Midlife “Body Flow”

Midlife Body Flow

BLOGGER:  RENEE FISHER

Twice a week, I take a Pilates Reformer class at my gym. The “Reformer” is a big, lightly padded board on wheels, with levers, pulleys, weights, and other components, all employed without the benefit of a user’s manual. It was either invented by Mr Pilates, the same person who invented people like Madonna, who is one of his disciples. Or, it might have been invented by some unnamed person who wanted to “reform” what Mr Pilates invented, since regular Pilates consists of human beings working out on the floor, whereas this gives a person thousands of dollars worth of apparatus to insert between the floor and one’s body. In addition, we are sometimes given a large, hollow, padded box to place either “long ways” or “short ways” on the board. Since, as well all know now, I am still not clear which way is “long ways” or “short ways.” I watch what other people are doing, and copy them. Other equipment includes the “magic ring,” the “jump board” and “the pole.” I choose to take Reformer classes instead of regular Pilates, because when I tell people I do “Reformer Pilates” they have no idea what I am talking about and so are completely impressed. They assume it is some advanced form of Pilates, known only to Victoria Beckham and other anointed individuals. The exact opposite is true. Reformer means no working on the floor, which is much easier. And, because space is limited due to the size of the machines, it also means much smaller classes, affording either individual attention or, on really good days, some kibitzing among participants that can waste some time. The downside to Reformer is that it costs money in addition to my monthly gym membership. Regular Pilates is included in the membership fee. But I have never given even a thought to regular Pilates, so I keep paying. There is a lovely, older woman in my Reformer class. She is in her eighties and brings her portable oxygen equipment with her. I am not making this up. I like having her in class, because she needs extra time to arrange her oxygen whenever we switch position, and this corresponds exactly with the extra time I need to figure out what the instructor is talking about, since I am usually initially facing the exact opposite way that everyone else is. One day last week, the sweet older woman suggested to me that I take a class called “Body Flow,” which is, like regular Pilates, included in gym membership. She takes Body Flow once a week and Reformer once a week. It works perfectly for her. She said Body Flow allows people to work at their own level. This sold me. First off, I like the phrase “Body Flow.” And it has the added advantage of being something else that others are unfamiliar with when I tell them what I do at the gym. I took the Body Flow class a couple days later. There were about twenty women in the room, whose combined weight equaled one large meal. Our equipment consisted of a mat the thickness of a good quality paper towel. I should add that the sweet older woman wasn’t there. As I came into the gym, I had noticed her in the Reformer room, a bad sign. Aside from two grey-haired women who each looked like when they are not at the gym they are hiking the Appalachian Trail, I was old enough to be everyone else’s mother. The instructor started with the following words: “We have a really, really tough workout planned today! Get ready! We will twist our bodies around in all kinds of ways that human bodies are not meant to twist! This will be brutal!” I scanned the room, Apparently, these words were greeted as positive, since everyone around me looked like hyenas just presented with a fresh zebra kill. The instructor proceeded by throwing out names of positions in rapid-fire manner. Most of them involved animals. To me, everything sounded like “The Down Dirty Dog,” except for the one called either “Ape” or “Gorilla,” which involved bending over from a standing position and placing the entire palms of one’s hands under one’s feet. After awhile, I really wasn’t paying much attention. I sort of slumped down on my mat and wondered why an eighty-something year old woman with portable oxygen equipment would do this to me. Isn’t there some kind of rule that when people get to be a certain age they can’t screw around with your life?

Renee Fisher is a Realtor and writer who lives in the Washington, DC area.  She is the co-author of two award-winning books about life after 50 www.invisiblenomore.com and is the DC Boomer Humor columnist for examiner.com DC-Boomer-Humor-Examiner.

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SPANX

SPANX

BLOGGER: RENEE FISHER

I bought a lovely dress to wear to my son’s wedding last September.  I had to wear Spanx with this dress.  Most people know about Spanx.  I know about it because my former best friend Jean became a model, dumped me and now Spanx is her best friend.  I also know about it because the 5’9” Hollywood celebs who weigh 95 lbs but who have “no eating disorder of any kind whatsoever under any circumstances uh uh no way,” all say they wear Spanx under their size 000 (then altered down) dresses.

All of this instilled in me a Spanx Anxiety Attack.  First off, you could make Spanx out of steel-infused nuclear polymer and I still wouldn’t look like those people in the magazines.  Several years ago, I went to Macys and tried on a pair of Spanx.  Sure enough, my belly totally disappeared, as promised, but I immediately developed a midriff bulge that went all the way up to my neck.

When I got home from London, I went to Nordstrom. I brought the dress with me to the store.  Not knowing which particular body area would be in crisis mode at the time, I gathered up all the available styles of Spanx they had.  The only one I didn’t choose was the one with long legs.  This was, after all, a knee length dress, and while the Spanx would make my legs look great, I wasn’t sure how attractive it would be to appear to be wearing a wet suit.

