Getting rid of your muffin top can be frustrating.
How many times have you found a beautiful pair of jeans that make your legs look ten miles long, only to find that the tight waist band makes your muffin top bulge over the sides?
Or what about when you’ve splurged on some sexy lingerie to entice your man, only to discover that the stringy sides cut into your hips and make you look like a string of sausages?
Unfortunately, a lot of us have experienced these all too familiar problems.
Luckily, to get rid of your muffin top there are only three simple steps you need to take:
• Changing your clothing
• Altering your diet
• Doing targeted exercise
In this article I will be going over these three areas, which are the keys to success with losing your muffin top for good.
Changing Your Clothing
This step really is ridiculously simple!
A lot of people don’t know that wearing tight clothing is the number one cause of muffin top – that’s why even the skinnier women among us can suffer from it!
When buying trousers, underwear, or any item of clothing that rests around your hips, it is important to get into the mindset of finding something that fits your body rather than something that is in fashion, or that your friends are wearing.
This change in mindset can be difficult, as it may mean going up a size or changing your style, but you won’t look back once you start finding that clothes fit you better and make you look amazing – no-one needs to know your size after all.
Altering Your Diet
A lot of weight problems are caused when the body is not getting a properly balanced diet.
People who eat a lot of salty or sugary foods (particularly chemical-laden microwave meals and processed food) cause their body to store fat because it would be harmful for its organs to try and process so much sugar and salt at one time.
The body keeps this fat to use as energy at a later date, but if you keep loading yourself with more of these unhealthy foods, the fat never gets chance to be used and more builds up on top of it.
This is how a vicious cycle of weight gain can start and it directly affects your muffin top and other related problems.
Many of us do not understand that the body works this way, which is why we will eat sugary treats and white bread, but once we have this knowledge we can put it to good use!
This means cutting out those salty, sugary processed foods and replacing them with wholesome, natural foods like fruit, vegetables, sweet potatoes and even butter!
Doing Targeted Exercise
We all know that exercise is important for us to stay healthy, so if you are trying to get rid of your muffin top, exercise can play an important role.
There are many exercises you can do to tone up your hips and waist, but my personal favourite is hula hooping!
Hula hoops are cheap and lots of fun, which makes it easy for me to stay motivated to use one – it doesn’t even seem like exercise to me!
All you need to do is stand inside the hoop and hold it so that one edge is resting against the back of your waist, then spin it with your hands and use a swivelling motion in your hips to try and keep the hoop rotating around your waist. Once it drops, spin it in the other direction and keep going until you’ve done around 20 minutes of hula.
The bright colours are great for getting kids involved. I like to encourage hula competitions to see who can go the longest, as it helps me get the best workout and it appeals to my two’s competitive natures.
Alongside targeted exercise I would suggest trying to do about half an hour of general exercise each day.
Try not to let this daunt you though, I’m not talking about half an hour of working out, it could just be going for a stroll somewhere or doing some hoovering.