If losing weight or looking a little bit slimmer will help you live a healthier and fuller life, then it’s a reasonable goal, among others, to pursue in a life that will finally have been testament to the sum of your directed energies.

Rolfing makes you look slimmer because your  Posture makes a huge difference to how we look. We know that instinctively, in the way we sit up straight or turn our bodies side-on to the camera lens; we know that slouching accentuates the belly.  Not that our intuitions are always correct: In general, Rolfing has a decompressive effect on the body, which is cosmetically advantageous to people.  One example, is the  effect of lengthening the front of the body, in particular (through work around the ribs, the abdomen and the psoas) can have a marked effect on the apparent prominence of the belly. 

Rolfing can help you lose weight, but let me again caution against any simplistic notion of Rolfing as a weight-loss solution. What really matters is how you feel in your body, and there’s no question that Rolfing can really help you to feel lighter, looser and more ‘uplifted’ through your torso and your spine.

Rolfing seems to have an ability to ‘reset’ your nervous system in a way that makes you less likely to put on weight in the first place and easier to lose when it’s there. It’s to do with how the body reacts to the experience of long-term stress. 

A growing body of research suggests a number of ways in which the benefits of touch and structural integration – the task of making the body work better as a whole – begin to re-gear the body’s habitual nervous system responses in a way that nudges the balance in favor of the parasympathetic nervous system (that part of the nervous system that promotes feelings of safety, trust and empathy, and is associated with high vagal tone) over the sympathetic nervous system (our ‘fight or flight’ response, and its attendant hormones, such as adrenalin and cortisol).

When we are stressed, our bodies go into a kind of ‘lockdown’ mode that aims at increasing our chances of surviving impending catastrophe such as physical attack or a shortage of food. Although a short burst of adrenalin fires up our system to burn more calories temporarily, the long-term effect of high levels of sympathetic activation makes it more likely that we’ll convert the energy we consume into fat for long-term storage, and it also impairs our immune and digestive systems.

So, there you have it. Rolfing can help you look slimmer as well as create the best conditions for your body to lose weight naturally. But more importantly than either of these, Rolfing can help you feel better in the body you’re in. While the benefits of Rolfing can be cosmetic, they are also more than skin-deep.