You put on your favorite jeans.
They still button. They still fit. But when you turn sideways in the mirror, you notice that familiar softness sitting just above the waistband.
You pull your shirt down.
Then you pull it back up and look again.
Maybe you call them love handles. Maybe you call it a muffin top. Maybe you don’t have a name for it at all. You simply know that the area around your waist seems to be one of the last places willing to change.
And that can be frustrating.
You may have already started eating differently. Maybe you’re walking more. Perhaps you’ve even lost a few pounds.
Your face looks a little slimmer.
Your clothes feel different.
But those love handles?
Still hanging around like they never received the eviction notice.
If you’ve been wondering How To Get Rid Of Love Handles, there are things you can do that may reduce abdominal fat and gradually change the way your waist looks.
But there is also a lot of nonsense surrounding this subject.
So rather than promising that one exercise will melt the fat from your sides, let’s talk about what love handles actually are, what research tells us about losing abdominal fat, and what you can realistically do about them.
And we can do that without turning your life into one endless diet.
Why Are They Called Love Handles Anyway?
It is a strange name when you think about it.
If you’ve ever wondered why are they called love handles, the expression refers to the soft areas around the sides of the waist that someone could jokingly hold during an embrace.
That’s really it.
There isn’t a medical structure in your body called a love handle.
Love handles are simply an informal way of describing fat around the sides of the waist and lower back.
Some people naturally carry more fat there than others.
One person may gain weight and notice it first around the stomach. Another may notice it around the hips, thighs, arms or face.
Age, sex, genetics, hormones, overall body composition and lifestyle can all influence body-fat distribution.
That helps explain something you’ve probably already noticed in everyday life.
Two people can weigh exactly the same amount and look completely different.
Even two people of the same height and weight can have very different waistlines.
Your scale doesn’t know where you’re carrying your weight.
The mirror does.
And Then There’s the Muffin Top
Love handles and a muffin top are closely related expressions, but they don’t always describe exactly the same appearance.
Love handles generally refer to the fat around the sides of your waist.
A muffin top body usually describes soft tissue extending over the top of a waistband.
And yes, we’re talking about body shape here.
Not something sitting beside your morning coffee.
There is another little detail worth remembering.
Sometimes the waistband itself makes the effect look more dramatic.
Put on a pair of pants that digs tightly into your waist and soft tissue has to go somewhere. Change into something that fits differently and your silhouette can change immediately even though you haven’t lost an ounce.
That doesn’t mean someone who wants to change their waist should simply be told to buy bigger pants and forget about it.
You can like yourself today and still want something different tomorrow.
You can buy clothes that fit comfortably right now and still work toward losing weight.
Those ideas don’t contradict each other.
You are allowed to enjoy your life now, and you are also allowed to work toward changes you personally want.
How To Get Rid Of Muffin Top Fat
This is where things get interesting.
Search how to get rid of muffin top and you can quickly find yourself surrounded by promises.
Do this exercise.
Drink this.
Wrap this around your waist.
Avoid this food.
Eat this food.
Do 100 repetitions before breakfast.
You could probably spend half the morning following advice about your waist before you’ve even had time to live your life.
Fortunately, the research gives us something much simpler to work with.
Exercise can help reduce abdominal fat.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 12 studies involving 591 adults with overweight or obesity. Researchers found that prolonged exercise reduced both visceral abdominal fat and subcutaneous abdominal fat.
That second type is particularly relevant here.
Subcutaneous fat is the fat underneath your skin—the kind you can generally pinch.
Visceral fat is different. It sits deeper inside the abdomen around internal organs.
When you’re looking at love handles in the mirror, you’re primarily noticing the softer tissue closer to the surface.
Research involving thousands of participants has found that aerobic training, resistance training and programs combining the two can reduce subcutaneous abdominal fat.
So yes, your waist can change.
It just probably won’t happen because you found one magical exercise on social media.
Can a Love Handles Workout Actually Target Your Sides?
