Confessions of an in shape person with a muffin top and how to deal with it

This story originally was posted in June 2017, but the time is right to assess the situation and take the appropriate course of action before swimsuit season kicks in.

I lift weights. I do yoga. I do Pilates. I swim. I run. I have a muffin top. I eat quite sensibly, no junk, easy on the processed food and sugar is the devil. I consider myself in good shape and my weight is about what it was when I was thirty, so why in the hell do I have a distinct muffin top?

The truth is I think I’ve had it for a while but I’m only now acknowledging it. I was in denial. If I saw it, it was surely a distortion caused by the ill fitting pant or swimsuit bottom I was wearing, strange angle, strange light, strange something but not a real muffin top, not on me.

Raquel Welch owning her muffin top, but that was the seventies, a simpler and looser time.

But today it hit me like a freight train while getting dressed. It was a rare morning with sunshine and I slipped on a pair of white pants (watch out, they can be trouble) and there it was, there was no denying it, a muffin top, my muffin top, staring me back in the face. I quickly put on a longish sweater trying desperately to go back to my denial place but not this time, oh no, in the back of my head the words muffin top, along with the visual, lodged themselves, setting up camp in my psyche.

This is what I’m going for. Realistic, no? Photo Slim Aarons

So I had to face my demon, admit I had a problem. In 12 step programs isn’t that the first step to recovery? It’s not like I haven’t been here before. A couple years ago when I acknowledged that I had a stomach I immediately sprang to action, doing what I always do when faced with a problem, I took to the Internet. I found out everything there was to know about what they so succinctly call belly fat, and how to beat it. I learned you can do crunches till you’re blue in the face but it won’t do s#&t until you completely cut out the white devil, sugar. At the same time I was trying to learn Italian, again, and my favorite phrase was, io non mangio zucchero. It became my mantra. And the belly did miraculously disappear. Or did it only migrate?