What exercises can I do to get rid of love handles?

Question

I want to get a tattoo on my side, and I could if I sat up perfectly straight at all times (because it elongates your sides), but I don't...and I have love handles. What exercises can i do to get rid of love handles?

Answer 1

First, for all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.


On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

Unfortunately, you can't target weight loss without surgery. You just have to do a lot of cardio. That's one of the last places most people lose fat, so be prepared for hard work.

While youre doing a lof cardio, do some oblique work as well. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, holding a weight in your right hand (start with 5-8 lbs) lean straight over to the right side WITHOUT sticking your hips out to the left. Straighten up. Repeat. This isolates your obliques. Repeat on the other side. You should feel it on the opposite side of the body that the weight is on. Keep in mind, you wont see results of this until you burn off the fat.

Good luck!

Answer 3

A good exercise that is easy and you can do everyday is Broom handle twists. Take a broom handle and place it on your shoulders like you're doing squats with a weight bar. You can do this either sitting or standing. Then just twist your upper body from left to right as many times as you can stand. Do that everyday and the love handles will slowly start to disappear.

Answer 4

Walking, drinking plenty of water and staying away from munchies does help with the love handles. If you want to work on it more, exercising and stretches does work too.

Answer 5

I've got an Ablounge, works great!!! My husband uses it and he lost a couple inches around his waist in just a few weeks. Or you can do some crunches.
GOOD LUCK!!!

Answer 6

there is no such thing as spot reduction.

You just got to do the classic: Cardio, good diet.

Doing abdominals and obliques won't reduce the bulge and may even worsen it as the developing muscles push out the fat.

Time, patience, determination ad discipline. g'luck