Health Tips

How To Lose Those Unsightly Love Handles

June 9, 2009
By J White

Love handles are those protruding flabs of fat that reside on the sides of your body. They are of course the unwanted gifts you get from all of your overeating.

Assuming that you’ve had enough of looking at them, you now want to know how to lose those unsightly love handles.

Well the first thing you need to realize is that just focussing on exercises that target that problem area will not help you to free yourself of them. This is spot reduction and it will not work.

Many well-meaning, but uninformed purveyors of health recommend this, but don’t be misled. In the end, you will become more tone and tight in that area, but it will not result in your love handles vanishing.

To be sure, there is only one natural method to lose those love handles and this is by burning overall bodyfat and building muscle.

Burning Bodyfat

To burn bodyfat, you need to eat healthy foods and perform aerobic exercises.

The healthy foods should of course include all the three macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein, and yes fat. A ratio of 60 percent carbs, 25 percent protein, and 15 percent fat is a good mix.

You can go slightly higher on the protein and slightly lower on the carbohydrates if you like. What really matters most is that the protein be low in fat, and the carbs be complex. Keep in mind that you also need to eat less food energy than you burn off.

As for the contrasting ratios, different diets recommend different amounts of the macronutrients. Regardless of which of those diets you choose to follow, as long as you take in fewer calories than you burn off, you will lose weight.

Also, by choosing healthy foods and eating an appropriate amount of them each day, you will help to ensure that the weight loss is mostly from fat and not muscle.

To speed up the fat loss, you also need to participate in cardio exercises such as walking, jogging, or step aerobics, which are all excellent methods to increase your heart rate and burn more fat calories.

Build Muscle

Losing love handles also involves building muscle. Unfortunately this part of weight loss is not stress enough by most diets. By building more muscle, you are able to burn more calories. This is because muscle requires more energy to maintain than fat.

In fact, as you age, the losing of muscle is the primary reason that we start to gain excess weight, and yes love handles. If you had maintained this muscle through any type of resistance training, you would have continued to have that lean figure you had growing up, bearing in mind that you did not start eating more calories than you were burning as you grew older.

As for now, you can still regain that muscle and even add more. You just need to start a resistance program. Free weights are always a good choice, but resistance bands work just as well.

You won’t build you a well-toned or well-defined body overnight, but with persistence and a little time, you will soon start noticing muscle growth all over your body, as well as a decrease in bodyfat.

Sum Things Up

To sum things up on how to lose those unsightly love handles, you need to focus your attention on burning bodyfat and building muscle. And stay away from spot reduction. In the long run, it will just leave you disappointed and frustrated.

Share and Enjoy: