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Tips on Getting Rid of Love Handles

Love handles are the flabby sections on both sides of your tummy, and they can be one of the hardest areas to lose the fat. The anatomic word for your love handles is "obliques." Contrary to what some people think, spot reducing is not going to work with your love handles; instead, you have to put together a comprehensive health program that will affect your entire body, not just your love handles.

  1. A Healthy Diet

    • One of the first things you should do if you want to get rid of your love handles is put yourself on a healthy diet. Diets consisting of junk food, soda and bad carbohydrates such as white bread products will take the extra calories you're consuming and store them as fat on your body. By eating a healthy diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats and low-fat dairy products, you will be taking away the foods that are causing your body to pack on the extra fat.

    Reduce Your Caloric Intake

    • Along with eating a healthy diet, you should consider reducing your caloric intake. Extra calories that you don't really need will get packed on as fat and add to your love handles. Your physician or a registered dietitian can tell you the number of calories you need to consume daily to stay healthy. It is different for every person depending on the person's size, current weight and health condition in general. This is not a number you should pull out of a book or try to figure out on your own.

    Aerobic Exercise

    • Contrary to what some people think, spot reducing is a myth. You cannot just do exercises aimed at reducing your love handles and expect them to go away. Instead, you have exercise your entire body by doing aerobic exercise that gets your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes every day. One aerobic exercise that you can do is walking. Just going for a 30-minute walk daily can be enough as long as you increase the speed at which you are walking over time so you keep getting your heart rate up.

    Exercises That Target Love Handles

    • Once you've gotten to where you are eating a healthy diet, you've reduced the number of calories you're consuming and you are doing regular aerobic exercise, then you can begin doing exercises that target your love handles. Such exercises will help to tone your obliques and reduce, if not completely get rid of, your love handles, but only if the other three things are in place first. Some exercises that you can do to target your love handles are abdominal crunches, torso twists and side bends.

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