even a thing. She was one of the online yoga pioneers on a search engine style platform versus yoga-specific online video platforms like Glo (formerly yogaglo).
She was and still is, an actress and met her business partner, Chris Sharpe, on a horror movie set. He had a nose for business success, having already produced one very successful show on YouTube (Hilah Cooks), and encouraged Mishler to put a few yoga classes online. The rest, as they say, is history.
But what really launched her into the stratosphere early on, were classes titled, “Yoga for Weight Loss.” Sharpe, her business partner, knew that SEO matters and that people are always looking for new ways to lose weight. So he convinced her to use language that would attract people to her classes: yoga for weight loss, fat burn yoga, yoga for 6 pack abs.
Mishler has mentioned this in several interviews and here’s one of the quotes I found of her talking about these early, super successful videos: "I did not want to call anything 'yoga for weight loss' in the beginning," she says. But (she and Sharpe) struck a deal and tried it. "It did so disgustingly well."6
It’s that last part that bothers me. “It did so disgustingly well.”
To this day, her weight loss videos are among the most viewed on her channel, with millions of views. Her most recent video with “weight loss” as one of the searchable words is from 5 years ago, so not recent but in terms of timing, it was published after the interview I read which included the quote above.
It’s important to note that despite the fact that Mishler is sponsored by Adidas and has partnered with several brands, it’s likely that the majority of her revenue comes from her monetized YouTube channel (as well as her very inexpensive monthly yoga membership).
For context, I also have a monetized YouTube channel. But I have 10.6k subscribers to her 12.8 million. I make a tiny profit, around $100 every 2 months. Most of my profit comes from a handful of videos which have over 10k views. My most viewed video is called “How to Stand Up From Sitting Without Using Your Hands” at nearly 600k views. But most of my videos sit between 150 and 500 views.
By contrast, all of Mishler’s videos have more than 10k views. And her most viewed video has over 50 million views to date. I can’t begin to guess what her monthly revenue is from YouTube, but I know it’s not $50 every month. And I know that there is something off about saying that “yoga should be free for everyone” when you are actually making millions online from the yoga classes you teach.
All that said, I am not opposed to her making money. I am opposed to the fact that she didn’t like the idea of making yoga videos implying you will lose weight if you do them, but did it anyway because it brought her enormous success and profit.
It’s also disingenuous to say that doing yoga will lead to sustained weight loss. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to back this up.7
At this point in Mishler’s YouTube yoga timeline, she is making money hand over fist. She could stop releasing videos and still make money from the 700+ videos she has on her channel, as well as her online membership, and sponsorships. As it stands, she releases fewer videos now than she did a few years ago when she was offering a new video every week.
So why are the “yoga for weight loss” videos still on her channel? She could remove them completely, if that truly lined up with her values, and still make a lot of money. But as of this writing, they are still there, proudly offering weight loss via low impact yoga.
In my entire career as a yoga and movement instructor, I have never marketed classes online or off as “yoga for weight loss.” I am a survivor of deeply disordered eating practices and I still occasionally have brief relapses.
Movement is not a way for me to torture my body into obedience or to fit myself into a very specific body type, preferred by diet culture.
Movement is a pathway for liberation.
Most people don’t come to my classes looking to lose weight, but if they did, I’d simply let them know that I can’t help them do that. I can help them feel stronger and more confident in their body, but it would be unethical for me to promise something that I cannot deliver.
This takes me back to the tweet that inspired this essay. I feel deep compassion for this person, who went to his doctor seeking medical help and was given a bullshit suggestion.
He deserves better than that.
We all do.
We don’t deserve to be dismissed and shamed when we ask for help.
We deserve to be listened to by medical professionals and treated with kindness, compassion, and dignity.
As yoga and movement professionals, I also think we should take more responsibility for the way we share movement classes. It’s one thing to share classes with click-baity titles that draw people in, but ultimately remind them what the real purpose of movement is and to support them high quality, anti-diet classes. It’s another thing to make unrealistic and unethical promises that profit off of their pain and insecurities.
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