The nice salesgirl led me to a dressing room and unlocked the door for me, assuring absolute privacy and protecting the general public from mistakenly entering my dressing room and seeing what a 62 year old woman looks like, sans bra, doing a St Vitus Dance in front of a three-way mirror while trying to pull on a rubberized garment .

OK, let’s discuss. I start with a warning: The following might be too graphic for small children and too emotionally damaging for younger women who fear the aging process.  The three-way mirror may be my friend (and I emphasize the word “may”) once I have completed putting on my clothing, but it is not something I enjoy when I am struggling to encase my torso in a space age tube of fabric.  The first one I tried on had no built in bra—the Girls got so smashed down that it took me several minutes to locate them.

Another style had a bra (hallelujah!) but stopped a few inches past my waist. The moment I put it on, it started to roll up. I was sure that it would be at my breasts by the end of the ceremony and up to my neck by the time we made it to the reception.  Subsequent styles had various other characteristics that didn’t work (don’t ask).  I finally had to admit that no style, no matter how uplifting, how packed with tight space age polymer, how much coverage it afforded, could turn back the clock to those glorious tiny bikini days.

I chose the best two and marched out twice to show my husband who had been patiently waiting just outside the entrance to the dressing rooms.  I let him choose the one he thought looked best with the dress; he preferred the one that was made like a leotard.  I paid the $85, and, while the salesgirl was ringing up the purchase, thought for $85 I should be able to pay someone to stand in for me in the wedding photos.

“I’m really discouraged,” I told my husband as we exited into the mall.  “What happened to my body?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but if you find yours, look for mine as well.”

On the day of my son’s wedding, I put on the Spanx and noticed for the first time that the garment seemed to be missing a critical opening.  Without this critical opening, I would have to take my dress off and remove the Spanx entirely in order to use the rest room.  Basically, I would have to be naked.  As this seemed an item entirely too significant to have passed Quality Control, I searched again.  Sure enough, there was an opening, but it was so small and constructed in such a strange way that it would have required an accompanying video to explain its use.

I was fine during the ceremony.  But, the minute we arrived at the reception, I had to use the rest room.  I quickly calculated how long the Mother of the Groom would be required to be at the reception, and the answer was considerably longer than I would be able to contain myself.  There was no getting around it: I headed for the rest room.

I decided to be cool, calm, rational, and methodical.  That plan lasted about five seconds.  The rest of the time I spent contorting myself so as not to wet my Pale Grey Mother of the Groom Dress Constructed Of That Kind of Fabric That Shows Every Single Drop of Anything That Could Possibly Get On It.  Had I failed, I would have had to spend the entire reception in the bathroom stall and have food delivered to me under the stall door.

The wedding reception was fabulous, and, on my next trip to the rest room I surrendered and did what I had tried to avoid doing during the first trip.  I’m not sure what the other women in the rest room thought to see a pile of clothing on the stall floor.  I suspect that if I showed the Spanx to my husband he would have said, “Oh, you did this incorrectly,” or something like that, with that same voice he uses when he says, “You pushed the wrong button on the printer,” or “You were holding the remote backward (or upside down or sideways).”  I will never ask him—I simply refuse to have a man explain my undergarments to me.  Instead, I will go on a diet to lose ten pounds and never wear the Spanx again.  When that fails, I will go to my seamstress and have her alter the Spanx.

Renee Fisher is a Realtor and writer who lives in the Washington, DC area.  She is the co-author of two award-winning books about life after 50 www.invisiblenomore.com and is the DC Boomer Humor columnist for examiner.com DC-Boomer-Humor-Examiner.

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Life’s Little Changes – THE FAT VS. MUSCLE FACTOR

Life’s Little Changes – The Fat vs Muscle Factor

BLOGGER:  JULIE WEBSTER

It is a known fact that as we age our bodies change.  Starting around the age of 45 we start to lose muscle mass at a rate of approximately 1% per year.  Although this doesn’t sound like a big deal, it really is.  The reason being is because at the same time our bodies are starting to lose muscle mass, most people are starting to gain weight.  The average American gains 1-2 pounds of weight per year as they age.  Again that doesn’t sound like a lot but if you average that over 10 years, you have gained 15 pounds!

Let’s look at that.  Muscle is about 18% denser than fat.  In other words, think about weight verses volume.  A pound is a pound but the amount of space one takes up verses the other is the key factor.  For an extreme example think about the weight of one pound of feathers verses one pound of brick.  Since the brick is so much denser, it would take up much less space than one pound of feathers would.  You get the point?

