Despite the name, love handles can end up being less than loveable for anyone who struggles to lose those last few, stubborn pounds. The area above your hips and around your stomach is stubborn and the traditional diets and exercises that most men do in the gym just don’t cut it when you’re looking to get rid of those pesky spots.
There are a few unique ways to get rid of love handles but just like any diet or exercise plan, it won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to be dedicated to the plan and stick with the structure to lose your love handles and keep them gone!
Exercise is only half of the battle. You’ll also need to incorporate dieting into your plan to lose your love handles and replace them with muscle. We’ve gathered some of the best hints, tips, and training regimens so you can get started losing your love handles today!
What are Love Handles?
No matter what they are or how they’re attached, love handles are stubborn and can be discouraging to see or deal with regularly. These are deposits and sections of fat that line your sides and the front of your belly. They’re referred to as “stubborn fat” and often don’t respond to cardio or ab workouts.
This “stubborn fat” can cause major issues with your health like decreased heart function and increased blood pressure. Getting rid of this fat can help you not only look better but improve your overall health and physique.
How to Get Rid of Love Handles
Getting rid of your love handles is more about overall health changes and less focused on one particular move or training that will eliminate them. You’ll need to combine serious changes to your diet and incorporate a new range of different exercises and moves to cut the fat and build muscle.
Regardless of your diet or exercise, the defining factor and what makes some people successful and others not is determined. Be strict with yourself and make choices that keep your overall health in perspective. It can be tempting to cheat several days because it won’t make much difference, but this can easily set you back and leave you in a deeper hole than when you started. Be determined and be strict!
Nutrition
Solid nutritional choices are crucial for good health whether you have love handles or not. But if you’re trying to get rid of your stubborn fat deposits, healthy, nutritional choices becomes a top priority.
It can be tempting to skip the carbs when you’re trying to diet and lose weight but healthy complex carbs like sweet potatoes, black rice, and oats allow your metabolism to stay stimulated and give your body long-lasting energy. If your body feels that it’s being deprived of energy, it goes into starvation mode and keeps fat deposits as a last resort! That body fat will stick around even longer if your body thinks it’s being starved.
To lose fat you also need to consume fat! Healthy fats like avocados, nuts, seeds, and coconut or olive oil help your body process and get rid of that stubborn body fat. You can also add some spices to your diet that help with inflammation like turmeric or ginger.
Water is vital for life but for busting fat, especially stubborn fat, it’s a top priority. If your body becomes dehydrated, it’ll hold on to water and end up tricking your brain into thinking it’s hungry rather than thirsty. To fight this, look to drink a gallon of water a day to bust up your love handles.
Cut out the alcohol to save yourself some calories! A beer or glass of wine often has over 100 calories that have no nutritional value at all. These empty calories are often gathered in your love handles and cutting out or down on alcohol can cause a pretty stark contrast in the size of your love handles.
Lastly, be sure every meal has a vegetable in it! Getting gin your greens and other types of veggies will boost your diet and help you have the energy to shed that fat and turn it into muscle in no time.
Lifestyle
Your diet is only part of the problem with those stubborn love handles. Your exercise regimen and lifestyle both add to or detract from your love handles.
Firstly, be sure that you’re getting plenty of sleep each night. When you’re sleep-deprived, your hormones can quickly get out of sync with the rest of your body and make it hard to lose weight or bust up body fat. When you’re overly tired, your metabolism slows way down to conserve energy and your appetite is higher because you lack energy. As a result, your body craves foods that are higher in carbs and fats. Aim to get 7-8 hours of sleep each night!
Over-exercising can be just as harmful as not exercising at all when it comes to getting rid of your love handles. Your body may hold on to fat since you’re stressing your body and it’s releasing a hormone called cortisol. Focus on your goals and performance but allow your exercise to have times of rest and recovery between workouts.
Before you head to the gym or start your day, kickstart your metabolism by drinking water with lemon in the morning! Skip the coffee or put it off until you get started for the day with your water. This helps to get your digestive system working at peak efficiency so you’ll be able to process everything you eat throughout the rest of the day.
Training
Lifestyle and diet are two parts of the triad of losing your love handles. Training can mean a lot of things to lots of people but when it comes to losing your love handles, you’ll want to incorporate a few different types of workouts to ensure that you’re getting the most out of it.
To build lean muscle you’ll want to work on doing compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, and thrusters so your metabolism will burn fat even when at rest as lean muscle accumulates in your body. The more muscle you have, the better your body will process foods and burn calories and fat, even when at rest.
When you need to burn off calories, work with some type of interval training which will get your heart rate and metabolism running fast. After an interval session, you’ll increase your calorie burn for 24-48 hours. Your body will lose excess fat fast when you incorporate interval training into your regular workout routine.
There are tons of different types of interval training so you can find one you like and that works with your body type. Jump roping, running in interval sessions, or interval weight room work, are all great ways to bust up stubborn body fat.
To bust up that stubborn fat, your body sometimes needs to be shocked out of a rut. If you mix in a longer cardio session while you’re at the gym, those longer sessions will tap into fat stores to fuel the session from start to finish.
While doing some longer sessions of cardio now and then is a great way to mix up the routine, overdoing it on cardio can be detrimental. Long periods of steady-state cardio like jogging won’t do much for cutting down on love handles. Mix up your routine with intense periods of cardio like HIIT workouts and other interval training.
