Far 2 Fabulous

Abs-urd: Why a Flat Stomach Isn’t the Point

• Julie Clark & Catherine Chapman • Episode 92

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Episode 92

Abs-urd: Why a Flat Stomach Isn’t the Point.

A single moment in a shop—two women, three stone lost, and still “not enough”—opened a bigger conversation about why so many of us measure our worth by a flat tummy. We take you inside the subconscious, where safety and belonging outrank motivation, and show how decades of programming and social media filtering make “smaller” feel like the only path to approval. This isn’t a willpower problem; it’s an identity problem. And identity, thankfully, can be upgraded.

We unpack the reticular activating system (RAS)—your brain’s built‑in filter that deletes, distorts, and generalises what doesn’t fit your current beliefs. If your inner map says “flat equals good,” your feed, compliments, and daily choices bend to that script. We trace how Gen X women inherited a thinness code from magazines, diets, and praise tied to shrinking, then layered on today’s quick fixes and ultra‑processed routines. The result? A scale reading can flip your mood in a second, even when your body hasn’t changed at all.

So we rewrite the playbook. Instead of punishing overhauls, we focus on identity-level shifts: “I’m a woman who takes care of her body and mind.” We swap shamey language (“I’ve been bad”) for kinder scripts (“I’m listening to my body”). We praise strength, stamina, sleep, and steady energy. We curate our feeds to normalise real midlife health—resilience, recovery, protein, lifting, walking, and rest. And we bring in practical tools that work with emotion: EFT tapping to calm spikes, simple visualising to rehearse better choices, gentle NLP timelines to unhook old loops, and habit stacking that feels safe to the subconscious.

This is about reclaiming attention for what actually improves life: deeper sleep, a steadier mood, easier movement, stronger lifts, calmer days, and a nervous system that feels regulated. The goal isn’t a flat tummy; it’s a body you trust and a mind that doesn’t bully you. If you’ve ever felt “I know what to do, but I don’t do it,” this conversation offers clarity, compassion, and a roadmap you can live with.

If this resonated, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more women can find it. Then join our free Far Too Fabulous Facebook group to continue the conversation and build a kinder echo chamber together.

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Thank you for listening.

You can continue the conversation with us in the Far 2 Fabulous Facebook group. Come and connect with other women on a journey to empowered health.

For more information about Julie Clark Nutrition, click HERE
For more information about Catherine Chapman, click HERE

We look forward to you joining us on the next episode.

SPEAKER_00:

