Belly Fat Busters for Seniors 12 Weeks to Lose Weight, Gain
Strength, and Improve Balance
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Contents
Introduction: Getting Older and Gaining Weight—It’s Not Inevitable
Belly Fat and Weight Gain
An Overview of How Our Bodies Age
Resistance Training Is the Answer
Chapter 1: The Basics of Perimenopause and Menopause—
What Happens as We Get Older
A. What Is Perimenopause?
B. What Is Menopause?
i. What Age Does It Happen?
ii. How to Know If You’re in Menopause
iii. The Truth About Losing Weight During and After
Menopause
iv. A Glimpse at What We’ll Focus on
1. Exercise
2. Nutrition
3. Managing Stress
4. Better Sleep Hygiene
5. Managing Your Insulin Resistance
C. The Symptoms of Perimenopause/Menopause
and How to Manage Them
i. Hot Flashes and Night Sweats
ii. Sleep Disruptions
iii. Brain Fog
iv. Dry Skin
v. Weight Gain
vi. Depression and Anxiety
vii. Reduced Sex Drive
D. When to See Your Doctor
Chapter 2: The Reasons We Gain Belly Fat After 40
A. What Happens to Our Bodies in Our Forties,
Fifties, and Sixties (Men and Women)
i. Between 40 and 45
ii. Between 45 and 50
iii. Between 50 and 60
iv. Body Changes in Men
1. Gaining Belly Fat
2. Loss of Muscle
3. Heart Issues
4. Prostate Issues
v. Muscle Loss
1. Neurological Decline
2. Hormonal Changes
3. Inflammation
4. Belly Fat
5. Slowing Metabolism
vi. Insulin Resistance—Feeling Hungry When You’re Not
vii. Hunger Hormones Are Out of Whack
viii. Unhealthy Eating Habits
ix. More Stress
x. Changing Sleep Patterns
xi. Not Exercising and Becoming Less Active Overall
B. The Benefits of Losing Belly Fat
Chapter 3: Let’s Talk about Your Diet
A. Things that Affect Your Metabolism
a. Genetics
b. Size
c. Age
d. Body Composition
e. Gender
f. Health Issues
g. Stress
h. Dieting
i. Activity Levels
B. Your Diet: The Biggest Contributors to Belly Fat
i. Sugar
ii. Alcohol
iii. Unhealthy Fats
iv. Processed and Ultra-Processed Foods
v. Eating Refined Carbs Instead of Whole Carbs
vi. Yo-Yo Dieting
Chapter 4: Changes You Can Make to Your Diet Right Now
A. Pantry Clean-Out
B. Drink More Water
C. Eat More Protein
D. Cut Out Added Sugar
E. Eat More Fiber
F. Eat Healthy Fats
G. Meal Prep
H. Mind Your Portion Sizes
I. Track Your Eating
Chapter 5: Let’s Talk about Exercise
A. Cardio for Losing Body Fat
i. General Exercise Guidelines
1. What Is Moderate-Intensity Exercise?
2. What Is Vigorous-Intensity Exercise?
3. Monitoring Your Intensity
4. Sample Rate of Perceived Exertion Scale
B. The Best Cardio for Losing Belly Fat
ii. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
1. Examples of HIIT Workouts
2. The Benefits of HIIT
a. Sample Home HIIT Workout for Beginners
1. Squat with Crescent Knees
2. Step Outs with Overhead Reach
3. Knee Smash
4. Squat with Knee Lift
5. Heel Digs
6. Crossover Knee Smash
7. Puddlejumper with Lifts
8. Side Squat Scoop
9. Dumbbell Swing
10. Low-Impact Jumping Jack
11. Side to Side Punch
12. Curtsy Lunges
13. Rear Towel Slides
14. Side Towel Slides
ii. Low-Impact Steady State Training
1. The Benefits of LISS Training
2. Examples of LISS
3. Sample Cardio Schedule for Beginners
B. Strength Training for Losing Belly Fat
i. General Strength Training Guidelines for Seniors
1. How to Choose Your Weight
2. Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness (DOMS)
3. How to Deal with DOMS
4. Discomfort vs. Pain
5. Rewarding Yourself
C. Best Strength Training for Losing Belly Fat
1. What Are Compound Exercises?
2. The Benefits of Doing Compound Exercises
3. What Is Circuit Training?
4. The Benefits of Circuit Training
Chapter 6: The Program
A. An Overview
i. The Breakdown of the Workouts
1. Warm-up
2. Total Body Strength Circuit Workouts
3. Flexibility Workout
4. Core Workout
5. Suggested Workout Schedule
B. Should You See Your Doctor Before You Get
Started?
