If the usual advice worked for weight loss after menopause, baby boomer women wouldn’t be facing belly fat and bat wings. Without realizing it most boomers are following a fat belly formula instead of the flat belly formula they want. The old advice to move more, eat less, can and does actually backfire.
Instead, reduce your exercise, eat more, and stress best (yes, not less, but best) and the results are balanced hormones that make weight loss possible.
These seven ways to weight loss after menopause are not random. They each impact the next. You don’t have to go for them all at once. These seven components have helped midlife women finally lose weight and feel great.
Hint: The feel great happens first. It’s your sign you’re shifting that internal environment. Don’t let the scale predict your happiness.
1. Get more of the right food
Eat more vegetables. Eat more fat. Eat more high fiber foods. If you’re a woman, be sure you’re getting adequate protein at each of three meals. Whether you choose to eat vegan or Paleo or some “flexitarian” style in between, protein will preserve your lean muscle tissue.
Eliminate or severely reduce your intake of sugar and simple carbohydrates. Yes, wine drinkers, that’s you. Assess your own daily nutrition for the area where you could improve.
2. Exercise less and with more purpose
While we’ve been conditioned by media and the old (yes, old and incorrect) “calories in/calories out” equation to think that the more exercise we have the better, if you’re doing it and it’s not working, stop! Fewer minutes and miles flipped for every exercise session assigned a specific goal could mean your exercise takes as little as 10 or 20 minutes a day.
Focus on moving more all day every day. That is, take the stairs and get up frequently from your chair if you sit at work. This all counts more than that 30 or 60 minutes at the gym that makes you exhausted or sends you to the kitchen immediately after where you overcompensate.
3. Best your stress
It’s not going to go away as long as you have a heart rate. Learn to harness the power of your stress and the stress hormone cortisol. It is after all, also the energy hormone.
Exercise early when cortisol is highest. Allow yourself to chill in the evening when stress hormones should be coming down. Embrace the idea that stress is a natural part of a meaningful life.
4. Sleep deep
When you sleep well, you give your body the hormones it needs to be at it’s best, and you also decrease the potential hormone imbalance that happens when you’re deprived. Get into a wake up routine and establish nighttime hygiene that you follow like clockwork.
That means no more sleeping in and no more staying up if your eyelids are drooping. Listen to your body telling you what it needs at night, and override that impulse to push snooze in the morning. The sooner you get into a rise and shine habit, the sooner you’ll establish balanced hormones that control your optimal weight.
5. R & R on time
Rest and relaxation are under-appreciated in our society. We’ve got adrenal burnout and metabolism slowing as a result. The ultimate in rest is sleep. Few of us can deny ourselves of sleep for long. Yet the less-obvious ways of resting and relaxing are often neglected. Women who listen to other’s needs first are especially poor at this.
Plan your rest days in as much detail as you plan your work days or your exercise. Assign yourself two hours of a VIP meeting… on a massage table or in the hammock with a good book. Write in that time to take a hot bath (and lock the door). Put your feet up (even if under the desk) after a long exercise session.
source: Easyhealthoptions