Fabulousness. Hello, hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Far Too Fabulous Podcast. It's just me, me all on my own. I'm sat under a blanket in my office trying to make the sound as good as I can in here. And it's not as much fun without having my sidekick with me. But as you well know, and I'm sure you are as well, we are busy, busy ladies, and sometimes something's gotta give, and we just have to do solo podcasts, which is fine. Today, what I wanted to initially talk to you about, and I am, but initially I wanted to go quite deep into how your subconscious is the pivotal point, basically of everything, but obviously we talk about things from a well-being point of view. I wanted you to leave this podcast knowing that you can't outmotivate your subconscious. You can't, you can't say trick it. There is definitely ways to trick it. You can't push against it. It has to be with you. So I was creating a podcast around this, and then today I went shopping and I overheard two ladies in the shop talking about how they looked, about weight loss and how they looked. And one of them had lost a considerable amount of weight, like over three stone of weight, which if anybody has like purposely tried to lose weight, three stone is no mean feat. And I don't talk about weight, I talk about body fat, and we don't, Julie and I don't talk about losing it because we don't want to find it again. We are, you know, changing our body shape and our body makeup. However, you want to phrase it. The fact that she has dropped three stones of body weight is incredible. And what she was saying was that she didn't think that she looked any different and that she still didn't have a flat tummy. Not once did she mention that she felt lighter or fitter or healthier or stronger. It was still that her body wasn't enough. I just, I wanted to, I wanted to give her a hug, actually, is what I wanted to do. There was nothing about how incredible she was. She was not of childbearing age any longer. I'm going to assume that she's had children. She was working, so she was fit enough and well enough to be doing a relatively physical job. She looked fabulous, and there was no recognition of any of this, and it just made me think like, where has this obsession with a flat tummy come from? This obsession with skinny, over fit, or energized, or well-being. And then, and I hear this conversation so much, so much, and occasionally I am part of it too, that we spend so much time and energy thinking and talking and doing things to become or want to become slim, skinny, less weight, and it's all consuming. And I just it I don't know, I am literally, I'm lost for words. And please, please, please, do not get me wrong. I still fall victim to this all of the time. When I went to Sicily in the summer, I like everybody was like, oh my god, I've got a bit of bikini on, I've got some outfits to wear, I want to look fab. And I am always looking into like new ways, efficient ways, fun ways that you can do this. I don't want it to be boring. It has to be interesting to actually keep any of us doing these things. And I always strive to come at it from a fitness and a well-being point of view. However, I did get on the scales. Now I've got body composite scales, so the top number to me doesn't mean very much. I want to see the body fat in a normal range, I want to see the muscle mass going up. I want to make sure that my hydration levels are really good. And most important is the visceral fat. I want to make sure. So the normal levels for that are between zero and ten. And I don't want mine anywhere near 10. I want it right right down, and it is slowly, slowly as I'm getting slightly older. It is creeping up. And so it is a constant what is the word? Like reinvention just to make sure that that number stays down. I mean, and I know that's just absolute BS because I know exactly what to do. Anyway, we'll talk about that probably a little bit later on. So I made the mistake of standing on these scales just before I went away on holiday, and I was feeling good about what I had been doing. Um, lots more weights. I had the half marathon that I've just run coming up, so I've been doing some more running, and I actually felt really fab. And I stood on the scales, and that totally obliterated it. It was not the figures that I was expecting to see. And from like one second, literally, to the next, I felt totally different about how I looked. Yet I my actual appearance had not changed at all. And we'd spoken about this on the podcast before: how you can stand on two different scales, and your body is exactly the same, but you feel better or worse depending on which one you stand on. It definitely played in my mind whilst we were away. Had I not done that, I would have felt much more confident, which is just utterly bonkers, right? So, what I want to do for this podcast is to have a look at this whole flat tummy thing, and then what we can do about changing the narrative. We are a generation of women, Gen X women, that have already changed so many things. We are realizing through our own parenting what we need to fix within ourselves and within them. We are raising the level of consciousness, we have raised the profile of menopause, we have brought patriarchy into the forefront of many, many conversations. We are healing generational traumas and we are still taking care of the emotions and most of the labor within the house. No wonder that we are exhausted and confused, but we are still doing it. We are an incredible, incredible generation of women. And if anybody can change this narrative, especially from growing up in the 70s and 80s, and what was programmed into us from the word go, we've got an uphill job, but we've done so