So, if muscle is 18% denser than fat and we are losing mass yet gaining weight what do you think we really gaining?  Fat, of course.  Our bodies are either staying the same size or, in many cases getting physically bigger.  Consequently our ratio of muscle to fat is changing dramatically.

Less muscle means less strength thus decreasing our ability to do even the little things.  I met a woman who could no longer carry her own groceries into the house because they had become too heavy and she was not very old!  Verses the woman who still lifts weights at 68 years old, looks fabulous and carries just about anything and everything she wants.  Big difference.  This doesn’t even address the bigger picture of doing the fun things.  I have a 77 year old friend that plays tennis like no body’s business.  She competed in a league a few weeks ago, played for 3 hours to win the overall competition, and she was playing against women in their 50’s.  Now that’s living!

A decrease in muscle mass does not only equate to less strength.  With less muscle, a decrease in bone density rises thus leading to the potential for osteoporosis.  In addition studies have shown that an increase in strength can:

·       Result in a decrease in arthritic pain

·       Improve balance and flexibility

·       Assist in balancing blood glucose levels

·       Have a positive impact on our emotional being

·       Strengthen the heart

·       And much more

So let us start by figuring out our own ratio of body fat to lean muscle.  There is a means of measuring this called the Body Mass Index or BMI.  BMI is a comparison of your height to weight.  This formula is being used more and more in the medical field and yet it is not necessarily an accurate way to measure body fat, in my opinion.  Take the individual who is very muscular and consequently quite lean.  They will come up on the BMI chart as having too high of a body mass index for their size.  Again this is because of the fact that muscle is so much more dense than fat.  A very small person, with a body fat of say 15%, will appear fat on with this measurement.  Or the body builder that is 5’6” and weighs 240 pounds.  His body fat may be around 12% and yet on a BMI chart he will show up obese.

A better way to determine the ratio is through actual measurement of body fat.  This can be done at a gym by using calibrators where skin is lifted from the muscle and measured on various parts of the body.  It can also be done in a pool by measuring how fast you sink; supposedly a better way and yet not too easily found.  For those of you that don’t have access to these kinds of measurements, I did find a source online that seems pretty accurate.  Simply go here to take that test:  http://www.healthcentral.com/cholesterol/home-body-fat-test-2774-143.html

Once you have this information you have the power to change it.  Rather than think, ‘I’m doomed!’ it is time to think positive.   It means you have an opportunity to make changes that can have an incredible impact on your health, your future and how to enjoy the balance of your life.  An Encore Life.  How great is that?

As time goes on and the kids are grown, there is more time to focus on ourselves separately and together with our partners.  It is a time to engage in new endeavors.  To think outside the box.  To explore things that we might have thought about in the past but just didn’t have the time to try.  It is time for an even better life!

Building muscle requires resistance.  When a muscle is challenged physically it puts stress on the bone.  The bone in response creates additional osteoblasts or cells that produce more bone.  The process is known as the piezoelectric effect.  Greater stress = more cell production=denser bones.  And, as mentioned, this is an excellent way to prevent osteoporosis.

Not only will that additional muscle strengthen your bones but it will increase your basal metabolic rate or BMR.  This is the basic amount of energy needed per day to function.  Additional muscle mass = higher BMR = additional calories burned.  Therefore a person with a higher ratio of muscle to fat can and actually needs to eat more.  Now isn’t that a great thing!  Of course what we eat is important as well.  To create these positive changes requires a blend of exercise and diet but for the purpose of this article let us focus on the exercise portion.  The diet will be addressed in a future article.

For now, let us take a look at the ways in which we can increase our muscle mass.  Of course there is the obvious – going to the gym to lift weights.  This is a great way and works fantastically for some.  For others this sounds like a death sentence!  Here are some additional ideas that can be really fun, give you a cardiovascular workout as well and offer resistance training:

·       Hiking up and down hills (my personal favorite).  Although this doesn’t address the upper body it is great for your legs and hips.  You would need to supplement with some upper body training.

·       Rowing.  This fun sport actually uses both your upper body and (to my surprise) a great deal of legs.  Overall it can really offer resistance as well as cardiovascular fitness.

·       Yoga can be a good form of resistance training, especially the more aggressive types such as Ashtanga Yoga.

·       Taking classes such as certain forms of dance, boot camps and so forth.

·       Kayaking.  This is more for building upper body strength but it is fast-paced and fun!

·       Rock Climbing.  Now this one might really take you to a new place!

·       Even the Wii Fit can offer those that want to stay inside a great workout.

These are just some ideas.  Play around with different types of activities that you enjoy and see if it fits into a strength or resistance training category.  Do not buy into the, ‘well I’m getting older…’ mentality.  Step out and up and make tomorrow even better than today!  You will be amazed at just how much you can change your body and fitness level!  We are only limited by our imagination so be creative, build muscle and head towards a more dynamic, healthy future!