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"I'm a woman over 40 ---
where are my abs?"
(Written by request
for Amazing Abs
website)
by
Lauren Muney
 The
biggest question looming on the American woman's mind seems to be, "Where
are my abs? The marketers promised me abs!"
Hello, my dear sisterhood... I tell you
the straight information about what happens in your body and where your
abs are now.
I'm almost 42 years old and I see my
abs everyday. That's not a brag: I hope that is incentive! I don't exercise
that much and I'm not on any diet whatsoever. Moreover, I used to
be fat. (There are pictures and people who will verify).
The first thing you have to remember:
your abs haven't gone anywhere. They are still under
your skin, waiting for you to notice them. They are also waiting
for you to understand the three cardinal pieces of information about
having a body which you like - and which works well. There are only
four that are in your immediate control.
- What you eat is 80% of seeing
your abs
- Whether you exercise is 15%
of seeing your abs
- Stress is 5% of seeing your
abs.
- There are no miracle products
or quick solutions.
That's all. I could actually end the
article right here...but I won't. You deserve explanation on each of
these:
1. What you eat
is 80% of seeing your abs:
Everything you put into your mouth
has the potential to benefit your goals or harm
your goals. If your goal is to be fit with an energetic body, then
eating food which your body can't process as nutritive sources
will not give you energy or leanness.
 This
"rule" of food is unarguable. Your body CRAVES nutrition:
vitamins, minerals, protein, healthy fats, healthy carbs. Your body
wants these building blocks in the simplist form: WHOLE UNPROCESSED
FOODS. If you give your body "food-like products" (you know
what these are), your body can't get the correct nutrition to work
correctly.
"What is my body
'working correctly'?"
Simply put, when your body works correctly,
it processes the food you eat as fuel, uses the nutrients, and eliminates
the rest. If you don't give it the correct nutrients, or give it more
food than it needs, it will rebel: you might get headaches, stomacheaches,
unhealthy skin or hair, low energy, organ dis-ease, and adipose tissue
(the medical word for "fat").
"What do I do
about making my body work correctly to stop those bad things happening
in my body and stop the fat?"
You must learn to be aware
of your eating habits, first and foremost. Once you know what actions
you are doing, you can start a path of correction. The GREAT NEWS
is that once you make the corrections to healthier food, your body
will start working better starting almost immediately. You will feel
more energetic, for an example. And you will start seeing healthy
fat loss in a few weeks, at a healthy speed: 2-lbs a week.
"I'm going through/past menopause.
I'm just getting wider and feel bigger. Am I hopeless?"
You aren't hopeless, of course not!
But you feel some pressure because of your changes in your hormones
and the changes in your appearance. Your body is supposed to slow
down at this time in your life, because it's no longer ready to bear
children every month.
But you can't stay sedentary as you
did when you were pre-menopausal, or else you will stay overweight!
Some women could do any (and all) resting they wanted, with no 'large'
effects - that is, they didn't get any bigger. Now, with the addition
of homonal changes and losing muscle (part of the aging process),
you are forced to watch your food (and exercise), and actually pay
attention more carefully than before. You must now start to watch
your intake (your food) and your expendature
(your exercise) -- just as you watch your finances.
Success is found in eating better and
exercising.
Many other menopausal women have survived
the menopause time - and succeeded in losing weight and getting very
fit. See the book "Fit
Over 40: Role Models for Excellence at Any Age" (your humble
author is a featured contributor).
| Read
more about eating better:
|
2. Whether you
exercise is 15% of seeing your abs
Exercise is the second component to
your goals. If you aren't eating nutritionally and you aren't exercising,
you definitely won't be seeing your abdominal muscles.
 To
be fit and have beautiful, sexy, tight body (at any age), you MUST
be active. Exercise and activity is unequivocal. If you see commercials
on television tauting that you can "use their product to get
a tight, sexy abs without exercise", that is blatantly untrue
- totally and completely. If you ask any woman with good abdominals
or a great body, they will say that they exercise. (Drug abuse doesn't
count, ha).
The body is made to be active.
Early man hunted and gathered his food; today, many people have desk
jobs and come home exhausted from stress. Most people get virtually
no exercise - and people who aren't active can't burn all the
calories they intake.
"But I don't have
time to exercise".
That's understandable. But you can't
get the abs you want, or the body you want, without doing the
work.
It doesn't need to be hours
per day - you can get great results in under 1 hour per day! But you
must exercise to burn calories and "tighten up" your muscle.
Have you seen my article on Top
Excuses - and Answers for Them? This is one of the top "reasons"
why most people don't exercise. But here's the truth: You definitely
have time for some exercise, because I
could ask you for a full breakdown of your schedule and we'd find
some time, and it would be perfect for your own schedule and needs.
