Hanuveda

No. Udvartana improves circulation and skin quality, reduces the sense of heaviness, and — importantly — is a daily therapy that helps people stay engaged with a programme. It does not dissolve fat, and no massage produces spot reduction of the abdomen or thighs. Fat loss is systemic and comes from the energy deficit. We would rather tell you what these therapies actually do than let you attribute your results to the wrong thing.

Because it does not last and it costs you muscle. Very low calorie regimes carry risks including gallstones, muscle and bone loss and electrolyte disturbance, and weight regained after rapid loss returns as fat while the lost muscle does not automatically return — so repeated cycles can leave you with more body fat than you started with. Charaka identified this problem too: reduce the fat without depleting the deeper tissues.

Yes, and please tell us. Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder, it is highly treatable, and it is not a failure of willpower. But it needs psychological treatment, not a diet plan — and restriction-based programmes typically make bingeing worse. We would work with you differently: no calorie targets, no daily weighing, and a psychologist involved alongside. What we will not do is put you on a restrictive protocol and let the cycle deepen.

It might be contributing, and it is worth testing. Hypothyroidism causes weight gain, and so do PCOS, Cushing's syndrome and several common medications including antipsychotics, steroids, insulin and sodium valproate. These need diagnosing and treating in their own right — a weight programme will not fix them. We check thyroid function on everyone and screen for the others where the picture suggests it.

Not automatically. Garcinia cambogia (Vrikshamla) is one of the most widely sold herbal slimming agents and has documented cases of acute liver failure — a published review of reported cases found roughly a quarter required liver transplantation, and the FDA recalled products containing it in 2009 after liver failure reports including one death. Sida cordifolia (Bala) contains ephedrine. We do not use Garcinia, we check liver function before and during treatment, and we want to know about anything you have bought online.

They work, and for some people they are the right answer. GLP-1 receptor agonists produce roughly 15–20% weight loss and bariatric surgery roughly 25–30%, compared with 5–10% for lifestyle programmes. If you have severe obesity, sleep apnoea or poorly controlled diabetes, we will say directly that our programme alone may not meet your clinical need, and we will support you alongside those treatments rather than pretend to compete with them.

Because daily weighing tells you mostly about fluid, and because for people with disordered eating it is actively harmful. Weight fluctuates by a kilogram or more day to day for reasons that have nothing to do with fat. We track weight at set intervals alongside waist circumference and, where available, body composition — which is what actually tells us whether you are losing fat or muscle.

Without a maintenance plan, probably — regain is the default outcome of weight loss across every method. This is why we build maintenance in from week one rather than treating it as an afterthought, and why we are honest that the programme does not end when the treatment block does. Anyone who tells you the weight will simply stay off is not describing how this works.

No. That framing belongs to the classical text and we leave it there. Obesity is a complex disease with genetic, hormonal, environmental and behavioural causes — Ayurveda itself recognised a hereditary component in Beeja Svabhava — and weight stigma is associated with worse outcomes, not better ones, because it drives people away from care. We use the clinical content of the classical framework, which is considerable. We do not use the judgement.