Sarah Mitchell ad: Your Waist Just Got an Upgrade

Your Waist Just Got an Upgrade

I tried to do a plank naked in front of the mirror. 😳 At 56, I want you to know what I saw hanging down was not a stomach. It was a curtain. I'm going to tell you about it because I have not told a single person about that morning and I think there is a real chance the same thing is sitting in the back of your own head, and you have not told anybody either. My name is Joanne. I am fifty-six years old. I have been a size four since I was twenty-two. I weighed one hundred and twenty-two pounds on my wedding day in 1993 and I weighed one hundred and twenty-four pounds the morning of the plank. Two pounds. In thirty-one years. I want you to hold that in your head while I tell you the rest, because everybody who hears the rest assumes I let myself go. I did not let myself go. The scale did not let me go. My body just took the same amount of weight it had always carried and quietly moved every ounce of it to the front of my abdomen while I was sleeping. The morning of the plank was a Tuesday in March of last year. I had been reading an article in a women's magazine in the waiting room of the dentist's office the week before. The article said a plank a day for thirty days would fix a midlife stomach. I decided I would start on Monday and I did not start on Monday because I lost my nerve, so I started on Tuesday. I took my robe off in front of the full-length mirror in our bedroom. Mike was at work. The dog was in the kitchen. I got down on the carpet in front of the mirror and I held the plank for the full sixty seconds the article had told me to hold it. Then I looked sideways at my own reflection. I do not have words for what I saw. I sat up immediately and I pulled the robe back on and I tied it twice and I went and stood at the kitchen sink and ran cold water over my wrists for ten minutes because I read somewhere a long time ago that you do that when you are about to faint. I never did the plank again. I never told Mike I tried. I never told my sister I tried. I never told my best friend of forty-one years that I tried. I am telling you because I think there is a plank story in your head too, or something just as bad, and you are carrying it alone the way I was carrying mine. I'll start at the beginning. The first time I noticed something was wrong was at my niece's baby shower in the summer of 2022. I was fifty-four. The shower was at my sister-in-law's house, and there was a group photo on the back deck. I had worn a sundress. A week later my sister-in-law texted me the picture. I want to tell you what I did when I saw that picture. I zoomed in on my own stomach. I sat on the closed toilet seat in my bathroom and I zoomed in on my own stomach in a picture of a baby shower and I held the phone two inches from my face. Then I deleted the message. Then I deleted the picture from my deleted folder so Mike would not see it if he ever scrolled my phone. I have never told anybody I did that either. That is the first thing I have to tell you about what was happening. It was not just the belly. It was the secret I started keeping about the belly. By the fall of 2022 I had a new uniform. A long open cardigan, every day, over everything, in every season. I bought four of them in the same week at three different stores so it would not look like I owned four of the same thing. I wore them inside the house. I wore them in 85-degree weather. I wore them to a wedding in July. Mike, in the fourteenth year of our marriage, looked at me at that wedding in my long cardigan in the July sun and said "are you cold, hon?" I said the air conditioning had been weird. There was no air conditioning. We were outside. I am telling you because if you have a cardigan in your closet you have started reaching for the way I started reaching for mine, I want you to know I see you, and the cardigan is the symptom, not the problem. The doctor's appointment was in February of 2023. She is a wonderful doctor. I have been seeing her since 2011. I told her, sitting on the paper of her table in the gown that does not close right, that my body had changed and I did not know why. I told her I had not changed anything I was doing. I told her my weight on the scale was the same as it had been at our daughter's bat mitzvah in 2012. She nodded. She listened. She typed. Then she said, "Joanne. You're in menopause. This is what happens. Most women just accept it." Most women just accept it. I am going to repeat that because it is what she said to me with her own mouth in February of 2023. Most women just accept it. She told me to cut carbs, to lift weights, and to "be patient with the process." I sat in the parking lot of her office building for forty minutes before I drove home. I want to tell you what I did next, because I know some of you reading this have done all of it too. I cut carbs for ninety-one days straight. I did not have a piece of bread, a forkful of pasta, a single bite of rice or potato, for ninety-one days. The belly did not move. I bought five pound dumbbells at the sporting goods store and I did a workout video in our basement four mornings a week for five months. My arms got a little tighter. The belly did not move. I joined a yoga studio. Three hundred and forty-two dollars for the introductory package. I went eleven