Moving through Midlife | Habit Stack & Movement Snacks for Midlife Moms, Parenting in Midlife | Fitness over 40

Ep 63: Beyond the Belly

July 18, 2022 Courtney McManus
Moving through Midlife | Habit Stack & Movement Snacks for Midlife Moms, Parenting in Midlife | Fitness over 40
Ep 63: Beyond the Belly
Moving through Midlife
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Show Notes Transcript

As someone who has worked with women the past 16 years, the one question I get asked most is what can I do to get rid of the belly?

Here I discuss a few things you need to focus on to help get rid of the belly pooch through:
-Breathing
-Posture
-Blood sugar
-Gut Health
-Hormones
-Stress
-Movement

If you would like to learn more make sure to grab our:
Belly pooch (copy 01) (mailchi.mp)

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Welcome to raising healthy humans, a podcast created for busy moms where you can easily find information on health and wellness for your family. Enjoy experts who share tips on how to raise children through each phase of life. Gather current information on nutrition and wellness and listen to Courtney, a health coach, movement specialist and founder of form fit and active and supportive community where she helps busy moms move more on raising healthy humans podcast, Courtney shares her personal life experiences, training, knowledge and conversations with other health and wellness experts so you can raise healthy humans. Hello, how is everyone I hope you are having a wonderful day. My name is Courtney and I wanted to welcome you. My name is Courtney and I am a certified personal trainer who has worked with moms the past 16 years I started my business as a franchise, I was in a franchise and I operated that company for 10 years. It was a stroller fitness franchise company, I then decided to go out on my own. And now I own form fit. I work with women on posture and breathing. And just anything that involves you know, something that a mom needs, whether it be you want to be able to find ways to move throughout your day, you are busy, you might be dealing with diastasis recti, a pelvic floor problems incontinence, or just want to be able to work out. That is what I help moms do. So just to let you know, I am Courtney. I'm a certified personal trainer who works with busy moms and have worked with them for the past 16 years. And I want to help you with that low belly pooch. So this is where it gets a little difficult because as a trainer, I want you to feel comfortable in your body no matter what. And that is where it becomes difficult because what sells is me telling you to get rid of something. But it's really important for you to also feel comfortable in your body. So I want to make sure that you understand that I'm here my goal is to help you reconnect to your core and feel good about yourself. So the first few things that I'm going to talk about are things that I've spoken about before, if you know me, you know that I talk about breathing and posture. So the first one is your breathing, we as a society have gotten to where we start to chest, breathe. So that is this breathing. If I were to tell you to take a deep breath in right now you probably go and you'd see your shoulders rise up and lower down. So this is a chest breather. This is called paradoxical breathing. And it's where you're going not through a natural breathing pattern. And this creates a lot of chest and neck tension. You don't expand your lungs, and don't work your diaphragm properly, which then affects your pelvic floor. So we need to get back into breathing properly, so that we are working our diaphragm properly, which will in turn, help us to work our pelvic floor properly. And what happens when we're doing this paradoxical breathing is when you breathe in, if your breath is if your body's going up, the breath then goes down. And that's creating pressure down which in turn might be creating that low belly pooch. So we need to work on expanding through our ribs. So think deep breath in, expand through those ribcage, and we call it 360. Breathing. So if you think like a jellyfish and how it opens and closes, that would be what you would be doing for that 360 breathing. The other thing is back breathing. So when I tell people to go 360 breathing, and you can try this right now, if you take your hands, you place it around your ribs, and I tell you to take a deep breath in, you might and you'll see I kind of rise up through my shoulders. I'm definitely a chest breather, breathe in. And you might notice you feel your ribs here but where you may not feel them is in that. So the back ribs start to have difficulty expanding because we haven't gone through this full breathing pattern so our ribs aren't able to move like they used to because we've got muscles in between each of our ribs. That kind of helped create this movement pattern. So we need to start working on back breathing as well and I have a few exercises if you're in the Facebook community, the form fit long community I have videos on that breathing in there that you can join in and watch. But it's basically the one that I tell people to do is when you're in your car driving, just sit back, wherever you are, take a deep breath in, and you want to feel your ribs pushing into the chair. And usually when people do this, they feel this release in their mid to low