The other day, I was with some teen girls who were looking at an old family photo of women in one of the girls’ families. One girl exclaimed, with some surprise, “none of them have ‘muffin tops.’”
My generation calls this look love handles. When I looked up “muffin top,” I discovered that it is a generally pejorative slang term used to describe overhanging flesh when it spills over the waistline of pants or skirts in a manner that resembles the top of a muffin spilling over its paper casing. Lovely.
The American Dialect Society named it one of the “most creative” new terms of 2006. Seriously? Most creative? What were we thinking?
Love handles or muffin tops, whatever you want to call them, affect many girls and boys regardless of weight or size and are reported to be caused by everything from ill-fitting clothes to sedentary lifestyles to stress.
If we care about girls’ health, we need to find a way to encourage them to exercise. Not because of appearance or because what they see in the mirror has been pejoratively labeled a “muffin top” but because of the potential threat to their overall health.
The U. S. Surgeon General suggests 10,000 steps a day as a goal to healthy hearts rather than endless diets or drugs advertised as effortless. The average person gets in 900 to 3000 steps in a day.
We have to start somewhere, and adding steps to our day is a good place.
Valora K Starr is director for discipleship. Learn how you can raise up healthy women and girls.
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