Belly Question

I most definately feel like my waist has expanded since adopting the whole woman posture. I did not have a small belly to begin with but after adopting the posture a woman asked me how far along I was! I felt terrible and said no its all me! I can't find a middle ground between holding my belly proud and letting it hang so it just sticks out. I feel like a lost cause and I will NEVER be proud of my belly. Oh well as long as my organs stay put!

A

Okay, now that you've been practicing relaxing your lower belly, see if you can start pulling the whole thing up. I have a feeling this might happen naturally over time, because it happened to me without my conscious doing. There was a time when my lower belly was kind of extreme and not very attractive. It was a concern for me because #1 it didn't look very healthy and #2 I knew it was a tough sell for me to say to other women, Hey, you can look just like me!

What happened over time is that I became pushed out in my upper abdomen and those muscles are tight as a drum even though I'm standing relaxed. Instead of lifting my chest I am really pushing my chest and upper abdomen out. It is a very natural look and my voluminous lower belly gets pulled up and taut in the process. I believe this has happened because natural breathing (relaxed lower belly) has created this musculature. The transversus muscles are exercised on the exhalation and the deeper we breathe (which can only be accomplished if we leave our lower belly slack) the more they are exercised. It is a very proud look. When I actually pull my chest up, I lose this other anatomy because my upper abdomen pulls in. Again, I believe this is how the body eventually configures with natural breathing, but for me it took a long time.

My baby granddaughter is learning to walk during which she greatly expands her upper abdomen. This is the natural posture of children around the world.

:-) Christine

You have described my belly exactly mommynow. My belly feels heavy as well as feeling bloated and this definitely coincides with my prolapses feeling worse.

It was feeling and looking a lot better and much lighter for a couple of months and I was doing a number of things- daily firebreathing, core exercises, cutting down a lot on wheat and sweet things, more walking, daily DVD exercises and some swimming. Almost all of this has fallen by the wayside for pre and post Christmas and I have only just started in the past couple of days to try and get back on track. Perhaps it is also fluid retention due to not drinking enough? My belly also swells around ovulation and period times. I am not proud of my belly because it feels unhealthy, uncomfortable and looks unhealthy.

Thanks for asking the question!

Frankie x

I can attest to what christine has posted
when I started the ww posture my belly was low and loose and NOT attractive or proud at all. so I stopped for a while and everything got worse. went back to the posture with more determination and patience and shortly before I got pg (a year ago, something like 1.5 years after starting this) I noticed in the mirror that my belly had changed. it was still not flat, but rounded in a strong way. still more prominent than before the ww posture, but taut and long. hard to describe.
and now I think I look like I'm 3 mo pg when I'm wearing clothes, but underneath the clothing the belly looks lean and muscular. with extra skin from the pg's but whatcha gonna do.
my waist definitely did expand along the way (before the pg) and I'm not sure why exactly. I dont' think I will ever fit into my size 2's again.

Mommynow, breathe with your diaphragm, but deep into your lower belly. The belly should expand and the little muscles between the ribs hardly expand at all and your shoulders stay relaxed and low. You can breathe as deep as you like. It just doesn't show in the mirror.

Louise

ps I've got the breathing bit right, but I am still struggling with the 'chest out further' bit.

If you watch a baby/toddler breathing only their belly moves up and down or in and out but somewhere along the line we get into bad habits and our breathing changes and our shoulders and chest move up and down/in and out. Breathing with our diaphragm and filling our belly is the natural proper way to breathe and I was taught this in CBT when trying to overcome panic attacks.

It does take some retraining and thinking about it at first but eventually I am guessing like posture it comes more naturally.

A

I too find it hard to relax my lower belly and let go so to speak when I am in posture when sitting and especially standing. I seem to be holding these lower ab muscles extra tight. I am guessing it will come more natural and easier as I keep practising it. I have taught myself to breathe through the nose as I was a proverbial 'mouth breather'. This was hard at first but is now natural for me and I don't have to think about doing it. It has greatly improved my asthma and breathing stamina in general.