back, because there's a lot of tightness there. So that is two exercises that you can do for breathing. And the goal is to get that breathing pattern more natural, so that you're not constantly putting pressure down on that low belly. The second thing that I wanted to talk about is your posture, and posture. I'll first say that posture is something we shouldn't always think like I've got to be imperfect posture, posture I want you to think of as movement, and how can we move through different postures, because when we move through different postures, we are creating more opportunities for our bodies to be put through different positions. So I'm going to start there with that. But many of us are in this rounded forward posture. If you think like when we're sitting, think about all the times you sit throughout the day, right now we're sitting, hopefully, maybe you're not, I don't know. But you're sitting at work, you're sitting in your car, you're sitting to eat, maybe hopefully breakfast, lunch and dinner, you're sitting to watch TV, you get the picture. So we're in this position, add these into our life. And now we're in this position with this, which creates this more downward effect. And if you've ever been like on a weekend, where you're sitting and just scrolling, you'll start to like notice your body starts to really fold in. So this position, if you feel like your ribs, and then you feel your belly pressure is going down. That is a lot of pressure, again, going down on that low belly, which again, in turn, if we think about it up the line as well, our breathing pattern, our ribs can't work like they're supposed to when they're stuck in this position. So it's really important to work on opening that chest up. Again, if you're in our community, you'll see the thoracic mobility, it's just kind of like this opener exercise, which is great for helping you to open up their shoulders again. So we've got to get out of this rounded forward posture. And the one thing I like to recommend people do is just pretend that there is a string got running up your spine, and you're gonna pretend someone is pulling the string from the back of your head. So pretend someone's pulling the string from the back of your head and we're not flaring our ribs, we're just thinking of lengthening straight up and you'll feel how that then provides you this natural position of your body and you don't feel that pressure down. You may still have a slight belly pooch, but it's not so much down and I didn't put this in my notes. But another thing that affects that low belly pooch is sucking in. So when we suck in, what happens is you suck in from your belly button. So it creates this pulling sensation right there at your belly. And if you ever look at yourself in the mirror, and you see this like divot in on your body, where your belly button is like, you know, if you're looking at yourself from the side, and you see this little divot in in line with where your belly button is, that would tell me that's a huge indicator that you are one who sucks in if you wear jeans too tight, this will naturally occur. If you wear yoga pants like the yoga pants I have right now actually these I had to change. These are not the ones that I was talking about. I have a pair of yoga pants that have this elastic, it's like compression pants and has elastic right where the waistline is right at that belly button. It pulls in digs in terrible terrible for that belly pooch because if you think if you're pulling in in that one area, what's happening, pressure is then going down. It's not allowing for full expansion. So pressure is not able to go or I'm sorry, pressure does go down because you've kind of walked in that one area so that's another thing that you need to work on. If you are interested if you're wanting to know like okay, she's giving me all these things I need to work on the how do I work on them? Just so you know, I do offer a program where you can just buy the program. It's called core connection or I have a membership portal and that's A monthly membership where you have access to many different things that I'm going to talk about today. And that would be like, once you stop paying, you no longer have access the core connection program, if you stop paying, you pay for it in a bundle. So if you stop, you know, once the payment is there, you will continue to have access to that. So that's the only difference really, between those two, if you do the membership, the core connection program was is within the membership. Okay, so moving on to cortisol and stress. So cortisol, I'm going to explain it to you this way, as cortisol is we have our stress response. And our adrenals will pump cortisol into the body. Now, when cortisol is dumped into the body, glucose is also pumped into the body, because your body is saying, there's a threat, there's something that I need to be worried about. And I need to respond. So you're the glucose pushes into your system to help you get through that situation. So if you have to, I'm trying to think of things like, you know, we've all heard the running from the tiger situation. But think about it, like from a standpoint of the mom, so your child takes off running, and you might be in a parking lot, well, you're gonna have this increase of cortisol, your body's going to pump out cortisol, because what do you have to do, you need to