"But I don't like
to exercise".
That's also understandable. However,
although you don't like it, for your health and for your abs, exercise
is what it takes. As this article states, there is NO MIRACLE CURE
to get you abs.
Does it help to tell you that many
elite athletes hate their own workouts? Yes, it's true! However,
for all the hating the workouts, they LOVE the results. They LOVE
how they feel later. They LOVE how they look later. They LOVE the
energy that their workouts give them.
Can you do something you dislike for
less than an hour a day for results you will love for the
next 20-50 years?
You don't have to like exercise,
you just have to do it. Imagine, only 4 weeks after
you begin making changes in food and start exercising, you will
see results.
"I'll get musclebound
if I exercise"
It's easy to think that way if you
see people swaggering around a gym being musclebound. But the real
truth is, most girls have absolutely no capacity to build hefty musculature,
and if they did, it takes alot of work to get muscle bound, including
eating very much, exercising immensely, and often taking androgens
(steriods).
Since you probably won't do any one
of these freaky-muscle-growers, it's not a worry you should have.
"The people in
ads and on TV say that I have have a great body without exercise...
or only exercising 5 or 20 minutes a day."
This is the complete TRUTH: the people
on television or in ads are lying to you. But they
don't call it "lying", they call it 'marketing'. They have
a product they want to sell you, and they have devised a way of
telling you about it which you want to hear.
The more you want to hear, "This is easy! No exercise!"
the more products will come out which says you don't need to exercise.
You cannot get a healthy, fit body
without activity or exercise, period. It's time to decide whether
you want to listen to those marketers tell you lies, or to start listening
to what you truly need to do: exercise.
Again, as the human body ages it loses
muscle, skin elasticity, and certain fat deposits, like in the face
area. One of the most efficient ways to combat loss of muscle is to
build muscle -- which is to use your muscles. A wonderful
weight-bearing exercise is to take brisk walks over 30 minutes (your
legs bear the weight of the body) and also to lift even minor weight:
build muscle so your body doesn't lose the muscle.
"What exercises
should I do? I'm confused".
Many people are confused, so don't
be afraid to say it. But don't let your confusion keep you from beginning!
There are many ways of getting exercise assistance, including books,
videos, and free Internet sources. I know it gets confusing with so
many sources! Here is my basic primer on exercise: "Muscle
Up". (Also see
"Training for the Neophyte")
For your abs: Amazing
Abs is an abdominals site. There are many wonderful ideas about
exercises FREE on the website. You can pick 2-4 ab exercises per session
and feel good that once your weight comes down on your midsection
through diet, you will start seeing results of all your hard work.
To be honest, most ab books, magazines,
and ab sites tell you the same exercises repeatedly. Every month,
a new magazine tells you "Take Back Your Abs!" or "Amazing
New Ab Exercises! ...
You don't need new ab exercises;
what you need is to do ANY ab exercises. You need to stop telling
yourself the excuses and find
the value to your own life enough to exercise.
"But I have a slow metabolism
from xxx medical condition".
Many medical conditions
slow the metabolism, and that's a sad thing. It's also sad to feel
frustrated by any fatigue. But since I've seen many people which difficult
metabolisms start an exercise program and work hard, it's definitely
not impossible!
It's usually a matter
of finding the solutions that work for you, and combining
them with solutions that work for everyone for fat loss.
All it takes is your
willingness to begin the fitness you have always wanted, and making
steps towards improving your condition. (You may need a doctor's permission).
| Read
more about exercise:
|
3. Stress is
5% of seeing your abs.
That stress which makes you feel so
frenzied is also making you (or keeping you) fat. Doctors and other
health researchers are discovering more correlation between the modern
stressful pressures and the connection to your body. So the stress
just isn't in your head anymore!
"How is stress
affecting my abs? I feel stress in my mind!"
To give you a small idea of how stress
affects your abdominals, I want you to understand a little about the
chemistry of stress. Don't worry, it's just the short version, and
there is no test later:
When you are under stress, the body
creates the hormone 'cortisol' to help give you energy to get through
the stressful time. Cortisol does many good things
in the body, but one of the bad things it does is sometimes goes haywire
if the stress continues often. One bad thing is that it influences
another hormone, insulin, to also go haywire
- and when insulin goes haywire, it creates extra fat. So not only
do you have several important parts of your body going haywire, but
you also gain fat just from stress. And the extra fat goes to where
the insulin is produced: your midsection.
