A woman’s bodily, physical, health and dietary needs vary throughout her life. The key to maintaining proper balance is knowing her own body, even as it changes, and making small adjustments accordingly.
Many of us work all our lives to maintain a pleasant figure, so that we like what we see in the mirror. Hopefully this is mostly for us and not just for others. We find healthy diet options that work for certain seasons of our lives or based on current trends or even medical knowledge. However, during our lives, our bodies and metabolism change. Those changes can be due to home or work related stress, hormonal fluctuations and hormonal changes due to stress on our adrenal system, unnatural medications (prescriptions) or many other causes.
The female midsection is sensitive to numerous effects that have nothing to do with weight gain. Unfortunately, they make many women feel like they’ve put on weight, when they haven’t. Many women often seek diuretics for monthly water retention. Others take high blood pressure medication when all they need is a diuretic for side effects of water weight gain (as I did for inhaler side effects for acute bronchial asthma).
- Diet and women’s health advice 1 – Maintain physical conditioning routines and training schedules of variable intensity. The feeling of lethargy can make one feel like missing a workout. However, it is proven that if you can find enough energy to do an ‘easy exercise’, you restore your energy level and decrease your body’s tendency to retain fluid while keeping your internal organs moving. Drinking more water of course helps with an herbal diuretic.
- Women’s Health and Diet Tip 2 – Know your digestive system. As we get older, our digestive system changes. We can feel ‘fat’ when we have digestive issues causing bloating or retention which, with the right probiotics, helps us find our ‘little center again’ that has nothing to do with fat. A daily digestive detox or cleanse with organic food saves your body from having to deal with impurities of many kinds (i.e. sugar, dyes, preservatives, etc.)
- Women’s Health and Diet Tip 3 – Know your hormonal system. Pregnancy, or perimenopause (which can actually start in your 20s), is changing hormones and digestive glucose levels, adrenal fatigue, and the like that require us to rebalance our body’s chemistry by working with the changes and adjusting accordingly.
- Diet and Women’s Health Tip 4 – Know your metabolism. Of course, the best boost for metabolic slowdown is to add more weight training to your workouts. My favorite piece of equipment in my house is my total gym. I alternate it for a few workouts on my non-powered Gazelle treadmill or elliptical with other things every 6 weeks or so to keep it fresh. But the total gym is my staple or anchor in all my workouts.
- Women’s Health and Diet Tip 5 – Know how sugar or salt affects your body. Digestive changes and stress are important elements. I know it took me 2 years to figure out why my clothes changed from morning to night, until I found out that my system had developed a sensitivity to salt (since I never add salt to my food). I realized that I needed to read the sodium content on the labels now more than the fat or carbohydrate content to avoid an “allergy-like” bloating reaction. Can’t find much less than 100mg sodium, but I’m looking for 60-85mg. The average prepared food ranges from 350 to 750 mg of salt. So pay attention to how your body responds to the food you eat. When you go out to eat, take a look at restaurant menus online if they are available to help you narrow down your choices for healthier entrees.
- Diet and Women’s Health Tip 6 – Know how stress affects your body. Cortisol is not your friend. I noticed a salt bloat-like reaction for a day or a week when I felt stress rise or my heart rate increase during emotionally challenging events. It goes without saying that reducing stress has many benefits and exercise or physical activity has always been a great stress reliever.
My own 2 year old body shift metabolism slowed down, where did my flat tummy go from this morning? The important life work relationship stress rebalancing was a discovery process to figure out what was out of balance and what I needed to do to get it back into balance. . Let’s face it, life happens, but it doesn’t have to happen in and all over our bodies.
Getting back into balance is what balanced health is all about. The result: a dress size and a half, adding nuts, cheese (low sodium), and unsalted peanut butter that I had left at my ‘25% or less of daily low-fat intake on eating days’ back to my diet and back to my little average self.
Another key is more focus since body composition changes, you have to change muscle development to counteract. So on those big birthdays, who says you can’t wear college-size clothes? I always refused to believe that getting older meant getting a thick belly or gaining weight, and I’m living the dream! I hope you can use some of my experiences and ideas to work on your own whole body healthy balance program. Balancing and rebalancing is the key and I know it works!
