11 Simple Tricks to Get Rid of Love Handles Fast.

If you speak to any professional fitness instructor about how to lose love handles, they will tell you that they are most stubborn fat to lose. What’s more? There’s nothing like ‘spot reducing’ of fat around your body.

It’s futile to target an area of body fat in order to get rid of it. What is even more true is that no amount of ab crunches will get rid of love handles; you need to improve on your overall diet and exercise routine.

Love handles are deposits of pinchable fat found right above the hips on both side of your belly. They give you a soft appearance and unfortunately they’re extremely difficult to get rid of for many people.

Men especially struggle with this problem stubborn area because it’s one of the first spots that we tend to pack on the fat. Needless to say it’s also one of the last spots to release it. Why are called love handles? Please refer to this article for a better explanation as in this article we’re showing you how to get rid of it.

One of the worst things you can do if you want to burn this stubborn fat is a crash diet. Diets that require you to heavily restrict typically lead to yo-yo dieting and within a relatively short time frame you give up and regain all the weight. This usually leads to your love handles problem only getting worse.

So how to lose love handles? I want to give you 11 simple ways you can start following today to help reduce the size of your love handles naturally without feeling like you’re starving yourself. It’s a combination of dietary changes, recommended exercises and lifestyle changes.

Our first seven tips on how to lose love handles are recommended dietary changes that have been proven to help you lose fat. Let’s get into it.

#1. Eat Foods That High Thermic Effect

The very first thing that you’ll definitely want to do to make fat loss way easier is eat a diet full of foods that have a high thermic effect. Cutting calories can feel difficult but burning more calories just by prioritizing certain foods is much easier.

It could really contribute quite a bit to your total calorie deficit leading to more fat loss without having to put a whole ton of effort in. The thermic effect of food is essentially the energy that your body requires to break down, digest and assimilate the nutrients from the food that you eat.

So to put it simply some foods cost more calories to break down than others. And this is a very good thing not just for getting rid of love handles but for fat loss entirely.

In general carbohydrates and fats will only require about 5-15% of the calories you take in to digest those macronutrients. However a protein requires 20-35 percent of the calories you take in to digest and process it. This is why you want to make sure that you’re eating at least 0.73 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight every day. (1)

It’s not only very satiating and great for helping you build muscle but it also provides a lot less net calories than other macronutrients. Now besides eating enough protein, whole natural single ingredient foods tend to have a higher thermic effect than their protein counterparts.

This is especially true with vegetables which almost cost as many calories to digest as the amount of calories that they actually provide. On the other hand something like sugar has one of the lowest thermic effects which is why our second tip is to reduce your sugar intake.

#2. Cut Out or Reduce Sugar Intake

Not only is sugar very high in calories for the volume that it’ll fill up in your stomach but eating too much sugar is also specifically linked to central obesity, which leads to diseases live diabetes type 2. This is essentially storing more fat specifically around your stomach and love handles area.

Another problem with a diet that’s high in sugar is that it increases circulating insulin levels while decreasing insulin sensitivity. This causes your body to store more fat and makes it much harder to burn previously stored fat. On top of that eating too much sugar regularly will stimulate your brain in a way that causes you to crave more sugar.

Sugar also desensitizes your palate so when you eat naturally sweet-tasting fruits, it simply doesn’t compare to the stimulation that you get from all the added sugar and the high fructose corn syrup in your diet.

So not only is sugar very calorie-dense but it also makes you crave more of it and it makes it harder to find enjoyment from the healthy natural food sources that would actually help you lose the love handles.

How do you reduce sugar intake in order to get rid of love handles eventually?

To reduce sugar in your diet, you want to do the obvious things like eliminate sodas and other sweetened beverages and stick to water instead. You’ll also want to eliminate sugar from the not so obvious sources like many processed foods that contain added sugars, artificial ingredients, flavor enhancers and high fructose corn syrup.

If you buy anything processed that’s in a box or has a really long shelf life, make sure you always check the nutrition label and the ingredients used to limit your daily intake of sugar.

#3. Cut Out Refined Carbohydrates

The next tip on how to lose love handles and excess body fat in general is, besides sugar, you’ll also want to cut out refined carbohydrates. I do not recommend you eliminate carbs completely. In fact many of people have been very successful even eating a higher carb diet. But these refined carbs are very quickly converted to sugar right after you eat them.