times. The belly did not move. I tried apple cider vinegar in water in the morning. I tried lemon water in the morning. I tried no eating after seven. I tried no eating after six. I tried no eating after five. The belly did not move. By the morning of the plank in March of 2024, I had spent fourteen months and somewhere around two thousand dollars trying to fix a thing the doctor had told me to learn to live with. And then I looked sideways at myself in a mirror. I want to tell you something I have not told anybody. The night after the plank, I lay in bed next to Mike, and after he fell asleep, I rolled over and faced the wall and I put my hand flat on my stomach in the dark. I held it there for a long time. I tried to remember the last time the skin under my hand had been flat. I could not remember. I could not remember the year, I could not remember the season, I could not remember the dress I would have been wearing. The body I had lived in for fifty-four years was already gone, and I had not noticed the moment it left. I cried so quietly that the pillow was wet but Mike did not wake up. That was the night I decided I was going to figure out what was actually happening inside of me. Not what the doctor said was happening. Not what the cardigan was hiding. The thing underneath. I am going to tell you what I learned at our kitchen table at one in the morning with the laptop and my reading glasses on, because I wish somebody had sat me down and told me this when I was fifty-four. Your belly fat is not just fat. Your belly fat is a living, working part of your body, and inside each fat cell are tiny little engines. The science books call them mitochondria. There are hundreds of them in every single fat cell. They are the power plants. Their job is to take the fat inside the cell and turn it back into energy that the body can use. A young, working fat cell has busy mitochondria. They run hot. They burn the fat. The cell shrinks. That is what was happening in my body for fifty-four years without my knowing it. Here is what I did not know. When estrogen drops, those little engines in the belly fat cells slow down. Not the engines in the hip fat cells. Not the engines in the thigh fat cells. The belly ones. Specifically. Because the fat cells in the belly have a different kind of receptor on them, and that receptor is the most sensitive to the estrogen change. The belly engines slow down first, and they slow down hardest, and the fat cell that used to burn the fat now just sits there holding it. That is not a willpower problem. That is not a "you should have lifted heavier" problem. That is a thing happening inside the cell. You cannot reach the inside of a fat cell with a salad. You cannot reach the inside of a fat cell with a treadmill. You cannot reach the inside of a fat cell with apple cider vinegar in a glass of water at six in the morning. The salad and the treadmill and the vinegar are wonderful for the rest of your body, and they do nothing to the inside of the cell where the actual problem is. I sat at the kitchen table at one in the morning and I read this and I covered my face with both hands. For fourteen months I had been silently believing that this was my fault. That I had eaten the wrong thing. That I was lazy. That I was old. That a woman my age was just supposed to look like this now. It was not my fault. I had been attacking the wrong thing from the wrong direction. Now, this is where it stopped being a horror story and started being something else. There is a kind of light that goes through the skin. I know that sounds strange. Most light does not. Regular sunlight stops at the surface. That is why you get a suntan on the outside and your insides stay the color they have always been. But there are two specific colors of light that pass through the skin and reach deep into the tissue underneath. One is a red light at six hundred sixty nanometers. The other is an infrared light at eight hundred fifty nanometers. You cannot see the infrared one with your eyes. You feel it as the faintest warmth. And those two specific wavelengths are the ones the mitochondria respond to. I am going to say that again because it stopped me cold at the kitchen table. The little engines inside your belly fat cells respond to those two specific wavelengths of light. The light reaches the cell. The cell wakes up. The engine that has been sitting quiet for three years starts to spin again. The fat that has been sitting in the cell starts to burn. The cell shrinks. This is not a wellness trend. NASA was studying this in the nineties for astronaut muscle recovery. There are over six thousand peer-reviewed studies on red and infrared light and the mitochondria in regular medical journals. You can look it up yourself. I did. I sat at the table until four in the morning. I went to bed at four ten. I lay next to Mike in the dark and pictured the inside of my own belly fat cells. I pictured the little engines with the lights off. I pictured somebody walking into each one and flipping the lights back on. I cried again. Quietly. Mike did not wake up that time either. In the morning I started looking for a way to actually do this at home. I found a red light bed at a spa forty minutes from us. Two hundred and twenty dollars a session. I tried it twice. I could not keep up the cost or the