When I still practiced Thai Massage, I rather often got questions from my clients about the benefits for weight loss and slimming of Thai Massage.
Of course, enough and intense physical movement is key to keeping fit and keeping your figure, so in fact, any physical activity is helpful in burning calories and/or excessive fat reserves. So… to answer the question: yes, surely, every Thai Massage session helps, even if it’s just losing 1 gram.
In contemporary, (post) modern societies, we can observe an increasing emphasis on the combination of “appearances and healthy lifestyles,” and the treatments, retreats and courses addressing beauty, whitening, plastic surgery, detox, health food, slimming, weight loss, sports, fitness, and the like, are simply mushrooming… globally. And recently, let’s say, in the last ten years, Asia has been taking the lead… clearly.
When there’s a strong demand, the commercial market usually follows, and the spa and wellness industry (Thailand being no exception) has welcomed and warmly embraced these developments by offering a wealth of beautifying therapies and treatments and increasingly also… courses, workshops, and training to educate a new generation of spa “beautifier” therapists.
Now surely, Traditional Thai Massage is not “invented” for weight loss and slimming, but for both preventive and curative therapeutic body- and energy work. To artificially push a traditional healing modality onto the “beautifying stage” is in fact a kind of sacrilege. Yet… it’s done. More and more.
Nevertheless, I would like to add my own story to this and show how Thai Massage can be helpful in losing weight, slimming, fitness, and healthy muscle growth and toning.
You see, when I started learning Thai Massage, I took 4 intense months of weekly Thai Massage courses in Chiang Mai, Thailand (5 days per week, 6 hours per day). I came to Thailand being fairly overweight (around 70 kg, being too much for a little guy like me measuring 1.65 m ).
After 4 months of, in fact, intense physical Thai Massage workout training, I had lost 14 kg (weighing 56 kg) having transformed myself in a “strong, lean and mean Thai Massage practitioner machine.”
What are the lessons learned here? Well, to me it’s obvious that it’s all about movement, enough movement, intense movement. I would almost want to state that it doesn’t matter how much or what you eat, as long as you move enough with your body… totally, completely, fully, daily, at least 3 hours a day.
I know that nowadays in our societies it’s very difficult to implement a “movement regime,” because many… way too many of our daily jobs and activities are done in the “sitting mode,” that is—sitting in the car, in the bus or subway, on the couch at home, on the chair at the office, on a chair at the breakfast, lunch and dinner table, on a bench in the park, and so on.
I don’t know the answer to increasing obesity, sluggishness, and un-fitness, because modern societies are generally build boasting an infrastructure that basically enlarges and multiplies unhealthy lifestyles resulting in aforementioned problems and finally… serious mental and physical health issues.
I do know the answer for me: trying to move as much as possible and avoid as much as possible doing “sitting jobs.” It’s all about a change of lifestyle, but I do admit that it’s very, very hard to do so. I do know also that diets, detox, slimming massage, fat-sucker regimes, surgery, and the like, don’t help structurally. That’s all for appearances, but then again, perhaps that’s all we want nowadays.
Finally, returning to the title of this article, I would say that Thai Massage definitely, undoubtedly helps for weight loss and slimming, but not by receiving it, but by doing it… often and intensively!
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