When the grains are refined they’re stripped of all the bran, fiber and the nutrients. Not only does this reduce the thermic effect of these carbs but it also speeds up the rate of digestion. It’s not long before you’re hungry once again. On top of that many refined carbohydrates also have additional added sugar.

A couple examples include white bread, doughnuts, pasta, pastries, white flour, sweets and most breakfast cereals. It’s not that you can never eat these foods but you want to do your best to limit them in your diet and stick mostly to whole natural sources of carbohydrates like for example sweet potatoes, brown rice, buckwheat and barley.

#4. Eat Enough Soluble Fiber

The next change you want to incorporate into your diet is to make sure that you’re eating enough soluble fiber. Because these foods really help fill you up and help you feel full for longer. Foods that help you stay full help reduce your calorie intake naturally without having to feel like you’re starving yourself.

A couple examples of foods high in soluble fiber include Brussels sprouts, beans, broccoli and some grains like barley and oats.

Eating more of these high-fiber foods has been shown to help lead to fat loss including love handles in many studies. In fact one study showed that by increasing the amount of soluble fiber that participants ate by just 10 grams per day over the course of five years, led on average to a 3.7% percent reduction of their visceral fat.

This is the fat stored around their midsection. Visceral fat has been linked to many health issues such high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol and being highly predisposed to diabetes type 2.

#5. Include More Healthy Sources of Fat

To reduce hunger and optimize your hormones you’ll also want to include more healthy sources of fat in your diet. Fat slows the digestion process helping you stay full for longer. The other thing about fat is that it simply tastes good so it helps make your diet more enjoyable. When you enjoy your meals you’re more likely to actually stick to your diet for weight and fat loss.

Aside from the benefits of consuming enough healthy sources of fat, if you’re not getting enough fat in your diet you’ll actually negatively affect many vital hormones for fat loss. So make sure that at least 20 to 35 percent of your daily calorie intake is coming from healthy sources of fat like avocados, olive oil, nuts, eggs and fatty fish.

#6. Eat More vegetables

Another very simple way to reduce your love handles is by eating vegetables with every one of your meals. You can easily do this by prioritizing the vegetables and the protein sources on your plate. Vegetables are not only low in calories but they also take up a lot of space in your stomach.

This helps satisfy your hunger, keeps you full for longer and it prevents you from overeating naturally. If you simply incorporate vegetables in every meal and you always make sure to eat all the vegetables and protein on your plate, you’ll be way less likely to overeat.

#7. Intermittent Fasting

Our final dietary recommendation to get rid of love handles is one of my favorite ways to burn fat: with intermittent fasting.

There are many types of fasting protocols that you could try.

Examples include eat stop eat, the warrior method, the 16-8 method, the 5:2 diet and OMAD, (one meal a day) diet, just to name a few. Depending on which one of these you choose, you could be fasting for either 16 hours, 20 hours, 23 hours or even longer.

Just by not eating anything at all during your fasting window, you’ll most likely reduce the amount of calories that you take in on a daily basis. you’ll also still be able to have larger more filling and satiating meals since you’ll be eating fewer total meals per day, which will allow you to eat more during each of those meals.

Fasting can also be used to help fit cheat days into your plan without going overboard on the total amount that you eat throughout the week.

Even though fasting may sound difficult and complicated to set up, I promise you it’s not. Refer to our article on how to set up your own intermittent fasting plan from scratch. That article will help you create your own intermittent fasting plan that’ll help you burn away those love handles and it’s totally free.

Our next couple of tips on how to lose love handles are the recommended exercises and workouts that should go along with the dietary changes we listed above.

#8. Lift Weights

The next thing you’ll want to do is lift weights. As we stated earlier, no amount of abdominal crunches is apparently aimed at the love handles is going to make it disappear.

A lot of people make the mistake of trying to lose their love handles by targeting them with oblique building exercises. However simply doing tons of abdominal work won’t help you get rid of your love handles. This is because it doesn’t burn all that many calories and it simply builds muscle underneath the fat.

Instead you want to focus on weight training exercises that build the most muscle and burn the most amount of calories. Exercises like deadlifts, squats, pull-up, bench presses, rose and cleans are all very good at doing just that.