For years, the standard answer to this question was simple.
You cannot spot reduce fat.
Do side bends and you’ll strengthen the muscles, people would say, but your body decides where the fat comes off.
The reality deserves a little more nuance.
A small randomized controlled trial published in 2023 studied 16 men with overweight. One group performed treadmill exercise together with abdominal endurance exercises, including torso rotations and abdominal crunches. The comparison group performed treadmill exercise without that same abdominal program.
After 10 weeks, the abdominal-training group experienced a greater reduction in trunk fat.
That’s interesting.
Really interesting.
But sixteen men are sixteen men.
It would be a huge leap to turn one small experiment into:
Do these three exercises and your love handles will disappear.
The researchers themselves were studying a very specific exercise program under controlled conditions.
So where does that leave you?
Some research suggests localized exercise may influence local fat loss under certain circumstances. But the much larger body of evidence supports something we already know works—regular exercise can reduce overall and abdominal fat.
That means a sensible love handles workout doesn’t have to be a 45-minute attack on your sides.
You can train the muscles around your waist.
You can strengthen your core.
You can do resistance exercises.
You can walk.
You can cycle.
You can swim.
You can dance in your living room when nobody is watching.
You can do whatever gets your body moving consistently enough to matter.
A major review examining 84 randomized controlled trials involving 4,836 people with overweight or obesity found benefits from several forms of exercise. Aerobic exercise, resistance training, combined aerobic and resistance exercise, and high-intensity interval training were associated with improvements in measures of body composition, including waist circumference and abdominal fat.
That gives you options.
And options matter because the supposedly “perfect” exercise isn’t very useful if you hate it so much that you stop doing it after nine days.
Imagine Two Different Mondays
On the first Monday, you decide everything has to change.
No more bread.
No dessert.
No eating after 6 p.m.
Gym every morning.
Ten thousand steps.
No restaurant food.
No snacks.
You even buy vegetables you don’t particularly like because they look healthy sitting in the shopping cart.
By Wednesday you’re hungry.
By Thursday you’re irritated.
Friday evening arrives and someone suggests pizza.
Suddenly your healthy-living plan feels less like a lifestyle and more like a prison sentence.
So you eat the pizza.
Then you decide you’ve “messed up.”
And because you’ve messed up, you might as well start again Monday.
Now imagine a different Monday.
Breakfast is mostly the same, but you make it a little more filling.
You take a ten-minute walk after lunch.
At dinner, you eat food you actually enjoy, but maybe the portion looks slightly different.
Tuesday isn’t perfect.
Wednesday isn’t either.
Nothing dramatic happens.
But you keep going.
A week passes.
Then another.
That second approach isn’t exciting enough to sell as a miracle.
But it has something the first approach didn’t have.
A chance of becoming normal.
The Kitchen Still Matters
Exercise matters.
Food matters too.
If fat loss is the goal, energy balance matters over time. But knowing that doesn’t mean you need to spend the rest of your life weighing lettuce and carrying a calculator into restaurants.
It also doesn’t mean you should try to survive on tiny meals.
A diet that leaves you constantly hungry can become very difficult to maintain.
Instead, think about what your ordinary day looks like.
Not your perfect day.
Your ordinary day.
What do you drink?
What do you snack on without thinking?
How large are your portions?
How often are you genuinely hungry compared with eating because food is available, you’re bored, you’re stressed or it’s simply what you always do at that time?
There may be surprisingly easy places to make changes.
Maybe you drink some of your calories without noticing them.
Maybe the serving you normally pour is much larger than the serving you actually need to feel satisfied.
Maybe adding more protein or fiber-rich foods helps you stay satisfied longer.
Maybe you’re not eating badly at all—you simply need modest changes in portions and activity.
No single one of those decisions has to feel dramatic.
That is the point.
A quiet change that survives six months can matter much more than a dramatic change that survives six days.
You Don’t Need to Exercise Like Someone Is Chasing You
There’s another trap people fall into when trying to lose love handles.
