How To Get Rid Of Love Handles With A Weight Loss Exercise Program

Regular exercise is the key to how to get rid of love handles

The phrase "girl with love handles" is such a lovely description of a woman and I imagine someone with a nice shapely figure that has all the curves in all the right places. They would be a warm and cuddly person and it doesn't take too much imagination to see the reason why those extra folds of skin around the waistline are called love handles.

Love handles unfortunately have a habit of turning from cuddly into unsightly and unattractive very quickly if you don't do something to stop them growing. They also make you heavier and force you to carry it around with you wherever you go. This puts an added strain on your heart and certainly isn't good for your overall health. Men get love handles as well as women and in my opinion it looks a lot less attractive but then I'm a man.

Wondering what love handle fat is?

Love handles are made of fat that your body has produced from the excess calories in your food and stored it for you. You must understand that there is no difference between love handle fat and fat elsewhere on your body; it's just stored in a different place. If you had burned off all the calories you ate by doing exercise then no additional fat would be stored.

In the past your ancestors were lucky if they found food every few days and they had no way of storing it in those days. If your hunting party were successful you would have to eat the whole lot in one go while it was fresh. To keep you alive until the next meal came along the excess energy in the feast was converted to fat and stored in the body where it would be gradually released over the next few days when you didn't eat.

Unfortunately evolution hasn't kept pace with technology and your body still has this survival feature. Today you will eat meals at the very least once or twice a day and often much more frequent than this. Your primitive instinct of eating as much as you can whenever you can together with the opportunity you now have to eat as often as you like has given you a challenge to keep your body in shape.

So your love handles are made up of fat rolls that cover the muscle on your waistline. They hang like handles over your clothes, which is where they get their lovely name.

Exercise is necessary to get rid of love handles

If you want to lose the fat on your love handles you have to make your body burn it off. You can only do this if you burn more calories in exercise than you consume in food. You can achieve an energy balance by reducing the calories that you eat or increasing the exercise you take, or preferably both.

If you only reduce your calorie intake then you will burn fat and lose weight but unfortunately you will also start to burn lean muscle and other body organs. You don't want to lose your lean body mass so you must compensate by increasing the amount of exercise that you take. Exercise breaks down your muscle and encourages it to rebuild itself bigger and better than it was before. This way you can burn the fat but maintain your muscle mass.

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