Little Diet Tweaks For 50 Year Old Women That Burn Belly Fat

There are many articles written about the disadvantages women have over 50 when it comes to losing belly fat. While it is true that natural shifts in hormone production make your body more likely to deposit fat in your midsection. The mature woman over 50 has some advantages that make her more likely to finally succeed at fat loss. Because of these advantages making a few little tweaks to her diet can make a big difference to her weight.

As a woman over 50 you have come to understand what works best for you concerning diet. You are also more willing to evaluate weight loss methods and abandon the "miracle diet" for a more intelligent approach to reaching your goal. These traits add up to true advantages and will help you reach your goal of a slimmer waistline.

If you are a woman over 50 who wants to burn belly fat, try these little tweaks for two weeks and notice the difference.

1. Cut the Trans Fats. Trans fats started being used a little over 50 years ago. At the time there were some questions about the safety of these man-made fats, but the food industry loved them because they increased shelf life as well as the flavor of their foods. Now, 50 years after their introduction, research is surfacing about how these foods contribute to abdominal fat and food cravings.

For the next two weeks I challenge you to avoid trans fats. This means avoiding any pre-packaged foods, including frozen diet meals (yes, most of them contain trans fats). Instead, eat whole foods that have not been processed. Fill your daily diet with oatmeal with frozen berries, a chicken Caesar salad, whole fruits, and home-made vegetable soup and notice the results almost immediately.

2. Aerobic Exercise Before Breakfast. You will get an added metabolic boost from your exercise if you do it in the morning before you eat. Get up and head out the door for a walk.

3. Add Two Days of Resistance Exercise to Your Week. When you age muscle mass is lost if it is not worked. And because each pound of muscle burns about 50 calories during the day, you can see why working your muscles is important. You can go to the gym and lift weights, or you can work your muscles by doing yoga.

4. Eat For Your Body. As you age your body is less efficient at turning carbohydrates into energy and more efficient at storing them as belly fat. Therefore you want to decrease your carbohydrate intake by a couple of hundred calories.

To make up for the lost calories swap the carbs for protein. At dinner try eating your chicken on top of a bed of lettuce, instead of in a bun and you will easily meet the need!

Shed Those Extra Kilos and Fat Easily!

We all desire for the perfect figure and body contour. As much as we may desire, some maybe blessed but others may have certain areas of your body, wherein fat accumulation exists which makes you look fat and shapeless. A well shaped and toned body not just attracts but also boosts your self confidence. For some, getting a fad diet plan in place is one of the prerequisites to shed those extra kilos and burn out the fat, reducing the flab and paunch. But more commonly it's observed that we as humans do succumb to temptations when it comes to good food and hence sticking onto a dietary plan is much more difficult in the fast paced times of today. It's easier said than done.

The body fat lingering around your tummy can be reduced with effective weight reduction programs guaranteeing inch loss in matter of few weeks by exercising and eating right. Your food intake, cravings, dietary pattern and lifestyle habits do influence and affect your looks and contribute to weight gain. The most effective way to regulate weight is to eat all day long in small time meals and avoid hogging over food.

Mental Workout to Reduce Weight

While physical workout and diet plan is give more importance when we talk about achieving the hour glass figure, very little or no importance is given to mental workout. The moment you start visualising a thinner you, the idea is conceived in your mind and starts growing if you stay positive at all times and maintain focus on your health goals. The right attitude as it always matters do help a long way to start introducing minor changes in the lifestyle choices you make and does contribute to a slimmer you.

Healthy Weight Loss

Healthy weight loss should be your goal and not deprivation of your body from essential nutrients and elements to growth. This might reduce weight initially but in the longer run shall make you look pale and less energetic. Do not opt for weight loss pills or products that assure immediate results for you never know about the side effects in the longer run. Your body does need a right amount of fat for energetic living.

Eat plenty of green vegetables and have nutritious fibre content in your meals for proper digestion. Your body needs healthy dairy products that are low in fat or with no fat. Beyond incorporating a healthy diet plan in your life, it's recommended to ideally drink 8-glasses of water every day and even too much exercise is bad.

Catch Up on Good Sleep

It can make you wonder how can a good sleep help in weight loss? For if you are up all night and reach out for the caffeine and sugar, don't get a healthy breakfast for running late, grab on some junk food and fillers for the evening and above all no proper sleep for 7-9 hours induces negative thoughts and makes you feel less energetic. Your metabolism controls your body weight; it determines burning out those extra calories. If you don't sleep all night, then your metabolism is very slow. Allow your body to get into the "deep slumber" phase that helps it repair, cope and deal with everyday stress.

Stay Happy at all times

Your moods do affect and impact your weight. Some people when sad end up eating more food than usual and have craving for frequent binges. This does add onto the flab around your tummy areas and extra fat. Hitting the treadmill burns out the fat to some extent, but mood elevators such as practicing yoga and meditation to seek inner solace and happiness helps reduce weight significantly.

What you eat reflects on your moods and thoughts. They influence negative and positive energies in your life. Hence develop supportive relationships with like-minded people, care and love for your near and dear ones, opt for extra-curricular activities like swimming, dancing, music and elements that bring joy in your life. It needn't necessarily involve money investment at all cases, even cooking a delicious meal for your family can elevate your mood and make you happy. Happy, Healthy and Nutritious way is the ideal route to get the perfect figure and reduce your waistline by several inches.

There is nothing as gratifying experience to see a renewed you with perfect figure contours, and as frustrating routine to reduce weight and making healthy eating habits a part of your daily life. The challenges and fears experienced with weight loss can be reduced only when you understand your body better.

3 Step Diet Strategy Shows Women Over 50 How To Lose Those Last 5 Pounds

For women over the age of 50 menopause becomes a factor in the success of a weight loss strategy. Besides puberty and pregnancy, menopause is the next most common time for a woman to gain weight. If you think about it each of these time periods in a woman's life share something in common - hormonal change. These hormonal changes can make losing those final 5 pounds challenging for those women who are close to their goal weight.

Here is a 3 step strategy women over 50 can follow for the next week to reach their weight loss goal.

1. Be Carb Smart. Low carb diets can work, but you have to be smart about your carbohydrate intake. If you have been eating fewer carbohydrates, or even fewer calories, for a number of weeks and you cannot get your weight to budge, then you might be unknowingly making weight loss hard for your body.

On Day One allow yourself to eat a high carb meal. You can aim for about a 1,000 calorie meal and over 150 grams of carbs. This is not hard to do if you are having pasta, bread, or baked goods, and you should feel free to eat these foods.

This high carb meal resets your fat burning hormones that naturally decrease when you follow a low carb or low calorie diet for more than a week or two.

2. Cycle Your Carb Intake. On the two days following your high carb meal you want to drop your carb intake to around 50 carbs per day. Then on the remaining days of the week add an additional 10 to 20 carbs to your diet per day. By doing this you prevent your fat burning hormones from plummeting, which helps keep your body in a fat burning state 24/7.

3. Exercise The Right Way For Your Goal. The day after your high carb meal is the perfect day to use resistance training, which means exercise using either weights or your body weight. This type of exercise uses your large muscles and depletes the stored carbohydrates in your muscles. This prevents fat storage and sets you up for fat loss during the week.

You may want to add one more weight training day early in the week or you can opt to do light aerobic exercise for the remaining days of week. Aim for a minimum of 30 minutes a day.

By the end of the week you should see the results on the scale. If you are not quite at your 5 pound weight loss goal, repeat the 3 step strategy the next week.

Over-Eating During Holidays: Do You Blame Yourself?

Have you ever noticed, that no matter what holiday it is, there's food associated with the celebration? Even for religious holidays where you "fast" there's an ending of the fast meal that become part of the celebration.