much great work already. I have no doubt that we can do this too. So let's go back to the subconscious for just a moment and talk about its prime directive, like why it exists. Its main job is to keep you safe and maintain identity consistency. It's not there to make you feel happy or confident, it's there to make sure that you continue to exist. And it will do whatever it needs to to protect you from real or perceived rejections, threats, fears, whatever it is. And so already you can see that within our culture, not fitting in, not looking the same, and this is, I mean, this is getting worse and worse and worse actually through social media, not looking like the next person feels like a real social danger. So it's really difficult to try and break from that norm because your subconscious wants you to remain part of a tribe because that is where the safety is, and it wants you to be safe. And so when you try and do something different, you try and break the norms, it feels very scary, it feels very unsafe, and that is not where your subconscious wants you to be. And so the story that your subconscious has been told for probably your entire life is that being smaller or having a flat tummy equates to being accepted, being admired, being safe, being like everybody else, so you're not gonna get kicked out of the tribe, you're not gonna be on your own, aka, you're not going to die. And this is what runs all of the time. And so thinking about this whole flat tummy thing. Now, I remember when I was at nursing college, and I mean bearing in mind I was tiny, absolutely tiny, and I remember being very proud of having a body mass index that was the same as my age, it was 19. Uh, I don't think I've ever seen those numbers again. And I still remember being obsessed with like not having a flat stomach, and I absolutely did. And I remember one of my tutors telling me that if you had a completely flat stomach, especially when you were sat down, that you wouldn't be able to stand up because you wouldn't have enough skin to be able to stand up straight. And so obviously, when you sit down, you are going to have, even if you've got no body fat on your body at all, you are going to have little rolls on your tummy because you're not stretched up standing up. So that's always kept in my mind is that you have to have those rolls, otherwise you can't stand up, which I really I still remember that now. However, for decades, flat stomach has been coded as control, as success, as desirable. And so the flip side of that is if you do not have a flat stomach, you are not successful, you are not in control, and you are not desirable. And like I mentioned earlier, this has been imprinted within our subconscious right from the word go. For better or worse, we have had media pictures, magazine pictures, you think Kate Moss, you think, Twiggy, and they've been highly glorified. You could probably think of your friends or your parents or your grandparents like always being on a diet, and I'm fairly certain that you didn't hear your mum turn around and say, I'm gonna get really, really strong this month. You know, I don't think she looked at Vogue or I can't think of an I can't think of a magazine from our childhood that they would have read. But she didn't look at that and go, right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get really, really strong. It was always about the uh crazy exercise fads or the diets. And it was all about, and that was all that the conversation was about. And again, this conversation is all part of belonging and approval. So if somebody was talking about this, you would be talking about it too, so that you were part of this tribe, that you were accepted, that you weren't the one that was sort of stuck out on the edge, you were gonna be like the one that was easy to be picked off by the wild animals. This is what your subconscious is thinking, it's not caught up with us, and so then you will start to do it without even knowing that you are doing it, and when you do know you are doing it, and you know that logically it makes no sense at all, you still continue to do it, and this is the bit I want you to like prick your ears up, listen hard, it is not your fault. So every time you make yourself a promise that you are going to, and I'm getting the bunny ears out here, you know, eat well or be good or not be naughty with your food, or I'm gonna work out every single day. This goes against everything that you have got programmed in you. So I want you to just understand from the word go, it is not your fault, it's an uphill battle, and especially I think I mean there are so many tangents to this, especially in this day and age with all of the ultra-processed foods. I mean, it's really topical with Joe Wicks at the moment. It's so it is it's a tough, tough thing to keep yourself fit and healthy, and it is an uphill battle because of what we've been programmed with. So within your subconscious, we have rather fun-named reticular activating system, which is your brain's like Google algorithm. So it takes all of the things that you see, the millions of bits of information that you collect within all of your senses every single second. And obviously, it doesn't know what to do, we can't deal with all of that. So it either deletes, distorts, or generalizes this information. If it is on your radar because it's been programmed into you, that is what you keep seeing because your particular activating system, your RAS, uh recognises that and it goes, Oh, we recognize that, we've been doing that, it's kept us alive for this long, we need to keep doing it. And then if there's something that's similar to the like the diets or or what have you, it will generalize and it'll go, oh that's that's