drive. I found a handheld panel that you have to hold against your skin for twenty minutes at a time while you sit still. It was nine hundred and forty dollars. The reviews said your arm got tired holding it. Then I found the belt. It is called LumaLean Ultra. It wraps around your waist like a wide black belt and the lights are built into the inside, sitting directly against the skin of your belly where the actual problem cells live. It has one hundred and fifty LEDs. Each LED has three light chips inside it. Two red at six hundred sixty nanometers. One infrared at eight hundred fifty nanometers. That is four hundred and fifty light chips, all pointing at the belly, all at once, for twenty minutes while you sit in a chair. I sat with the website for two days before I ordered. I read the studies they linked. I knew the science by then. I was not buying a promise. I was buying a tool that delivered a specific kind of light to a specific place on my body that I now knew was where the problem actually lived. The belt came in a black box four days later. I want to tell you what happened over the next four weeks. I am not going to make any of this up. I am going to tell you what happened. Week one, I used it for 20 minutes a day. You feel a gentle warmth. That is the whole sensation. You can see the red glow through the inside of the belt. You cannot see the infrared. Nothing visible happened in week one. I did not expect anything. By the end of the second week, the tight, heavy feeling I had been carrying around in my abdomen for two years had let go a little. I slept better. I did not expect that. The manual mentioned it. I thought it was nonsense. It was not nonsense. Week three, I was getting out of the shower and Mike was at the bathroom sink shaving and he glanced over at me in the mirror and stopped shaving for a second. He did not say anything. He kept shaving. But he stopped. I knew what that meant. I stepped on the scale that night. The number was the same number it had been for ten years. I went and got the jeans from the back of the closet. The first pair of jeans I had stopped being able to button in 2022. They buttoned. I sat on the edge of the bed in those jeans and I did not cry, because I had cried enough about jeans in the last two years. I just sat there and breathed. Week four is right now. I am writing this from our kitchen on a Wednesday morning. Mike is at the table reading the paper. I am wearing fitted jeans and a fitted shirt, and no cardigan. I did the plank again last week. On purpose. In front of the same mirror. I looked sideways. This time I did not have to run the cold water over my wrists. This time I held the plank for the full sixty seconds and I got up and I made coffee. I want to tell you something I learned in the last four weeks that I think matters more than any of the rest of it. This was never about getting skinny. I am fifty-six years old and I have earned every line on my face and every gray hair on my head and I am not trying to look twenty-five. This was about being recognizable to myself in the mirror. It was about not flinching when I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window. It was about being able to do a plank without running for the kitchen sink. For fourteen months I had been a stranger inside my own body, and a woman in a white coat had told me to learn to live with it. I did not have to learn to live with it. I just had to find the one thing that reached inside the cell. 🫶 If any of this sounds like you, I want to ask you to do one thing. Go look at the LumaLean Ultra page. Read it the way I read it. Take the time. Look at the wavelengths. Six hundred sixty red. Eight hundred fifty infrared. Look up the studies yourself if you have a quiet hour at the kitchen table, the way I did. If you do not feel right about it, walk away. Nobody is chasing anybody down. There is a money-back guarantee on the order page so the only thing you are actually risking is the cardigan in the back of your closet. That is more than the doctor's office is offering you. The doctor's office is going to charge you a copay to tell you to learn to live with it. P.S. 1 I want you to know something I wish someone had told me at fifty-four. The belly that appeared overnight is not a moral failing. It is not laziness. It is not what you ate at lunch on Tuesday. It is a specific, measurable, physical thing that happened inside your fat cells when your estrogen dropped, and the only way to address it is to reach inside the cell where it lives. You cannot crunch your way to the inside of a cell. Stop trying. Your back will thank you. P.S. 2 Try this. Pick the dress in the back of the closet. The one you stopped wearing in 2021. The one you keep thinking you will get rid of someday but you cannot quite make yourself do it. Don't get rid of it. Try it on in four weeks. You will know. P.S. 3 Take the picture. Get in the group photo at the next family thing. Not behind anyone. Not holding a tote bag at your waist. In the front. In four weeks, you are going to want to remember what you looked like the day you decided to stop hiding. P.S. 4 The last thing. I want you to try the plank again. In front of the same mirror. I want you to look sideways and not flinch. I almost learned to live without that. Please don't wait the twenty months I waited.