C. What You Need for Your Workouts
a. Equipment
i. Dumbbells
1. Alternatives to Weights
ii. Resistance Bands
iii. A Towel
iv. Mat
v. A Step
vi. An Exercise Ball
b. Workout Shoes
a. Workout Clothes
a. Activity Tracker (optional)
D. Scheduling Your Workouts
Chapter 7. Warm-Up, Cooldown, Flexibility, and Core Workouts
A. Warm-up—You can use this warm-up or any
cardio of your choice before you do any workout.
B. Cooldown—This workout, or some other light
movement, helps your body heal after exercise.
C. Flexibility workout–This is a great workout to do
after any workout or anytime throughout the day.
D. Core workout—This workout can be done in
conjunction with your other workouts or on its
own. Just make sure you take at least one day in
between core workouts.
Chapter 8. Weeks 1 & 2–Let’s Get Started
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 9. Weeks 3 & 4–Getting Stronger
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 10. Weeks 5 & 6–Building Muscle
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 11. Weeks 7 & 8–Making Changes
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 12. Weeks 9 & 10–Getting There
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 13. Weeks 11 & 12–Your Most Challenging Workouts
a. Suggested Workout Schedule
b. Equipment Needed
Chapter 14: What Happens Now?
a. How to Change Your Workouts
b. Taking an Exercise Break
Resources
Introduction: Getting Older and
Gaining Weight—It’s Not
Inevitable
R
emember when you were in your teens and twenties? If you’re like
me, you never gave a thought about getting older and how your
body might change. We feel invincible when we’re younger and
never expect to feel anything different.
Fastforward 20 or more years, and a lot of things have changed in our
bodies, our minds, and our lives. Just think how different things are when
you get into your forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond.
Not only have your priorities changed, but you’re no doubt dealing with
many of the physical effects of getting older.
It’s normal to slow down a little. After being alive for so long, we’re
bound to have the scars to prove that. You’ve probably had surgeries,
injuries, chronic pain, and other damage that make your body hurt more or
just get in the way of feeling good enough to exercise.
Another thing that happens as we get older is that our bodies start to
change, particularly where we store fat. You may notice that you start
getting more belly fat, and this can happen even if you don’t actually gain
weight on the scale.
Gaining fat around the middle happens to most of us—men and women
alike— as we age. One of the main reasons for these issues is due to
hormonal changes. If you’re a woman in your forties, your estrogen starts to
decline, sometimes it starts in in your mid-thirties. If you’re a man, your
testosterone starts to decline as well around the same age. These hormonal
changes lead to a number of things:
Weight gain
Weak bones
Depression
Headaches
Fatigue
Brain fog
Mood swings
Hot flashes
Difficulty sleeping
Generally feeling like you spend most of your time entering a room and
not remembering why you went in there
BELLY FAT AND WEIGHT GAIN
One study published in the journal Climacteric suggests that hormonal
changes in women during perimenopause “substantially contribute to
increased abdominal obesity which leads to additional physical and
psychological morbidity.”
Studies also show that, like women, men typically show increases in
belly fat with age and decreasing hormones, putting us all in the same boat
of more belly fat.
Women typically hold their body weight around the hips and thighs but,
when you go through perimenopause and menopause, you quickly find that
your fat stores shift right to your belly.
Men typically hold extra weight in their bellies, only adding to that
extra fat as they get older and hormones change.
This can happen even if you’ve changed nothing about your eating
habits or exercise routines, which makes it all the more frustrating.
Here are two things I want you to know if you’re in this situation:
You’re not alone, and it’s not your fault.
While scientists know we gain belly fat during menopause and, for men,
andro-pause, it’s only been in recent years that they’ve found out why. As
the experts say, “Proteins, revved up by the estrogen drop, cause fat cells to
store more fat.”
What that means is that your body just naturally stores more fat without
making a single change to your exercise and nutrition habits. Worse, you
don’t even get to enjoy that piece of cake or slice of pizza you passed up
because you were trying to be healthy.
And how much weight you gain varies from person to person. One
study published in the International Journal of Obesity suggested that some
women can gain up to 12 pounds eight years after menopause. For men, one
study found that, per decade, the average male gained about 3.3 pounds
around the waist per decade. That adds up to about three quarters of a inch.
But, even if you don’t gain weight, you may notice your waistline
expanding as your hormones keep changing. Again, these are normal
changes, but they aren’t written in stone.
