A "girl with love handles", what a nice thought. The phrase conjures up an image of a warm cuddly person with a personality to match. She has all the curves in the right place and just screams out for a hug. The love handles would be the first thing to grab on to.



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.

Just what is love handle fat?

Love handles are made out of the fat that your body has produced from all the excess calories in your food and stored it for you. There isn't any difference between love handle fat and any other fat elsewhere on your body; it's just that it's stored in a different place. If you had worked off all the calories you ate by exercising then there would be no additional fat to be stored.

Your store of fat is a primitive mechanism that allowed your ancestors to survive when they might only have been fortunate enough to find food once every few days. The excess energy intake from a rare feast would be converted and stored as fat in the body then converted back into energy gradually until the next meal could be found.

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.

Your love handles are a big part of your store of energy. Your body finds that your waistline and stomach is a very convenient to place to use as a storeroom.

You must exercise 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.

Don't just starve yourself to reduce your calories below the rate at which you can burn them. If you do that you are risking burning not only fat but also lean muscle and other body organs. Your metabolism will slow down and your appetite will increase which will make it very difficult for you to stay trim. You must balance your energy intake with exercise and you must keep up the exercise for life if you want to lose your love handles permanently. Try to take up something you enjoy doing to give yourself a chance of keeping it up. Increased exercise while paying attention to good nutrition will allow you to burn fat while building your muscle.

Paying attention to the types of food that you eat as well as how much you eat can also be part of the solution how to get rid of love handles: Food to Help You Lose Weight