It's finally becoming apparent that dieting doesn't work. Sooner, rather than later, the weight you lost is regained. 95% of all dieters regain their hard fought lost weight within a couple of month to two years. And, unfortunately, most people still blame themselves for getting overweight in the first place, and secondly for failing at dieting.

If you have fallen for the belief that limiting your food intake and increasing your exercise is going to make you lose weight permanently, holidays are a even more of a challenge. Going to parties and trying to avoid eating the foods you love is stressful. If you don't resist, you get disgusted with yourself, which adds to the stress and feeling of low self-esteem.

And yet, there is so much misunderstanding about how and why people gain weight. But unfortunately, despite the facts, there is very little disagreement among health care practitioners about how you gain weight, and how to lose it. The vast majority of diet gurus insist that you have to eat less, exercise more, avoid fats, carbs, and eat rabbit food. And this has become "common wisdom" in the general population as well, despite the huge failure rate! But if you read the actual research, you learn that is not the case.

Doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting different results is the definition of A DIET, and insanity!

The sad thing is people who are overweight, have taken on the belief that they are responsible for being overweight; that they over-ate, under-exercised, have no discipline, cheated at their diet, or did something else to "deserve" their over weight condition. They are stuck in the belief that being overweight is their fault, and they blame themselves instead of the flawed concept of dieting! This self blame is self destructive, stressful, and can actually add to their difficulty with their weight!

Perhaps worst of all, is that people who don't have weight problems will fight vehemently for their position blaming overweight people for being lazy and pigging out, causing their own problems. They even quote the Law of Thermodynamics (which doesn't apply in this situation).

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

- Mahatma Gandhi

There are circumstances that create conditions that make people overweight. Yes, over-eating can be one of the causes, but people don't typically over-eat unless there is something wrong with their body's feedback loop that tells them that they've eaten enough food! You only need to try to stuff more food in your mouth when you've had enough. You feel miserable. It's painful!

Some of the reasons that lead to overweight are:

• Genetic inheritance

Epigenetic inheritance- (this is the newest research- the stress your parents were dealing with in THEIR lives..)

Exposure to toxins while in utero, or during your lifetime

• Chronic or serial Stress

Stress not only changes your and slows your metabolism, but it can cause you to eat as a response to stress. Multi-tasking and being overly busy makes you eat mindlessly, unaware of your body's signals of satiation.

• Under-eating or Dieting

Chronic dieting puts the body automatically into fat storage mode to prevent death from starvation. Your body is designed by nature to keep you at a weight set point.

• Over-exercising

This increases your appetite automatically to prevent the body from losing too many calories, thus preventing weight loss. Your body is designed by nature to keep you at a weight set point.

So, don't diet or over-exercise to control your weight. Enjoy yourself, during holidays. This is the time to de-stress, and relax. Eat the food you love. But eat mindfully, and check in with your stomach to realize when you've eaten enough. It's when you deprive yourself of the food you love during the rest of the time that encourages binge eating!

Don't punish and blame yourself for something that is not "your fault". Self deprivation is stressful and can wreak havoc with your metabolism. When you pay attention to your body's signals of hunger and satiation, your body will keep you at your proper weight set point.

Can You Think Yourself Slim?

One great strategy for lasting weight loss is to link great pain to your current eating habits and pleasure to making better choices.

This might just be the trigger that stops you from reaching for the cookies/cake/chocolate when your trigger behaviour occurs. Trust me it feels great to recognise those occasions where you would have reached for comfort food and can choose not to.

Choice is what shedding weight is all about, nothing else!

Restrictive diets tend not to work because they are literally all about denial. When you deny yourself something you tend to crave it. Cravings are very hard to control. It goes back to the pain and pleasure principal and if your mind-set is "I have to feel miserable today so I might get thin tomorrow", what do you think is going to happen?

