Posture

Good posture not only helps you look ten pounds lighter it's also been proven to make you more confident and successful. I've noticed how poor my posture is lately, holding cute baby all day and never standing up straight. A few tips to help:
Strengthen the upper back with seated rows, bent-over rows, and reverse flies
Stretch the chest - I like putting both hands on a door frame and then leaning through the door with the chest
Push your tongue against the spot where the roof of your mouth and the back of your upper teeth meet, it will automatically straighten you up
Tilt your pelvis and tuck in those abs - this will also help train your abs to stay flat, works better than crunches and is much easier (if I can just remember)

Flat Abs

I think most ab machines are a complete waste of your time. How dare I make such a claim when there are hundreds of ab products out there?

All I can say is the fitness companies are giving the public what it wants. Everyone is screaming for flat abs, so of course there are going to be products sold to meet that demand.

Here's the truth: Most of us have nice abs under a layer of fat. You use your abs all day long as a stabilizer and one of the best ways to train your abs to be flat is to think about holding them in throughout your day. But until we lose that fat on our abdomen with a sensible diet, challenging cardio, and effective weight training to increase metabolism, a million ab curls won't make our abs flat.

Am I saying you should give up all ab exercises? No. I'm just saying to focus on losing the extra fat and train your core with effective exercises like plank, side plank, bicycle, captain's chair (lifting knees while suspended in the captain's chair), and crunches on a ball (amazing that adding the ball makes crunches effective, but it does because of the instability of the ball). You don't need to spend a lot of money or a lot of time on your abs. Five minutes a few days a week will be enough to give you good core strength and make those abs beautiful when those last few pounds come off.