Thanks for your reply Christine, and I hope to get there one day after many more days and weeks and months in the posture.

Good to hear your testimonial Granolamom. My belly is like a barrel that can expand throughout the day, that is taut when I am standing or sitting, and floppy when I am lying. I am cautiously optimistic, but I think I am also seeing a slight improvement after a couple of weeks now of daily firebreathing.

Frankie x

Hi Christine

I have done a lot of walking and people watching while on holidays (up to the bakery van for custard donuts for breakfast, then down to the boat ramp to check out wave and swell conditions for fishing, mainly!)

I have also been practising the chest-out-not-up thing, which has gone OK. During the process I have also discovered that the way I and others swing their arms while walking also has an effect on posture, particularly the position of the thumbs (believe it or not). Where your thumbs are pointing is related to the openness of the shoulders. ie if you slouch, your thumbs tend to point towards your body, or even backwards. This seems to be accentuated in people who are obese. It may be to do with fat deposits under the arms and from the back, that push the arms forward in the relaxed position and cause a slouch. If you consciously turn your wrists so that the thumbs are pointing forwards as you walk it brings your elbows closer to your waist and opens up the chest and shoulders.

I am not yet sure which causes what, but it might be another barometer that we can use to check our own posture as we go through the day. It is quite difficult to slouch with your thumbs pointng forwards, and it is quite difficult to open the shoulders with thumbs pointing towards the body.

Your comments, Christine??

Cheers

Louise

I think that the thumb position is indicative of the position of the shoulder. when the shoulder is internally rotated (what you typically get when you are standing slouched over) the thumbs will point in towards the body or even behind the body. when you stand with your shoulders broad and spine elongated, you externally rotate the shoulder, which brings the thumb position towards the front of the body.
my guess is that the shoulder dictates the position of the thumb, rather than vice versa.

This is so true and directly related to arthritis in the large joint at the base of the thumb.

When I was 25 I began to lose strength and develop pain and swelling in that joint of my right hand. By age 40 both thumbs were large, red, weak and very painful. I just had to motor through the pain because I wasn’t going to give up sewing or carrying large buckets of compost.

Around that time I attended an arthritis seminar with my step-mother-in-law and was interested to learn that arthritis in that joint is very common to people of Northern European decent. I’m not exactly Nordic, but I do have broad shoulders and long, heavy arm bones. They just said it was genetic and that was that.

For years, while many women beg their husbands to rub their back or feet, I leaned on mine to rub my thumbs! The pain was very severe and he used to grasp my thumb, pull it away from the joint and just hold it there for minutes. There was never any relief beyond that.

Then I developed the posture. Some months later – I have no idea how many – I had this remarkable awakening to the fact that my thumbs were healed. My husband was and continues to be completely amazed because no one knew better than he how trashed they were.

What you describe, Louise, is exactly what gmom has elucidated and in time if your arm bones are heavy enough they will pound that thumb joint to a pulp. I’ve written before about this, but it’s good to remind people again.

You can go to any mall to see teenagers hanging out and on most of them their arms hang from their shoulders like a bent coat hanger with palms pointing toward the back.

not to sound like I'm hawking snake oil, but the ww posture helped heal my wrists too. I developed this awfully painful cyst in my wrist, right at the base of my thumb and shortly after starting this posture it shrunk and was no longer painful. now it only acts up when I slip into old habits.

Thanks for sharing that, Gmom. My 25 year old son, who has gorilla posture, has developed a longstanding shoulder injury that physio does not seem to be helping. He has also now developed a little lump in the same wrist. You know what I am thinking, don't you?

I have spoken to him about posture (which I think is probably Wholeman posture as much as Wholewoman posture, with a couple of fine differences) and the relationship between spine, nerves, shoulders, wrists etc, and he agrees that his posture is not good, but he wants to get the shoulder, and now the wrist, fixed up before fixing his posture. The poor darling can't think about more than one thing at a time.

Men! Go figure!

Cheers

Louise

But I often have swollen knuckles, partic. my index and middle fingers...
and it's not from "pointing"...
I think it's all the handwork/sewing. Or ?
Zelda