a bit like what it is, or it distorts it so that we can make it mean what we want it to mean. It's very clever. So when you are going through your feed on your social media or magazines or TV or whatever it is, you will see every single woman with a flat stomach. You will see the content for the abs, for the toning, for the bloating, for the diets, and you will filter out conversations, compliments about strength gains, about being a strong woman, about progress in any other way. You won't hear those, you won't see those things because they are not on your radar, they are not on your RAS. And then you start live creating and living your very own echo chamber that just constantly reinforces these beliefs, even though they are optional, they are outdated, and maybe you don't believe them, but your subconscious, your RES knows that these have been running for 40 odd years, and they've kept you safe and they've kept you alive, and so they must be what we need around to continue to survive. So I'm hoping that that gives you some insight into why when you know what to do, you still don't do it. When you make these promises to yourself, and then you don't keep those promises, I want you to understand that there is a very, very powerful force at work. So please let go of any blame right now. And now that this subject is piquing your interest, we've already started to put it into your filter. All right, we've already started to highlight to your IAS that this is important. So now what I want you to do with that is start to listen out for the everyday language around you. Start to listen out for things like I feel fat, I've been so bad, I need to get back on it. These are all phrases that reinforce that you are not enough, that you're not doing enough, that you're lazy, that you're not keeping your promises to yourself, and that you start to believe that, you start to take that within to your own identity. Also, like if somebody says to you, Oh my goodness, you look amazing, you will instantly brush that off. You're like, no, no, no, you know, don't take that. And what's really interesting also about that statement is that again it goes on appearance when you see somebody that has lost body fat who has lost weight, and with all of the weight loss injections and things like that around the use of those at the moment, there's a lot of that going on, and then people go, Oh my god, you've lost loads of weight. You look amazing, and it reinforces that how you look is the most important thing. Now, I'm not saying that you're gonna walk up to somebody and go, Oh my goodness, your visceral fat must be about four now. How incredible! But wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't that be brilliant if you were walked up to somebody and said, You must feel really energized right now. How much better do you feel? Rather than talking about their appearance, and again, it's like a knee-jerk reaction when you see somebody, you are programmed like they've lost weight, you're programmed to go, Wow, they look amazing, you're a lovely woman, you want to tell them they look amazing, but again, it's all about that visual, and then you reinforce it. I mean, literally, nobody ever in this world has said to Kate Moss or Twiggy, Oh my goodness me, I bet your visceral flats really low. And how strong do you feel? I'm pretty sure they don't. And we've also got to remember that people like that, and sort of in more recent times, you're thinking about maybe uh Victoria Beckham or any of these super superstars, they have got a lot of help all around them to be able to create that image, and hopefully, hopefully, they get to do that with health in mind. I know that they do it again for their looks, it's all about the appearance, but hopefully they do that with their health in mind because they're very busy women as well, and they need that energy, they need that strength to be able to continue their busy lives just as much as we do. And our social media algorithms really mirror our subconscious algorithms by keep showing you all of the appearance-based content and rewarding you for looking at that by sending you more. And again, just keeping reinforcing this subconscious look that if you do not look the same as everybody, then you are not enough. So then feeling good gets lost in looking right, looking like everybody else. Your energy and your attention are subconsciously hijacked by these appearing focused goals, and you measure your progress and you measure your worth on the mirror or the scales or the photo or your comparison with somebody else, and not by how you feel, like how your energy is, how your mood is, how your sleep is, how strong you are, how capable you are to do everything that you need to do all the way through the day and not feel like you're just dragging your sorry ass through the day, or how joyful you are, or how you get to set your life up. I mean, just think about that narrative of like, oh, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. Always. Gotta be busy. It's like showing the world, because if you don't, if you if you're showing the world that you're not busy, somehow that affects your worth. And you want that external validation and and then you get it, and then you want more of it. It's like a fix that uh can never be fully satiated, and you could be fitter, stronger, and healthier than ever, and still not feel like it's enough. And if this is not part of your identity that you f feel fit, that you feel strong, that you feel healthy, that you feel joyful, if these are not the things that you are looking out for, that you're sending your reticular activating system out to find in the world, then you will never recognize these things. You will continually