get to your child and make sure they're safe. So you then take off running, your body uses that glucose right away. It's done what it needs to do, your body uses that glucose, you can grab your child, everybody's safe, the difference with where we are in society. There's many times especially right now in our political climate, where we're dealing with a ton of stressors. And what's happening is we deal with that stress, our adrenal glands push out the cortisol, our body responds by giving us an uptick up tick of glucose. And what happens once that glucose hits our system, we're still strolling, or strolling scrolling through our feed. And instead of us using that glucose, it's going to be stored as fat. So if you deal with belly pooch, and it's especially that mid tire, so maybe not so much the low belly, but this is more of that midsection belly pooch that is, that could be there's two things that really could be cortisol, that could be your cortisol response. And we've got to start working on getting that under control. So meditation, you've heard this numerous times. And if you're a type A personality, you're going to think, yeah, I'm not doing meditation, but Type A's need more meditation that anyone else. So something for you to know if you're a type A is make sure that you are taking time to meditate and you don't even have to think about meditating, just sit and be look out in nature of nature. Sometimes I'll look at the clouds, I just tried to calm my system. Another thing I like to do is go to Insight Timer, they've got some great, like, follow along ones that you can do. And they're great for just kind of helping you zone out. And but you're not having to like think about breathing or anything specific. It kind of tells you what to do as you go. So that is what I recommend for cortisol. I do want to touch on one thing with cortisol in that mid belly, like fat tire is what they call it area. When you have this area, maybe you're just gaining weight in the middle. There's two things that while I said there's two things that could be a part of but HIIT training. So high intensity interval training is great to go after that kind of tissue, that kind of fat, I'm sorry, that kind of fat. Hit training is excellent. The problem is, depending on where you are in your life, if you're dealing with perimenopause, it may not be where you need to be with exercise. So if you are one who exercises a lot, and you are doing three to four days of hit training, and you aren't noticing a difference, it probably is that hit training because and you've given it some time. Okay, so we're talking like five to six weeks before you start to see results. If you've given a time and you're either continuing to gain weight, not on the scale, don't look at the scale because some of it might be muscle. But if you are Continuing to gain weight in the midsection, you might be having a cortisol response. Now we all deal with cortisol responses to exercise, that is the natural thing. It's good for us in small doses. The problem occurs when we are dealing with a lot of cortisol, from other stressors in our life, maybe busy job, home life is chaotic. You know, dealing with kids at home, especially for the summer, you know, you're adding on adding on adding on and exercise on top of that is just creating more of a cortisol response. So in those situations, I would say, hold back on the high intensity, you can still take high intensity classes, you just don't want to be pushing as hard as maybe some other people are, you might want to pull back and be doing some lighter intensity work. Okay, so I mentioned that there's two things that may be affecting that cortisol, so hormones, and cortisol is a hormone, but in the sense of like I just mentioned with your exercise, we as women, we have the joy of dealing with constant fluctuations of our hormone levels, and depending on where you are in your cycle will depend on what you should be doing for thinking about the high intensity interval training, you may not want to be doing high intensity training during your cyclical, like your periods, things that may not be when you want to do it, that is more of a resting point. So yoga, stretching, pilates, those style exercises, even some even strength is okay, as long as it's not, you know, high intensity type strength exercises. So paying attention to where you are in your cycle will depend on different types of exercises that you're doing. And if you want to know more, I do have in the membership portal, if you click on hormones, you'll be able to see in there I've got it all laid out, like each phase of your cycle. I also offer you meal plans for each phase of your cycle workouts for each phase of your cycle. And then also a synopsis. So you know, what, what you should be doing doing during this time, how you should be sleeping, or working with your sleep, how you may want to work if you are someone who likes, you know who was working, like if I think of myself, as a business owner, there are certain times where I should be doing things like lives and pushing. And then there's times when I should be retracting and doing more calming and focusing on creation rather than being out in, you know, doing things like this. So hormones is also great for you to look out for that belly pooch, because it could be affecting it. The other thing that I had mentioned, I