Olympic athletes are hiring breathing coaches. Californians are filling their lungs at trendy Hollywood "oxygen bars." In fact, the marketing of breathing is so hot, GQ magazine called it "the Jula-Hoop of the '90s." Deep breathing credited
with weight lossAnd a new book says you can actually lose weight -- just by breathing.
"Jump Start Your Metabolism With the Power of Breath," was written by Merriam, Kan., author Pam Grout. Grout said she lost 10 pounds in three weeks through breathing exercises.
"The last thing I was trying to do was lose weight," Grout said. "I was just trying to cope. But then I lost 10 pounds and had all this energy. And I thought, 'This is really interesting.' "
Grout became a breathing coach. Now her self-published book (just picked up by Simon & Schuster) has been getting national exposure on talk shows and in several major magazines.
"Nine out of 10 people are not getting the full capacity that they could," Grout said. "Our lungs are capable of holding a couple of gallons of oxygen, but we're settling for only a couple pints."
Even when we'take "deep breaths," she said, we're usually just taking the oxygen into our chests, not deep down toward our bellies where we really need it most.
Shallow breathing, Grout says, impoverishes our cells, slows our metabolism and leads to a variety of health consequences. You can reduce stress, feel more relaxed and -- most importantly -- "energize" your metabolisms and lose weight by performing specific, deep breathing exercises, she says.
"Oxygen is the big kahuna!" Grout says. "When you don't give your body enough oxygen your body has no choice but to store fat."
Gerald Kerby, pulmonologist at University of Kansas Medical Center, called Grout's weight-loss claim "nonsense" and her metabolism theory backward. "Metabolism determines how much oxygen the body needs. You don't force oxygen into muscles to make them consume glucose and other foods."
Another doctor, Sheldon Saul Hendler, an internist at the University of California at San Diego, also wrote a book about breathing in the late 1980s called "The Oxygen Breakthrough."
Yet Hendler could not support Grout's assertion that breathing alone could produce weight loss.
"It's unfortunate that she is stressing weight loss," he said. "There are much more important reasons to learn how to breath correctly than to lose weight."
Kansas City Star