The nice thing is that there’s something we can do about it. No, we’ll
never be our younger selves, that’s just the way aging works. But we can be
our best selves now no matter what’s going on in our lives and bodies.
Learning more about what happens as we get older can help us make
sense of what we can and can’t control.
AN OVERVIEW OF HOW OUR BODIES AGE
We’re going to get into the details of perimenopause, menopause, and, for
men, what is called andropause to learn what happens to our bodies as we
get older, but I want to pull back and focus on the big picture.
There are a variety of things that contribute to weight gain as we get
older, things I’ll cover later in this book in detail. But I think it’s really
important to understand that there are a lot of moving parts here and you
can’t always tackle all of them at the same time.
That’s okay. We’re here to figure out what’s going on and how you can
get started with a program that will help target multiple goals at the same
time.
Here are just a few things that happen as we get older:
Hormonal Changes—As mentioned before, estrogen levels tend to
become more erratic, which may make your periods shorter, longer, or
even skip months at a time. For men, waning testosterone affects sex
drive, muscle loss, and more fat around the belly.
Stress—As we get older, stress takes a strain on our bodies and minds.
Chronic stress causes us to gain weight, especially in the belly, and
studies show that aging causes oxidative stress way down in our
mitochondria that can lead to damage in the body and aging.
Loss of Muscle—We naturally lose muscle, something we call
sarcopenia as we age, particularly if we don’t lift weights. That loss of
muscle is a main driver of weight gain because it lowers your
metabolism so that you burn fewer calories overall.
We’re Less Active—We often have aches, pains, and other conditions
that make it more challenging to move around more. One study
published in the journal Clinical Interventions in Aging found that both
men and women are naturally less active and have a reduction of
functional fitness due to the aging process. This is due to loss of muscle
strength and changes in body fat, flexibility, agility, and endurance.
These are all things you can change with some commitment to exercise,
and I’ve got your back on that.
Lack of Sleep—Sleep disorders are more common as we get older. As
we know, sleep deprivation not only makes us hungry for things like
processed carbs, but it also triggers cortisol, the stress hormone that
contributes to belly fat. Women and men may experience things like
sleep apnea, which involves snoring and interruption of the breath, and
women may have night sweats that interrupt sleep.
That seems like a lot to digest, but knowledge really is what you need most
to make changes in your life. Patience, education, and of course the habit of
exercise are all things we’re going to work on.
I’ve been through this and I’ve had so many clients experiencing this
very issue. It can be frustrating. It affects your self-esteem and your
confidence. You want to feel good and look good, right?
This is so important to me because when I gained about 12 pounds, a lot
of it around the belly, it affected every aspect of my life. As a personal
trainer and fitness writer, I want to be an example to my clients and here I
was, in that same boat as many of them.
It took some experimenting to figure out what worked and what didn’t,
but I learned a lot through experimenting with different types of workouts.
I’ll tell you what the real secret is:
Resistance training.
RESISTANCE TRAINING IS THE ANSWER
Depending on when you grew up and your gender, you may have very
different opinions about lifting weights. For women growing up in the
sixties and seventies, it was all about cardio.
If any weights were used, they were usually tiny dumbbells that had us
doing a lot of reps. Think Jane Fonda.
Men, on the other hand, were coached more into weight training and
are, therefore, much more used to the idea of lifting weights than some
women are.
Yes, cardio exercise is important, but adding muscle to your body is
what makes the biggest difference.
If you’re skeptical, let me share a few things that may motivate you to
start (or continue) exercising and lifting weights:
According to one study, 80 percent of people over 50 have too little
muscle and too much fat. This is probably not a terribly shocking fact
for most of us, but it’s good to be reminded.
There is a cause and effect relationship between losing muscle and
gaining weight. That means the more muscle you lose, the more fat you
gain.
We may lose about five pounds of muscle every decade if we don’t lift
weights.
Muscle is metabolically active 24 hours a day. If you lose five pounds
of muscle, your metabolism drops about three percent. You burn fewer
calories and those extra calories end up stored as fat.
This metabolic slowdown can lead to an extra 15 pounds each decade,
which is crazy, I know.
To sum it up, if you’re not exercising and lifting weights, you may lose 15
pounds of muscle and gain 45 pounds of fat over the decades.
That’s a lot and probably something most of us aren’t aware of.
But, here’s the good news: This is reversible at any age.
In just one study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise,
experts found that, first, loss of muscle contributes to frailty and functional
impairment. They also found that resistance training can help you gain
muscle if you’re an older adult. The bottom line is, you’re never too old to
make changes in your body!