Most diets also fail because we don't change underlying attitudes towards food, how many times have you heard (or even said), " I lost the weight but as soon as I started eating normally I put it all back on"

Why? Because what we class as normal eating is not healthy, a quart of ice cream in one sitting is not healthy, drinking quarts of soda is not healthy, the same goes for candy, cookies, potato chips etc.

So how can we break free?

Make healthier choices, not as a diet but as a lifestyle. If we eat nourishing sustaining food, our bodies will naturally find the weight that is right, right for you, right for me. This is the best way to lose weight and KEEP IT OFF!

Learn your triggers, what makes you overeat?

Years ago I was a sales rep on the road, I would drive 50,000 miles a year. I used to eat in the car A LOT, I gained 30 lbs in a couple of years. Every time I went to put fuel in my car I put a lot of junk inside me, I finally worked out what was happening when I discovered that I had eaten 2 chocolate bars before even leaving the petrol station forecourt.

These days I still find that I want to eat if I surf the web or watch TV. So I now don't eat whilst doing anything else, more about that later.

Exercise.

Take some time and find out what triggers you, is it boredom, to distract yourself from pain be it physical, emotional or spiritual. Is it thirst, remember most hunger pangs are actually thirst.

It will be time well spent I promise you.

Women Over 50 - Why You Stopped Losing on a Low Carb Diet and How To Fix It

If you are like most women over 50 who go on a low carb diet you likely found that after about two weeks your weight loss slowed or even stopped. Low carb diets came on the dieting scene a few decades ago and they are still being used today, mostly because they produce fast weight loss, at least at the start of your diet. In this article we will take a look at some of the special circumstances facing women in the menopausal stage of life and how carbs can be timed to break through a weight loss plateau.

Low carb diets are appealing to women over 50 because they help reduce belly fat. Hormonal changes that occur at or around the age of 50 make it easier for a woman's body to store fat in the abdomen. Even if you had always stored fat in your legs, hips and butt, the classic "pear-shaped" body, after the age of 50 you will find that fat accumulates in your belly more easily. Therefore, leaving you with a more "apple-shaped" body.

If you have been following a low carb diet and have been generally pleased with the results; but, you have noticed that the diet has stopped working, here are some steps you can take to fix your low carb diet:

1. Add a Cheat Meal. Carbohydrates are your body's primary energy source. After a few weeks of following a reduced carbs your body shifts to using fat, and possibly protein, for energy. This is one of the benefits of a low carb diet. However, the down side of this is that your body looks at this shift as a threat.

Your body does not know that you are cutting out carbohydrates because you have started to get more belly fat. It only knows that it is not getting enough of its primary fuel and to "help" you, your body shuts down your fat-burning hormones.

Giving yourself one day off each week and enjoying a Cheat Meal that is high in carbohydrates gives your body the message that all is okay and your fat-burning hormones are reset.

2. Use Carb Cycling during the week. Instead of going low carb all week, cycle your carbs throughout the week. To do this effectively you want to have a cheat meal and then for the next two days eat a reduced carbohydrate diet. From the third day until your next cheat meal increase your carb intake by about 10-20 carbs per day. This prevents your fat-burning hormones from dropping too dramatically, and keeps carbs low enough to continue weight loss.

3. Take Irvingia Gabonensis. This is nutrient supplement that works for low carb dieters because it makes your body cells more receptive to the fat-burning hormones.

Low carb diets are popular with women over 50 and they can be followed with success. But, if your low carb diet has stopped working you can utilize a Cheat Meal, Carb Cycling and the supplement Irvingia Gabonensis to boost your fat loss.

