“Love Handles” sounds cute. But no, it’s actually the stubborn fat that is just above your hip. It’s like a donut-shaped piece of excessive fat surrounding your waistline. It’s the biggest enemy of skinny jeans. Ok, you got the idea. You can’t really hide it whether you are wearing jeans or hot pants. So let’s forget about finding ways to hide it. Let’s just put some effort into getting rid of it.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that it does takes some hard work. Otherwise, everyone on the street looks sexy and stylish in her skinny jeans, and that’s certainly not the case. So being determined and consistent is the key. Motivate yourself by imagining that you have lost your love handles and you now look so perfect wearing your favorite pair of jeans.
I am going to talk about the 5 most important tips that works best for myself instead of just showing you a bunch of things that I haven’t tried myself. For myself, it’s the combination of doing those 5 together that gave me the best results.
Doing Exercises at Home that are Designed for Getting Rid of Love Handles
Doing aerobic exercises or at-home workouts is actually for getting your entire body in shapes. But there are certainly some exercises that emphasizes on the belly or midsection of your body. In my opinion, almost all aerobic exercises or at-home workouts can help. You don’t even have to go to classes. There are tons of good ones on Youtube. But here, I want to share with you a Youtube video that demonstrates a 5-minute workout that really gave me good result. The video includes some introduction and explanation. Skip to the 11:56 mark if you want to go straight to the workout. Remember, you don’t actually need to buy a dumbbell if you don’t have one. You can simply use a bottle of water or a bag of apples.
Jogging
From my experience, jogging really works. Although the result does happen rather slowly in terms of losing love handles, you will actually look the best using jogging as your go-to method. The reason is that jogging actually doesn’t emphasize on your belly fat, so once you work hard enough to eventually lose your love handles, you will find your whole body so in shape. Jogging is easy to do, but hard to do. For me, the most difficult part of jogging is to get myself out of my home, especially in a freezing morning. My own motivation tip is to wear some beautiful jogging wears and imagine myself looking 10 times better in the jogging wears having lost some excessive fat.
Swimming
Swimming gives me similar result to jogging. For me, that’s my best solution of how to get rid of hip fat. But I have to confess that in the past few years, I am no longer swimming regularly. Let me tell you the whole story.
I am a freestyle swimmer. I have tried before to swim 3 times a week, for half a year. It really helps made me look much slimmer. I don’t think it will work as well if you are a breaststroke swimmer. My friends who is a breaststroke swimmer seems to look wider and more muscular after swimming with me during that half-year time period. But I really can’t tell whether breaststroke is good for getting rid of belly fat since I don’t really swim breaststroke. But I actually gave up swimming and went back to jogging even though I had some pretty good result, because swimming is just not for everyone. To me, the commute to the swimming pool and the shower after makes it hard for me to fit it to my daily schedule. If you know how to swim and it fits your schedule. I will go as far as saying it is even better than jogging because it doesn’t give you the huge burden to your knees.
Eating Healthy
I know there are lots of “10 Food You Should / Shouldn’t Eat to Get Rid of Love Handles” kind of articles on the internet. I am going to keep it simple and give you the few eating tips that help me get my result.
Snack is the obvious one. I actually didn’t completely stop eating snack, but I’d say I cut snack down to around 20% of my usual eating habits. Oh, and ramen noodles are considered as snack if you don’t know already.
Processed food is actually a big one. You should eat less processed food and that’s something I feel like it’s not mentioned enough. I have really been eating less sausage, ham and canned soup. For myself, it was surprisingly fast to get result of having less excessive fat, not just for my love handles, but my whole body. So I feel like that eating less processed food is an important tips that people always forget.
Fast Walking / Brisk Walking
Fast Walking is probably the slowest way among the other methods mentioned above. But it is something that many people get actually stick to, for a very long period of time. Let’s be honest here, jogging and swimming takes motivation and drive, and we experience the lack of motivation in a bad day at work, a freezing winter morning, you name it. Fast walking, on the other hand, can be forced into your daily habit. What I mean by forcing is that you can do things such as getting off the train or the bus one station before your usual station for work, and instead, fast walk 15-20 minutes. 2 Times every day (going to work and going home after work). During weekends, you can add a little bit of fun by fast walking to your closest restaurant for meals, or your closest malls for shopping (actually I usually do window shopping only after my fast walking section).
Hopefully, the above tips on getting rid of love handles from my own experience can really help you. Remember, just put in the hard work and you will so happy when you see some result. It took me about 2 months to actually see some result, and about 7 months to get to the point where I am actually satisfied. I still do a lot of fast walking, and not eating that much snack and processed food to keep the love handles from appearing again. If you find this article useful, make sure you check out our other articles on fashion, beauty and fitness.
