Fitness Over 50 for Women: Fitness, Diet and Weight Loss Tips to Shedding Fat and Keeping It Off: Stay Fit

By Carrie Hicks

We live in a fitness-crazed culture, but is there something to all the hype?  Yes, there is, and this is it for we of the older female set:  Strong women live better.  We live longer than our menfolk, and mostly have for centuries.  So being strong and fit helps us take care of ourselves more independently. It helps us enjoy the people in our lives and the activities we can all do together – when we get and stay strong and fit.

Inside You Will Learn:

·         Reasons to pay attention to your fitness that go beyond strength. 

·         Benefits of exercising for fitness that go beyond results your body may show you.

·         How it can be fun and create social opportunities – while side-stepping the old No Pain No Gain mindset completely.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Guava Books
• Release date: Jan 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386328612

Book preview

Introduction

Lots of my peers have a really hard time imagining their quality of life at 90 or 100 years of age ... or beyond.

Well, ladies, we need to face some facts: We females outlive our men by many, many years. And we’ll probably make it to those centennial ages, too, if we play our cards right!!

But let’s back up a few decades. It’s not only how you feel and move about when you are 100 years of age. How do you wish to feel, move and enjoy life now and during the years moving up to your centennial birthday: your next 10, 25, 45, or 60 years of life?

Oh, my – some of us have only lived HALF of our life!! That puts things into different perspective, indeed!

What will you do, physically, with these coming years of your life? Can your body keep up? Maybe you need to do something different from what you are now doing...

If you are just 50-something now, 60-something ... or beyond – you need to look at such questions as they help decide the quality and direction of your life!

I asked myself these questions after witnessing a (are you sitting down?) 101-year-old man run a marathon. Run. A. Marathon. By the way, he only began to run at 91 and started out easy by doing walk-a-thons...

If that isn’t motivation enough, how about the 95-year old exercise teacher, who started teaching at age 23 and just keeps on going?

Or the 80-year old marathon runner, who first ran at age 72, and whose times have only been getting faster.

Take a moment to consider the 77-year-old grandmother who can do one-handed push-ups and deadlift 215 pounds – when she herself only weighs 105 pounds!

And last, but hardly least – a Swedish woman who did 55 pushups in 1 non-stop minute (yup – nearly one pushup per second), recorded on video for posterity, at age 72.

WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Why aren’t we mature women more fit, especially after the age of 50? I see two problems blocking us in our fitness intention and a couple of solutions to those problems.

Problems:

All problems or excuses are in your mind. You are the one and only person in control of that thinking you do.

You are the voluntary victim of your own wrong thinking and beliefs

Example: I’m too old for this. My diagnoses get in the way – I’ll hurt myself. I’m disabled, can’t exercise. Sheesh, at my age it’s time to slow DOWN.

You are the voluntary victim of our cultural expectations, which is just more wrong thinking that has turned into incorrect beliefs

Example: I remember meeting Indian women from Delhi who said to me, We Indian women just never exercise; it is not anything we even think of doing. This from privileged women who were raised in the culture that invented Yoga!

Example: Hollywood stars and the expectation that we must look like them at any age ... but here we are, having no clue how to get from where we are to where they appear to be, fitness-wise.

Solutions:

Remember that 101-year old: You DON’T know how long you will be living, but isn’t it a perfect time to decide that all those years will be healthy, and your body will carry you tall and strong through them?

Be your own person with your own goals, as you look beyond the age you are (example: Age is a myth and illusion – I can do and be anything I choose, at any age. I’m going to live at least 20 ... 45 ... more years, so let me make them GOOD ones! I decide to be stronger than ever before!)

Decide to be relentless about achieving those goals (example: I decide to do my floor workout right away when I get out of bed, THEN reward myself with a pot of tea – No hustle, no tea!)

What is Fitness, Anyway?

Fitness and health are really two different creatures.

Fitness is the ability to successfully get your body to do a range of physical activities and body movements. You call on certain body capabilities to achieve certain results. As the saying goes, Strong people live better. When we speak of fitness, we are talking muscle strength – lifting power, muscle tone, the range of motion from your joints, the endurance of breath and body – and the ability of your inner-body systems to support these types of outer-body movement.

Health is your degree of freedom from passing illness and serious diagnoses.

A perfectly fit person can catch a cold or have the flu: in other words, NOT be healthy at that moment. Likewise, no amount of outer-body exercising will cure that unhealthy inner-body state you have created in your arteries, digestive tract and elsewhere in your body’s inner systems, which you