My house is making me fat

The first neighbor I met at after we moved assured me that I would gain a good fifteen pounds in the transition to a home without stairs. Our on-campus community is comprised of single-floor, former military brick houses which require much less effort to reach the laundry room from the den than our last house did. I scoffed, if this whole moving thing didn’t drop me at least five pounds I’d be surprised. And then there was cleaning the old house and unpacking… I’d never worked this hard. Weight gain was the last on my list of imminent concerns.

As soon as moving activity slowed, I took up walking every night with the same neighbor, now a close friend. Oddly, I have felt weight creeping on but ruled those feelings out of the realm of possibility and so have continued to avoid the scale. The moment of truth came this last Monday. In an effort to assure myself that I was just imagining my new tightness of my waistband I stepped on the scale, and there it was… I put on fourteen pounds!

“I told you!” whooped my friend. “It’s the stairs!” She has a point. I was up and down those stairs all day; apparently enough that my nightly walking doesn’t even make a dent in the difference. I’m bummed! I’m still not sure how to combat the absence of my daily stair-stepping cardio so, for now I’m cutting out treats and upping my walking mileage like a good girl. This is so totally unfair!