This paper presents a textile-based, embroidered inductive strain sensor that can be fabricated with standard embroidery processes and aesthetically integrated with apparel and garments fabrics. The sensor consists of two embroidered coupling coils (called coupling planar coils, or CPC) connected in series, and stacked on top of each other. The mutual inductance of this coupling coils pair is determined by the relative positions and displacement between them. This structure can be used as a restorable and repeatable strain sensor for human movements and activities, such as the measurement of respiratory rate. This structure can also form a passive sensor by using the coils as antennas to connect with RFID/NFC chips, such that the sensing information can be extracted wirelessly as phase and amplitude variations by RFID/NFC readers. Experiments demonstrate that a wearable belt embedded with this proposed sensor can be worn on human body to monitor breathing activities reliably under normal wearing conditions. The sensor structure can be fabricated by commercial embroidery machines using off-the-shelf conductive yarns and all the materials are commercially available in large quantity; therefore, it also has good potentials to be commercialized as a low-cost health monitoring system in mass production.