said there were two is blood sugar. So if you are dealing with that midsection, and you're like I don't really have a lot of stress in my life, my life is pretty easy going. Then the other thing is blood sugar. Another wonderful thing that we deal with, I would say I I didn't really notice it for myself at 41. Once I hit about 4243 that's when things started really going crazy. And that's where I started feeling that I struggled with certain foods. So this is blood sugar. When we get older, we become insulin resistant. So we can't handle insulin like we used to. Therefore we need to pull back on the amount of carbs especially refined carbs and sugar and alcohol and all the amazing wonderful delicious stuff, right? So we've got to start cutting back on that what I recommend people do when you hit perimenopause, I really would recommend you start making sure you're eating enough protein and fat. I am not one who says to start restricting anything. I really like you to listen to your body. I think some people do well on certain foods. You may love oats you may never have any kind of problems with oats so keep going with that if you don't notice just because I say you should up your fat and protein. If you are eating oats and you feel good and you don't feel different, you feel like level then keep doing that you feel satiated, all of that. That's great. But if you if you Eat something in the morning, and you're like heartstart. In a race, I'm starting to feel a little anxious, I'm feeling more, dealing with more highs and lows, I might be craving stuff that would tell me you're having some sort of reaction to what you've eaten. And we need to really kind of hone in on that. And I would maybe then have you change what you're eating, adding more fat and protein for protein, what I recommend, and what you'll hear, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not that but I am a health coach. And I do get a lot of nutritional information. And I like to educate myself. So I would not say this is specific to any one person. But what many people recommend is, if you eat about 60 grams, 60 to 75 grams of protein in a day, for what you're talking 120 to 150 pound female, you're striving for that. So it's I think it's like point six, eight grams, I keep wanting to say ounces, it's not ounces, point six, eight grams, up to over one gram per pound. That was hard, sorry. So that's I kind of figure, my goal is to try to hit 60 grams a day of protein. If I can get above that, then that's really good. But I really try to strive for that. And not just at dinner I want you want to try to spread it out through the day. But what I recommend you do is breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we got to get out of this snacking throughout the day, because that also affects your blood sugar and insulin. And we want to keep where we've got some time in between our meals. So hopefully that helps. I kind of went off task here a little bit. I do want to say that when we're talking about blood sugar and what you're eating, oh, make sure that when you're eating certain foods or proteins that I do like to I don't like to say, like keto, I don't like to call it a diet. I don't like where we have come as a society. Because I think those are too restrictive. Does that mean? I don't believe in keto? No, that's not what I mean. I think keto is great for some people. I think keto green is great for some people. But I also think that eating some carbs, some healthy whole grains is great for some people as well. So I really think it's individual, which is why you won't hear me like touting one diet, because I do think we've really got to look at it individually. And one of the reasons why is our gut health, we all have different microbiome, our microbiota in our belly is different. And this is you probably have started hearing this, this is very much a buzz word recently, because I think it's only been within the last 10 to 15 years that scientists have found that we have very varying microbiome microbiomes. And microbiome affects so many things within our system. It affects how we think our mind our mental issues may be due to our microbiome, this leaky gut that so many people are dealing with auto immune disease because of the leaky gut, gut, this is all micro biome related. And if you deal if you are one, who struggles with saying you can't eat something that's supposedly healthy, you know, like, oh, I can't really eat. I've heard people like nightshade, I can't eat nightshades and I can't eat kale, my stomach, I have a problem digesting kale. That is because of your microbiome. It doesn't mean that you can't eat that. Yes, you can't eat that right now. But once you start working on your microbiome and getting the healthy bugs back into your system, then and get rid of the bad bugs, you may start to be able to eat kale because you're providing your body with the bugs that it needs to kind of help create a more symbiotic system within your gut. They have done like scientists have been looking at these tribes. I'm kind of going off on a tangent but the stuff I find so interesting, and I will bring it back to the point. So they've studied these tribes. Indigenous cultures say that were their microbiota they deal with know that you know, high blood pressure no So heart disease, no, nothing, no, no cancers, no anything like that. And