Fat around the middle, belly fat, love handles, abdominal weight, visceral fat or muffin top - you can call it what you like, many of us mums are all too familiar with it!  You may have worried about your hips and thighs in the past but now your mid-section is making up for lost time.  The good news is you can lose your muffin top for good but first we need to understand how it got there in the first place.  And no, it’s not all down to picking at the children’s left overs and eating their party bag cakes (although that doesn’t help!).  Believe it or not, there are underlying biochemical processes at work that result in increasing abdominal fat as we age. 

It’s all to do with stress and the action of the stress hormone cortisol.  Well, there is no shortage of that in our busy lives as mums! 

Millions of years ago, our bodies were designed to react quickly to danger.  When your brain thinks your life is threatened it stimulates the release of adrenaline and cortisol which mobilise glucose to provide instant energy for 5-10 minutes, allowing you to run from the sabre toothed tiger.  This is the ‘fight or flight response’.  The problem with modern day lifestyles is that stress (our ‘perceived threat’) is almost continuous and comes without the natural release that either fleeing or fighting might provide.  Unless you do something physical, all that extra energy, in the form of glucose and fat, has no-where to go.  It is simply deposited as fat - around the middle of your body, because it’s close to the liver where it can most quickly be converted back into energy if needed.  Your body is only trying to help!  It tries to keep a convenient store ready for constant use in your stressful life.  To compound this, cortisol levels in the blood often remain high for a while after a stressful event, increasing your appetite because your body thinks it should be refuelling after all this fighting and fleeing.  This means people under chronic stress quite often feel constantly hungry and have cravings for carbohydrates and fats.

So there you have it, it’s not that we are all weak willed and greedy.  There is a real biochemical explanation for why we Mothers often struggle with fat around the middle.  The question is, should we be worried about it and what can we do about it?

Gaining weight around your middle does more harm than simply making your waistband too tight.  While putting on weight in general can have negative effects on your health, abdominal weight gain is particularly unhealthy.  Too much belly fat increases your risk of:

• Heart disease  
• Breast cancer
• Diabetes
• Metabolic syndrome
• Gallbladder problems
• High blood pressure
• Colorectal cancer

Researchers also have found that abdominal fat cells aren't just dormant energy waiting to be burned up.  The cells are active, producing hormones and other substances that can affect your health.  For example, some fat-cell produced hormones can promote insulin resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes; others can produce oestrogen after menopause, which may increase your breast  cancer risk.  Researchers are still sorting out how the excess hormones affect overall health, but they do know that too much visceral fat can disrupt the body's normal hormonal balance.

So given that ‘stress’ is part of our modern day lives, what can we do to get rid of our muffin tops for good?

Dieting and cutting calories DOES NOT WORK!  It simply puts the body under further stress, reduces your metabolic rate and encourages your body to hold on to all the fat.  An eating plan which balances your blood sugar throughout the day will eliminate further fat gain and will encourage the body to burn fat.  This is a low GL (glycaemic load) way of eating.  The golden rules for balancing blood sugar are:-

• Eat 3 meals and 2 snacks every day
• Don’t skip breakfast
• Eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates
• Add protein to each meal and snack
• Eat essential fats
• Avoid caffeine, sugary drinks and alcohol
• Don’t eat on the run
• Change the way you think about food

This may sound daunting at first but you can get help.  There are lots of great resources to support you including books, websites and workshops.   Have a look at zest4life programmes, they are based around a 12 week format where you attend a 2 hour workshop once a week and learn about the low GL process and how to put it into practice.  You’ll find more information at www.zest4life.eu.  You could also find yourself a Nutritional Therapist to support you.  If you are in the Marlow, High Wycombe, Maidenhead area have a look at www.yourfoodmatters.co.uk, alternatively you can find a practitioner in your area at www.bant.org.uk.   Good books include Patrick Holford’s Low GL Bible and his Low GL Cookbook, available on Amazon.

Exercise or physical activity has never been more important. If you have fat around the middle of your body caused, in part, by the activity of your stress hormones, exercise MUST become one of your priorities. By simply making time for exercise in your life, you can control the potentially damaging fight or flight response.

Muscle is metabolically active. This means it requires fuel in the form of calories just to maintain it even when you are sitting doing nothing. So the more muscle you have, the more calories you consume, and, if you don’t overeat, the more fat you will burn.

• 500g (1lb) of muscle burns 75 calories a day
• 500g (1lb) of fat burns 8 calories a day

This is one of the infuriating reasons why men tend to find it easier to lose weight than women - they generally have more muscle than women.

So let’s look at a real life example of how this work’s in practice.

Let me introduce Linda, she is 38 and has been dieting since she was a teenager.  In  November 2009 she enrolled on a zest4life programme and weighed in at 16 stone 10lbs and carried much of her weight around the middle.    She described herself as having  low energy levels (rated as 3/10), low self esteem (5/10) and poor eating patterns (4/10).

Linda began the low GL eating plan and after 6 weeks she had lost a stone in weight and her energy levels and self esteem had increased up to a rating of 8/10.  She has continued with the programme since Christmas and as of 5 February has lost a further stone and now weighs 14 stone 10 lbs.  She is on target to make 12.5 stone by June and 10 stone by October.  She reports that she neither feels hungry nor has cravings and that she has so much extra energy that she has been forced to take up exercise to burn it off!  She has joined a gym and has had great pleasure in ditching her old clothes to the charity shop and buying a new wardrobe for work.  In her words ‘I am never going back’.  Losing weight the low GL way is changing her body’s biochemistry. The weight Linda has lost is mostly fat and she has become more efficient at burning fat, thus making it easier to maintain.

So there you have it, if you are ready to take the challenge and lose the muffin top for good, learn about the low GL approach.  You will not only lose the inches and pounds but you will discover increased energy, more balanced moods and a new zest for life!