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Gone from a 30-inch waist at age 20 to something wider? Fat around your midsection may have played a roll, but so did your pelvis.

Our skeletons generally stop growing taller around age 20, but apparently they don't stop growing wider, according to a new study.

The study, by researchers at the University of North Carolina, found the pelvis continues to widen as people advance in age from 20 years to 79. The oldest patients in the study, which was published this week in Journal of Orthopaedic Research, had pelvises nearly an inch larger than the youngest patients.

That one-inch difference could add as much as three inches to waist size, researchers said. Researchers decided to conduct the study when they observed the widening in an unrelated project. They found no previous studies that directly examined whether the skeleton continues to widen after maturity.