they have some of the most diverse microbiome out there. So that I find really interesting. And I think the more we can diversify the foods that we're eating, with fruits and vegetables, and healthy proteins and healthy fats, and, you know, you can even get into the seeds and the beans and the nuts and all of that to kind of help as well, the better. And the point, the reason I wanted to go off on the tangent of gut health, is because depending on your gut and your microbiome, you could be dealing with some bloating. And if you're dealing with bloating, you're dealing with that low belly pooch. So the goal is to try to help identify, why, what am I eating? What is affecting me? How can I start changing my diet doesn't mean take away, take away take away, we got to start adding the healthy stuff to start cleaning up our microbiome, so that we can start to eat some of this other stuff. If you're dealing with issues every time you eat beans, and I'm not these are not I want to preface this, this they're not allergies to Okay, sensitivities are not always allergy sensitivities is your body is up against something because of the leaky gut. So you've become sensitive to it. It does not mean you're allergic to it. Okay, two different things. So hopefully, that answers your questions that you may have. If you have questions. Stay on and let me know I do want to direct you to a few things. If you are interested in learning more about this nutritional aspect. I do have some information in my program. But I also want to provide you with a resource of someone I love. I have interviewed her on a podcast. If you listen to my podcast raising healthy humans. It is episode 52. It is called under dieting with Lisa Kilgore. She is amazing. She kind of honed in on you know how I mentioned about the oats that I deal with issues when I eat oats and I feel like it's insulin related. But she said that it may be the reason it might be affecting your blood sugar is because you are deficient in a specific nutrients. So she recommended I get this nutrient back in my diet. And then that may help me to get back to eating. So I thought that was fascinating. I think she knows her stuff. She's really, really great at what she does. And you can find her go listen to that podcast if you like or if you'd like her, then you'll be able to see where you can find her. But I'd love to have her back on because she was great. And then if you're not interested in doing the membership or things like that, I do want to also direct you to two episodes where I talk about hormones so that you can gain more information about that. And it's episode 41 In my podcast, and that is understanding the hormonal cycle or something like that. And then episode 48 It was understanding your body with Sj she is out of the UK I believe. And she works with women on hormones as well. So there are a few things that you can do for that. And then you can also join our cord connection program. If you want to go through the posture and breathing and working on strengthening that deep core line. That information is all in that cord connection program. And I wanted to if you're not already a member, I wanted to offer you the opportunity to jump in. I'm going to be offering everything while the core connection program or my membership for 25% off. So you will have you can get that for 25% off you have a week to sign up because this is going out through replay. So you can sign up that will be until what the 23rd till next Thursday it stops. So you have until next week to sign up you can sign up for the core connection or for our membership and if you sign up through the membership, then you can get a week free to try and then you will get three months at the 25% off if you're interested and I wanted to provide every single one of you a bonus as well. That if you decide to join that will allow you access to a month of our classes our live classes on On zoom, so if you want to join any of our fitness classes, you can try it for a month. So just purchase those and that will automatically you'll get all the information you need to be able to sign up for that. So, hopefully, that provides you some information and you can feel free to stay on the call and ask me any questions that you would like. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen to our podcast. I hope that you found this information valuable, and I hope that you were able to immediately use some of the information that was provided, make sure to go check out our show notes for all of the links that we discussed today. As a mom, I understand that at times you can feel alone and are looking for that sense of community. Here at form fit. I am bringing moms together in a healthy and supportive community. I would love for you to come join us over on our free Facebook community that is form fit community. Join us over there where we can get to know you more, or feel free to try out our membership free for seven days. It provides you with workouts recipe guides, information on healthy hormones healthy habits, posture information, accountability calls, and in person in zoom events. Plus, you can receive one on one training from me for 50% off. Find out all the information by going to form CIT online.com so that you can learn more. Now, go out and enjoy your day while practicing small healthy choices that will make lasting changes