If you’re looking to get rid of your love handles, you might want to consider getting rid of your ab routine or at least rethinking it! Sit-ups or crunches only work the muscles around your lower spine and it leaves your love handles intact. Mix it up by building your core with moves like planks or hollow body holds.
Find simple ways to burn calories throughout the day. They may not be intense cardio workouts but by moving and being active in small ways, your body will start to respond burn fat fast. Track your steps to see how you’re moving and how far you’ve walked each day. Get involved with a walking group at lunch or make it a point to walk to the water cooler every half hour if you work in an office or other sedentary job.
Mental Health
Our physical and mental health are intimately connected. The more you stress, the harder the physical toll it will take on your physical health.
Stress triggers the production of cortisol and prolonged stress and overexposure to cortisol can cause several side effects. One of these side effects is weight gain and another digestive issue. Both will cause your stubborn love handles to keep hanging on.
High levels of cortisol have been linked to weight gain, especially around the midsection. While it can be hard to control your stress levels throughout the day or week, learning to keep it under control can help you keep weight off your midsection.
Exercises and mindfulness routines like yoga and meditation can help you reduce stress and prevent the collection of that belly fat around your midsection and sides. Yoga and other mindful exercises will also help you tone and exert areas of your body that aren’t always tapped by traditional exercise routines.
Thinking your way to smaller and nonexistent love handles may not be your first response when looking to tackle the problem but it can help! Try to start practicing mindful eating and teaching your body to pay attention to hunger and fullness cues.
By paying attention to these cues you’ll learn to eat slowly and stop eating when your body tells you it’s full. Eat slowly, to begin with, and eat without distraction so your mind can focus on your body’s cues.
Whole Body Plan
It can be tempting when you’re looking to lose your love handles and get even more fit, to simply focus more on doing crunches and side twists. Love handles are stubborn fat deposits that can threaten more than just your physique. Those fat deposits can put stress on your heart and in turn, cause you more overall mental health issues.
To get rid of your love handles, you’ll need to make changes to your lifestyle, diet, and your exercise routine. You’ll also want to focus on your mental health during this time to make the best choices that benefit your whole body and lifestyle.
Focus on changing your diet by incorporating healthy fats, keep carbs in the mix, and make sure you’re getting plenty of veggies throughout the week. Cut down on alcohol as it offers no nutritional benefits for your body and tends to go straight to the love handle area!
Lifestyle changes that you can easily work into your everyday routine are making sure you get plenty of sleep each night, drinking plenty of water in the morning to kickstart your metabolism, and giving your body a rest day. When you get determined to cut down on your love handles, it can be easy to fall into a demanding routine where you workout every day. Allowing for a rest day gives your body time to incorporate and make use of the new muscle you’re building.
Lastly, be sure that you keep a close eye on your training routine. Interval workouts and routines are some of the best ways to cut down on fat in your body and build up lean muscle. The lean muscle then in turn gives you increased metabolism to bust up foods and absorb them before they turn into fat. Ab routines seem like the best choice to bust up your love handles but they don’t have the same focus as interval training. No need to worry about stable cardio routines! Utilize those interval workouts instead!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get rid of love handles fast?
Start by cutting out empty calories like alcohol and sugar. Substitute any sugar with Stevia or other lower-calorie choices. With the fuel for your love handles gone, they’ll start to shrink and disappear quickly!
What exercises get rid of love handles?
Some of the most effective moves to get rid of love handles are sledgehammer overhead strikes, running planks, deadlifts, and hanging leg raise. There are lots of others that you can incorporate into your daily workout routine. Depending on your health and any possible injuries, you can switch in or swap out different exercises to suit your needs.
What causes love handles in males?
The simplest explanation is that your body takes in too many calories or retains more if you’re not exercising as much. Over time, these fat cells become more noticeable and hang around your hips and waist causing love handles. Burning this stubborn fat can be tough and you’ll want to be sure you mix up your lifestyle and workout routine to get it done.
A Final Word From Energetic Lifestyle
Getting rid of love handles can be difficult for anyone. You tend to lose fat deposits in the reverse order you put it on. Fat tends to accumulate in the waist and belly area first and thus makes it hard to lose later on in life.
Fat and deposits tend to settle around your stomach or belly as they’re easy to grab and make use of when burning but lots of calories throughout the day. But with more and more people working in an office or a sedentary lifestyle, those fat deposits are relatively worthless. They simply get stuck and stay stuck.
Getting rid of love handles and belly fat takes dedication and determination. It requires not just one extra lift in the gym but a whole lifestyle, exercise, and diet change that will impact your whole physique and mind.
Start by cutting out empty carbs like alcohol and sugar. Introduce your body to healthy fats and carbs so you’ll have plenty of energy to get through a workout or day.
Make sure you get plenty of sleep, water, and allow your body to rest on your off exercise days. These rest days and time for sleep allows your body to heal and build up lean muscle which gives you better metabolism during the day.
Lastly, be sure to incorporate interval training into your exercise routine. Cut out ab workouts that don’t cut down on your love handles and add in time doing specific types of cardio that will shake up your routine.
Love handles have a cute name but they’re anything but easy to eliminate. They tend to be deposits of stubborn fat that will hang around no matter how much you try on your own. Incorporate new types of lifestyle, diet, and exercise changes to ensure that you’re making the most of your new lifestyle.
Spend time researching or working with a coach who can give you love to handle specific exercises to build up the muscle beneath the fat deposits. Add those routines into your regular regimen and give yourself a whole new lease on life!