be striving for the skinny, for the weight loss. And it also doesn't matter then how well you have done with your markers of muscle gain, of fat loss, of energy, you will go back to where your identity is. And so if you always identify in your subconscious, in your mind, in your body, with somebody that is low energy, with somebody that carries more fat than you want to, that doesn't work out, that doesn't fill their body with nutrition, that is what you will always, always go back to. And it doesn't matter how hard you try, you will always get pulled back into that. And so you need to start to rewire your subconscious, and like I've said earlier, you've already started to do that because when you're listening to this and your emotions are getting involved, hopefully in a good way, hopefully, this isn't a triggering conversation for you, but it might be a triggering conversation for you, and I want you to hopefully not get angry with me, but realise that if this is triggering you, then there's there's something there to look at. Often when we think about negative things about ourselves, our subconscious that's not often, our subconscious will will soak that in. The often is when we are thinking about negative things about other people, our subconscious will make that mean that about ourselves. It won't, it doesn't understand that you're looking at somebody and judging them for whatever it is. I can't believe she's put those clothes on, doesn't she have a mirror? All that sort of thing. It hears that about yourself, and chances are it probably is about you. You probably are judging those people because you feel those things about yourself, and that is exactly what your subconscious will do for you as well. So, as I've said, the awareness. I mean, Julie and I talk about awareness all of the time. Awareness is your first thing, starting to catch yourself with that language, starting to catch yourself with what you notice on social media, or that you start to do that body comparison with other people. And I mean, I'm I'm mostly talking to people of you know 40s or 50s or or plus. Often the images that we see on social media, if they are real at all, if they have not been AI'd or adjusted in some way, are often younger people. And I am not saying at any point, subconscious, do not hear that I am saying because you are older, you can't have a really, really fit, slim body because that isn't true. You can absolutely have that. M menopause is trying to put a spanner in that works as well, but again, it is completely, completely doable, but is it like the be all and end all, which is what society makes it out to be? Do we hang the measure of our success on having the body of a 20 year old? Do we hang the measure of our success on being a size 10? Is it time that we changed how we measured our success? It's very rare that we are measured by. How joyful we are, or how loving we are, or how helpful we are like initially. So, awareness. Catch yourself and ask where that came from. Ask if it's even your thoughts. Is this even mine? Do I really feel this like this? Or has somebody given me this idea at some point, probably before the age of seven, you've sucked it into your subconscious because at that age you are just a big walking subconscious sponge? You've sucked it in as truth, you've decided that that is gospel truth, and then you have run your entire life with it, and you've not even thought about it. Is that idea, that thought, that feeling even mine? And if it's not yours, what would you like it to be instead? That constant loop of I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight. What do you want to swap that for? I'm gonna get stronger. I'm gonna have enough energy to get through the day feeling strong, awake, and alive. I'm going to fuel my body with the right stuff that means I don't have that slump in the middle of the day where I want to go and crawl into my bed. And I love a nana nap, so that's a-okay as well. Swapping out, I have been bad. For I'm listening to my body. And then, I mean, just feel that in your body. Feel how different that feels to I have been bad, and maybe that means you you sat on the sofa one night when you promised you were gonna go to the gym and you change it to I have been listening to my body, whether you went to the gym or whether you did not go to the gym. I made the decision this evening that I'm gonna sit my butt down and watch Netflix. As long as you don't make that decision every single evening, own that decision. I am going to make the decision that even though I am feeling tired, I'm going to go and move my body because I know that it is good for it and I will feel better afterwards. Own that decision. And when you are speaking to other women, praise their effort, praise their energy, praise their vitality, not just the way that they look. And I'm really struggling with this at the moment because again, with lots of the lots of weight loss injections around, and also obviously people that I work with, and people that my husband works with and people that Julie works with, around when they get their results, my need reaction is to say about how they look. And again, you just reinforce that. So thinking about shifting that language. Maybe you need to think about your environment. Maybe you need to unfollow some unhealthy examples of what women look like or what women wasn't saying should be doing. I don't like the word should. And find some examples within social media, within magazines and things. I think magazines are really tough one, of real people. And have that affirmation in front of your eyes all of the time that you are very, very real and you are very, very normal. Sorry. I don't know if anybody wants to be normal. That's