YOGA CONDITIONING FOR WEIGHT LOSS

2006, $1.75, at Out of the Closet Superstore in Glassell Park

First Impression: She can do Reverse Prayer Hands while doing a backbend.

Second Impression: Show-off.

This DVD starts off with the presenter, Suzanne Deason, being interviewed in a red L.L. Bean sweater in front off a babbling-brook backdrop. Her blonde helmet of hair has been parted using a t-square and a mechanical pencil.

There, all set for her Sears portrait, she lays out her theory for using yoga as permanent, effective, weight loss. She claims that yoga will help establish a connection between your mind and body to develop a sense of calmness, so that you will better handle everyday stresses and won’t reach for “that piece of pizza” to make yourself feel better.

Sing a new tune, Suzanne. Pizza is delicious. Food is good. The holidays are coming and I want to stuff my face. That’s why I exercise. That’s why most people exercise: a potent combination of food-love and vanity.

Also, sometimes it feels really good to eat your feelings. At one of my jobs, when interacting with management starts to feel like being emotionally mugged, we excavate a freezer-burnt tub of generic ice cream from its special hiding place. Then all the ladies dig and gobble with plastic spoons. This off-brand frozen treat tastes like chemicals and broken dreams, but when eaten in sympathetic company, it’s the cure for what ails you.

Speaking of sympathetic company, the three backup yogis must have a hissy-whisper session whenever Suzanne’s back is turned, because she has made them wear the most unfortunate onesie leotard things I have ever seen. They look like pears. Colorful pears doing yoga on a mountaintop in Sedona, Arizona. The red rock formation where all their mats are laid out resembles the thing the alien ship landed on in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Somewhere, Richard Dreyfuss is making a mashed-potato sculpture of it all.

Since this gentle, basic yoga routine doesn’t make you break a sweat, I don’t think it will work on its own for weight loss. In her interview, Suzanne Deason pooh-poohs the notion that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. I’m afraid a nutritionist would say, “Yeah Suzanne, that is exactly how you lose weight, because science.”