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

By: Steve Gee Regular exercise is the key to how to get rid of love handles

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.

Are you 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.

Way back in the past your ancestors were lucky to find food every few days and there was no way of storing it back then. So if your hunting were successful you and your friends would have to eat the lot in one go before it went off. To enable you to continue living until the next meal came along the excess energy in the food was converted to fat and stored in the body where it could be gradually released over the next few days.

Your body hasn't forgotten how to store food and it can't predict when the next meal is going to arrive so it stores the energy for you in the form of fat. You probably eat far more regularly than your Stone Age ancestors did so you need to be very careful that you use up your fat store or better still, don't allow it to build up in the first place.

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

Losing love handle fat is a matter of losing fat all over your body. You can't tell your body to lose fat in any specific place even if you exercise all the muscles in that area. What you will do is strengthen and build the muscle underneath the fat but the fat will still be there. Losing fat can be accomplished using a combination of good nutrition and regular exercise to make sure that you burn off more calories than you consume.

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.

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