I'm Stuck On My Weight Loss

Have you ever said to yourself, I'm stuck on my weight loss? You know you've been really good, OK, maybe could tweak a couple things, but you know that you should see the scale moving down? That's where I have been for a while now. I haven't gained any weight, but I'm stuck. I was talking to my Doctor about it and he recommended that I take a metabolic test. He said it would explain where I have deficiencies and if I have any food allergies. That would allow me to eliminate the foods that may be causing me to not lose weight. The results will also show what supplements I should take that will get my system functioning tiptop so that I can lose the weight. He works with a company called Metametrix. He sent me home with the test where I had to provide a blood test (finger prick) and urine sample. Everything you need is included in the kit, including shipment. I sent everything in and about a week later, my Doctor had my results.

Symptoms
I hadn't anticipated my results. I mean I couldn't believe all the deficiencies I had. And I found out I have a severe intolerance to pork (no more Canadian bacon for me), eggs and dairy. I also started looking at the list of symptoms that were affected by the deficiencies and food intolerances.

You ask, why am I sharing all of this with you? I am hoping that maybe I can provide you some insight. Does any of these symptoms sound familiar to you? You're foggy, can't focus, don't remember. Do you find yourself saying I'm tired all the time and have trouble sleeping? Or maybe you're doing everything right but you are on a plateau with your weight. Do you ever wonder why that is? Do you think that maybe it's your age, your diet, stress, all the above? It's crazy because sometimes we just go on with our day thinking these symptoms are normal. I know I did. I mean, sometimes we know we're having issues, but find it such the norm that we don't think twice about how it could be something that requires serious attention.

Test Results
So let me share a little about my test results showed. If any of this seems familiar to you, you may want to ask your Doctor if he/she can perform this test, or send you somewhere that can.

B-Vitamin Insufficiency
B-vitamins are essential co-factors in a wide spectrum of chemical reactions within the body and are essential for the production of important hormones and neurotransmitters. They are the most important vitamin modulators of human biochemistry. Having less than optimal levels may not cause specific symptoms in some, but may manifest in many people in the following ways:

• Fatigue and lack of vitality
• Exercise intolerance
• Diminished capacity to deal with stress
• Mood imbalances and sleep disturbance
• Lack of concentration and memory
• Blood sugar regulation difficulties
• Dermatitis and skin disorders.

Inefficient cellular Energy Production
This is a critical process that occurs within all cells and sub-optimal energy production may result in:

• Fatigue and lack of vitality
• Exercise intolerance
• Generalized muscle aches
• Lack of concentration and memory

Chronic Stress
A chronic high level of stress and a sub-optimal or fatigued stress response can result in:

• Fatigue and lack of vitality
• Exercise intolerance
• Diminished capacity to deal with stress
• Mood imbalances and sleep disturbance
• Lack of concentration and memory

Detoxification
A Sub-optimal ability to detoxify internal and external chemicals and toxins. Elevated body burden of toxin may result in:

• Fatigue and lack of vitality
• Exercise intolerance
• Lack of concentration and memory
• Increased oxidative stress and risk of chronic diseases

Dysbiosis
An imbalance of gastrointestinal bacterial growth. Dysbiosis may cause increases in bacterial toxins being absorbed and sent to the liver where the body's detoxification process is required to neutralize these compounds, putting additional stress on the detoxification system. It commonly can cause vague gastrointestinal symptoms such as:

Diarrhea and/or constipation (or alternating diarrhea and constipation)
Gas and bloating
Intestinal cramping
Flatulence (excessive gas)
Increased risk for arthritis and autoimmune diseases

Food Intolerance
I also had multiple food intolerances. They can result from eating the same foods too often (over exposure), poor digestion of foods, and/or increases in intestinal permeability (leaky-gut). Multiple food sensitivities can result in a myriad of potential symptoms including:

• Fatigue and lack of vitality
• Skin rashes and other skin conditions
• Respiratory and sinus congestion
• Increased risk for arthritis and autoimmune diseases
• Inability to lose weight
• Migraine and other headaches

So, this is in no way telling you that you have any of these deficiencies, I just wanted to bring to your attention that if you feel many of these symptoms, you may want to have it checked out. Here's to your health.