my worst nightmare, but I am completely normal. And come away from these people that are constantly showing you that, for instance, flat equals good, and find people instead that celebrate strength, that celebrate health, and a realistic view of a midlife woman's life and body, and just start to reprogram those ideas instead of I want a flat tummy, shift it to I'm a woman who takes care of my body and mind. And affirmations like that are so important and are they're so simple, but again, they're not simplistic. It's something that works so so well. So when you catch yourself with that, I want a flat tummy narrative, being able to instantly reprogram what you would like instead, what upgrade in your identity you would like instead. And so every time you catch yourself saying something and you go, Oh no, that's not mine, that doesn't belong to me. I'm going to say, I'm a woman who takes care of her body and her mind, then you will keep doing that. That will become your habit until you don't say, I want a flat tummy anymore. And then your identity will have upgraded to I am a woman who takes care of her body and mind. And then these things become much, much easier. They don't feel like such an uphill battle anymore because that is your new identity level. That's where your thoughts and your feelings and your behaviors will align to. And there's also lots and lots of other subconscious, what's gonna say, tricks, and they almost feel like they are tricks. Things like tapping, emotional freedom technique, things like visualization, lots and lots of NLP techniques and timeline work that will help you to unpick the things that you no longer like, the programs that you no longer want to keep running, and to be able to reprogram what you would like instead. I know that these are it's a very emotional subject, which is why lots of things, these things are so deeply ingrained in you, because they it uses the emotion uh to to kind of really drive it into you, but also you can use that emotion to help you change your thoughts and feelings and identity around this, and the more that you do this, the calmer uh the subconscious gets. And so when you start to slowly introduce new things, the subconscious is willing for you to take that on board, and so to give you a really huge example of this, when on January the 1st you go, right, I'm going to be really bunny ears out, good. I'm gonna do all the things, I'm gonna stop the drinking, I'm gonna stop the eating of sugar, I'm gonna go to the gym every single minute of the day, and all of this. I'm gonna, I don't know, just eat green stuff forever. Your subconscious alarms will just go off all over the place because it's like, what on earth? It's like being attacked, like what on earth is going on? This is not what we normally do, so it is not safe for us to do, and it will self-sabotage you at every single point. And I know that you've done that, and I know that you feel that. And then what do you do? You feel rubbish about yourself, that you haven't kept all these amazing promises, and you don't understand why, because you want this, you want to feel well, you want to feel energized, you want to feel fit, you want to feel strong, you know that that's right, but you don't understand why you can't get there. So, little bits at a time, the habit stacking, just every single piece of advice that we've ever given on the podcast for the entire time. Just little bits. Start to start with that awareness and just slowly but surely upgrade your identity as you go along. So when you free up that mental and emotional space you've been using to fight your body, you get to use that energy for living, for joy, for connection, for confidence. Think about like breath work or meditation, creating that space, that peace. So you've just not got that constant program running in the background that wasn't yours even in the first place, and then you get to reprogram what you would like instead. The goal isn't a flat tummy, it's a regulated nervous system, it's a strong mind, it's a body that you feel at home in. So I would love, love, love for you to come into the far too fabulous Facebook group and let me know what you think. Good or bad. Let me know what thoughts and feelings came up for you. Was there anything that was really triggering? And what does that what does that mean to you? What does it highlight to you? And and I'm happy to continue the conversation in the Facebook group. I hope that you have enjoyed this and you have got a lot out of it. And uh just know that you are not on your own. Um a lot of my work and a lot of Julia's work is to create a community, to create a tribe so that we don't have to do this on our own. Research shows that doing the this work together means that we actually get to achieve it and we create this different echo chamber from the one that we have always had. So you're not alone. We are in this together and sending you lots and lots of love. Until next week. Thank you so much for joining us today. We love creating this for you. We'll be back next week with another great episode. Until then, we'd be beyond grateful if you'd subscribe to the podcast and leave us a glowing review. If you've already done this, thank you so much. Please do share the podcast with friends and family. You never know which tiny piece of information could be life-changing for someone you care about. We absolutely love hearing from you. So connect, comment, or message us on our social media channels. You'll find all the links in the chat. And if you haven't already, come and join us in our free Facebook group where we continue the conversation and you get to connect with like minded women. We'd love to welcome you in. Until next time, stay fabulous.