It’s not simply your imagination when you think your body shape changes, even when you’re neither gaining nor losing weight. Your body stores fat when you consume more than you burn, then draws on these deposits when you burn more than you consume.
Where these stores happen can change over time. Love handles are a common problem area for many. It may not matter if you’re below, at, or above your optimum body mass index (BMI).
Love handles form from subcutaneous fat, layers that accumulate beneath the skin but above muscle layers. It’s a difficult area to tone with exercise since there’s no overlying muscle to reign in the fat deposits.
At Bayview General Medicine, we understand the frustration, particularly when you’re working hard to optimize your body shape. A multifaceted approach combining medical treatment and lifestyle modifications typically produces the quickest and longest-lasting results. Here are our top four tips for getting rid of love handles.
No matter your current activity level, there’s likely a way to build in another 30 minutes of moderate activity a day, all at once, in two 15-minute segments or even three 10-minute bursts. The goal here is a boost in calorie-burning time to counteract things like a slowing metabolism. Increasing your baseline daily calorie consumption makes it easier to reach the point where your body draws on fat stores, potentially shrinking the fat stored in the love handle area.
The logical partner to activity gains is calorie reduction. Don’t seek to make wholesale dietary changes you can’t sustain. Instead, reduce portions of high-calorie proteins and fill up on low-calorie fresh fruits and vegetables. Again, your target is a bump toward calorie deficit conditions, so your body actively seeks nutrition from body fat.
In addition to increasing your overall activity, you want to add exercise that explicitly targets strength and cardiovascular conditioning. Remember, it’s hard to reshape love handle fat through exercise, but improved muscle tone combined with your adjusted calorie equation could add up to reducing love handle size.
While the first three tips depend on self-discipline and careful planning, tip #4 could be the easiest and only solution you need. A noninvasive cosmetic procedure with no downtime required, laser lipolysis with the SculpSure body contouring system literally melts love-handle fat with a simple in-office session taking less than an hour.
Fat cells can’t tolerate the same wide range of temperatures that your surface skin can. Heating these cells above a certain point disrupts fat cells and targets them for natural removal from your body.
The SculpSure laser uses a wavelength chosen to pass through the skin with minimal effect before being absorbed by adipose tissue (the fat cells that produce your love handle bulges). Absorbing laser energy heats about 24% of the fat in a treatment zone to the coagulation temperature.
You’ll see a difference in the weeks after your treatment as the treated tissue flushes out naturally from your body. Fat cells destroyed by SculpSure won’t return. Potentially, your love handles could be gone for good.
SculpSure also treats other problem areas. Contact the body contouring specialists at Bayview General Medicine to find out more. Book an appointment online or by phone today.
