No more thick winter coats to hide my waistline
Jodi Davis
| 3 min read
I love the sunshine and the higher temperatures, but I’ve found that my clothes do not. Why? Because less cloth and material to cover my body allows for the muffin top to come out of hiding. No more hoodies or thick winter coats to secretly conceal my waistline accessory. That lovely muffin top is going to be there in full view.
Each year it happens, some more than others. This year I noticed it a bit more when I pulled on my elastic-waist athletic pants, which are basically all spandex and have the habit of pushing the ‘extra stuff’ up. Extra pudge that I don’t want to see which is my little reminder that I have to work at it a bit more each day now that I’m getting older. The metabolism slows down as we age. I thought it only happened to other people; now I know better.
So I made some changes during the month of March and I’m still practicing them today.
I knew that I needed to get back into my old routine of drinking more water; half my body weight in ounces. Because of the cold weather, I found that I was turning to hot coffee for warmth and didn’t find cold water too appealing. In order to increase my water intake I keep a few bottles of water around the home at all times, which also includes keeping a bottle of water in my vehicle. If I see it, I’ll drink it. It works great.
Next I began consuming more fibrous foods because I know that they keep a person feeling fuller longer and slows down digestion just a bit. Foods such as broccoli, peas, avocados and Brussels sprouts were included in at least one of my meals per day, often used as snacks as well. Avoiding foods such as white rice, pasta and potatoes was pretty simple for me since I do that “most of the time” anyways. Now it was always.
One contributing factor could have also been my higher stress level, which was gradually climbing daily. My son reminded me that the hormones associated with stress, cortisol, can actually cause some bloating in the stomach area. I began focusing on the elimination of the stress-causing issues and started lightening my daily work load. I’m happy to say that the stress is now almost gone … almost.
But the biggest change I made was to increase my daily walking mileage. When I lost the 162 original pounds, I did it by walking 1.5 miles every single day. I’ve now increased that to 2.25 miles per day. Since my goal was to get rid of the muffin top by June, that same distance is often walked twice per day. My two dogs are loving it and so am I.
It feels good to announce that my muffin top has slowly crumbled away! No more mid-section rolls on this gal; I’m confident that by the beginning of June I will be celebrating its complete disappearance with a healthy and delicious banana-nut muffin, and I bet you can figure out what part of the muffin I’ll enjoy eating the most!
Photo credit: Sweet Flour Bake Shop