Additionally, if you are chronically
stressed, you may eat 'comfort foods' to feel better, or relax by
being sedentary. These are only temporary solutions but they will
create larger problems because they lead to obesity and depression.
The solution is simple: discover the
sources of your stress and learn to mitigate ('turn down') the problems.
It's important that you take frequent breaks from the stressful
conditions DURING THE STRESSFUL TIMES. Good food choices and exercise
also help you de-stress, thus giving your body better strength immediately
and later.
"But you don't
understand my stressful life. I can't take a break!"
This is what all people say, so feel
in good company. But please know that if you don't take a break NOW,
something is going to break later -- probably your physical or
mental health!
No one can keep breakneck speed forever.
There may be a reason why our forefathers died so early - so much
work done by hand.
Just SIMPLE changes done on a consistant
basis --even as easy as a few minutes away from your workdesk every
couple of hours for a drink of water or a stroll down the hall-- can
save your life (and your sanity).
If you are overworked at home, it might
be time to teach the kids about folding their own laundry or assigning
your partner his own chores - so you can attend to your own health.
| Read
more about solutions for stress:
|
4. There are
no miracle products or quick solutions.
It's true. Nothing
worthwhile is instantaneous when it comes to your health. There are
a million products on the store shelves and a million books telling
you,
- "Quick!"
- "Easy!"
- "No effort!"
- "No exercise!"
- "Amazing new
diet!"
- "Lose pounds
and inches quickly!"
- "Look at this
movie star who used it!"
- "It will change
your life so quickly you will be amazed!"
- "Your friends/co-workers/buddies/girlfriends
will ask you how you did it! You'll be the hit of the parties!"
- "Your love
life will come alive!"
- etc
Here's the REAL answer: only the people
who say, "I had to work hard and make tough choices, but it was
worth it" are the ones telling you the truth. Getting fit is
hard work if you were out of shape, but it's SIMPLE once you have
gotten into shape.
"But I saw Anna
Nicole Smith talking about her weight loss product, and she looked
so good... are you saying that I should buy that?"
You can spend your money on whatever
you want. But many of those products are massively expensive, may
hurt your health in the long run, and you don't need them. They
are lies in many different ways, and they only suit to put money in
the pockets of the salespeople and marketers.
Besides, do you trust everything that
Anna Nicole Smith does? Or other people like her? She ate her way
into obesity and then someone paid her to take a weight-loss product.
We don't know what other substances she ate or drank, and we don't
know her real health.
Would you like to stake your life on
an ad campaign's coaxing you to buy their legal speed, or would you
like to take a healthy and permanant solution to your fitness desires?
"I saw an infomercial
which said their exercise would have me losing 5 inches in the first
week. I want to see my abs so much, why shouldn't I believe them?"
I can understand the desire to see
your abs and your other fit muscles. However, NO LASTING CHANGE
in your body is instanteous. If you lose it instanly, you can
gain it back just as quickly - the product was a lie or is
an illusion.
Only healthy eating and efficient exercise
can give you a long-lasting fit body and great abs. These are the
ONLY things. Even liposuction and surgical procedures are temporary
if the person doesn't exercise and eats poorly.
Find real solutions:
article: There is no escape from
your life
----------------------------------------------------
These are the hard truths about seeing
your abs. I can't cover every question, but this may help the beginning
ones. My passion is helping people make changes for a great life.
If you are ready to put aside your old
habits which weren't working, and create a life of health, fitness,
and personal completion, maybe you'd like personal coaching.
Personal coaching means that we create solutions which work for
you. Contact me and we'll
get you going.
---------------
|  Lauren
Muney, CPFT, CHC, BFA
is a fitness, wellness, and personal coach. She is a certified
personal fitness trainer with a special interest in biomechanics,
a certified health coach, and a Wellcoach. She has a degree in
graphic design. In 2006, she turns 42 years old.
Lauren's interest in looking deep
into the root of problems and finding solutions is the basis of
her business. She takes her skills from
somatics, mindfulness and integral psychology, orthomolecular
nutrition principles, naturopathy basics, sports nutrition information,
peak performance, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), feng shui,
and behavior modification techniques.
If all this sound like gobbledy-gook, good.
It's all real but no one needs to know any of these things. All
any client needs to know is that Lauren will listen and help you
solve your obstacles.
Lauren's first step is to teach you to be
aware: when you are aware of what you
are thinking and doing, you can change anything.
Lauren's website is http://www.physicalmind.com
Read more about Lauren on her Bio
page, or learn more about coaching on the Coaching
page. |
For more ideas on fitness, health,
or "alternative" methods for your lifestyle,
contact Lauren for coaching solutions! |