By performing these exercises with heavy weights, you’ll burn a lot of calories during your workout and afterwards during the recovery process. Now due to all of those broken down muscles, your body will need to use calories to repair them muscles. On top of that you’ll boost your metabolic rate at rest by building more muscle over time.

Many of you that feel stuck and can’t lose anymore fat even though your calories are already pretty low would be better off focusing on lifting heavy and building muscle. That will help you burn fat without having to drop your calories so incredibly low.

#9. Try High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

Another exercise that will help you get rid of love handles and body fat is HIIT. You can do to help burn fat faster by incorporating 15 minutes of high-intensity interval training directly after your weight training workouts.

Weight training predominantly requires carbs for energy. By the end of your 45 minutes or hour long weight training session, your glycogen or your carbohydrate stores will be depleted.

By performing a 15-minute high-intensity interval training session directly after your weight training session your body will be forced to burn the fat to provide the energy needed for the workout since it’s already burned through the carbohydrates with the weight training.

We recommend grouping together exercises that work your whole body and get you breathing really heavy. Exercises like burpees, squat jumps, medicine ball slams and mountain climbers.

Then you would do each exercise that you end up choosing and you would go as hard as you can for 15 to 60 seconds, walk it off for 15 to 60 seconds and repeat over and over until your 15 minutes are up.

Even though this can help you burn a lot of calories there’s no point of working harder than you have to. Only add one HIIT session per week at a time. Try to save adding these sessions for when you start to plateau. This way you always have something in your back pocket to break through and continue burning fat.

Next the following couple of tips on how to lose love handles is the recommended lifestyle changes.

#10. Get Adequate Sleep

To get rid of love handles, you want to ensure that you’re getting enough sleep. I know you’ve heard it all before but you keep hearing it because it works. It’s true. Not getting enough sleep has a very negative effect on your testosterone to cortisol ratio. This leads to less fat loss and less muscle growth.

Hormonal changes can highly contribute to the problem of excess fat being stored around your love handles and belly area.

One of the simplest way to avoid many of these negative changes is by getting enough sleep. You want to do your best to get anywhere from 6 to 8 hours of sleep per night to help your body burn fat.

Studies have shown that people that sleep fewer than five hours per night tend to weigh more and have more belly fat than people that sleep for 6 to 7 hours per night. And there are many other studies that confirm that sleep deprivation is absolutely terrible for fat loss.

#11. Reduce Alcohol Consumption

To get rid of love handles, you’ll also want to reduce your alcohol consumption especially if you drink a lot at once or you drink often. Here’s why. Fat is processed by the same organ that processes alcohol: your liver. When you drink alcohol your body stops burning fat to prioritize breaking down and clearing out the alcohol.

Alcohol is also technically its own macronutrient adding seven calories for every gram of alcohol consumed. On top of that many drinks have added sugars. For example wine and beer are full of additional calories on top of the calories from the alcohol itself.

What’s more? Wine and beer are the go-to for people that drink often. Even though there is some evidence to suggest that having one or two glasses of wine a day can help reduce the chances of developing cardiovascular issues, having one or two glasses of wine every day will definitely not reduce your chances of developing love handles let alone getting rid of it.

So if you do drink try to stick to hard clear liquors that don’t have additional flavors and additional calories. If you can’t control the amount of food and the type of food that you eat when you do drink, then you may be better off not drinking because you can easily consume a thousand extra calories in one drunk binge eating session if you’re not careful.

Conclusion

There you have it. Those are the eleven simple ways that you can use to start getting rid of your love handles right away. Combine any of the exercises above or at least do one of them consistently to ensure you get a much more fitting waistline.

In addition to that make sure you’re eating, in moderation, single ingredient foods. Add in the recommended lifestyle changes and you would be able to lose your love handles for good.

No one exercise routine or particular food or supplement can help you lose body fat from any particular spot. Combining several of these tips will help you stay in great shape and keep unwanted sicknesses away. You can do this all by yourself.

However, if it all seem confusing or you’re not sure how to start or how to lose love handles, may be you could do with a done-for-you workout plan that can be done at home or in a gym. Some programs also come with a customizable meal plan that will be based around your preferences whether that be intermittent fasting, carb cycling, one meal a day, keto or vegan, to name a few.

Look for those online and join in. When you have a professional health and fitness trainer assist you, it makes more accountable and you may be more likely to stick to the program and make the necessary changes you need.