They assume exercise only counts when it hurts.
If you’re not dripping sweat…
If your legs aren’t shaking…
If you didn’t burn some enormous number of calories…
Then apparently it wasn’t worth doing.
That’s a miserable way to think about movement.
A walk counts.
Resistance training counts.
A bike ride counts.
Swimming counts.
Gardening and other physical activity can contribute to an active life too.
And if you’re currently doing very little exercise, going from nothing to something is already a meaningful change.
You don’t have to begin where someone else is after five years of training.
Start where you are.
The research doesn’t say everyone has to perform the same workout. In fact, studies comparing different forms of exercise show that several approaches can improve abdominal-fat and body-composition measures.
The useful question becomes:
What can I realistically keep doing?
Maybe that’s walking five days a week and doing resistance training twice.
Maybe you enjoy a gym.
Maybe you’d rather exercise at home.
Maybe you’re the person who needs music blasting before you’ll move for 20 minutes.
Fine.
The body doesn’t award extra points because you hated the workout.
What About Strengthening the Area?
This is where exercises such as torso rotations, side planks and other core movements can have a place.
They train muscles.
And stronger muscles can be useful even while fat loss is happening gradually.
Think about your waist as more than something you look at in the mirror.
Your trunk helps stabilize you when you move, lift, bend and perform everyday activities.
So there’s nothing wrong with training it.
The mistake comes when somebody promises that doing hundreds of repetitions will selectively burn away the fat sitting directly above those muscles.
As we just saw, there is some intriguing research on localized fat reduction. But that evidence isn’t strong enough to promise that a particular set of exercises will remove your love handles.
Train your core because you want a stronger core.
Let your overall nutrition, movement and exercise habits do the heavier work of changing body composition.
Then There Are Bingo Wings
The waist isn’t the only place people notice stubborn-looking fat or loose tissue.
Another common search is how to get rid of bingo wings.
“Bingo wings” is an informal term for loose or hanging tissue underneath the upper arms.
But here’s where we have to separate a few things.
Sometimes what you’re seeing is largely body fat.
Sometimes loose skin contributes.
Sometimes it is both.
That distinction matters because losing body fat and tightening loose skin are not the same thing.
Someone who loses a significant amount of weight may become considerably leaner and still have loose skin around the arms, stomach or other areas.
Resistance training can strengthen and build the muscles underneath the area.
Fat loss may reduce fullness if excess fat is contributing to the appearance.
But exercise cannot guarantee that loose skin will completely disappear.
That’s important because people sometimes blame themselves when the scale has changed dramatically but their skin hasn’t followed exactly as they expected.
Those are two different tissues undergoing two different kinds of change.
Your Body Isn’t a Before Picture
There is something uncomfortable about the way weight loss is sometimes marketed.
You see the “before” photograph.
Bad lighting.
Unflattering clothes.
Sad expression.
Then comes the “after.”
Better lighting.
Better posture.
Better clothes.
Big smile.
The message isn’t subtle.
Apparently the person in the first photograph wasn’t supposed to be enjoying life yet.
That’s nonsense.
If you have love handles today, you’re still allowed to wear the swimsuit.
If you have a muffin top, you’re still allowed to buy clothes you love.
If your arms have loose skin, you’re still allowed to wear something sleeveless.
Changing your body doesn’t require declaring war on the body you currently have.
In fact, treating yourself reasonably may make the whole process much easier to live with.
Because this could take time.
And you still have a life to live while it’s happening.
Don’t Let the Mirror Be Your Only Scoreboard
Here is something people sometimes miss while trying to change their waist.
The scale may move slowly while something useful is happening underneath.
Exercise research has found meaningful changes in visceral fat, waist circumference and other body-composition measures across different training approaches.
So progress isn’t necessarily:
Monday — 190 pounds
Friday — 180 pounds
Real life may look more like this:
Your jeans fit differently.
Your waist measurement changes.
Walking becomes easier.
You can exercise longer.
You feel stronger.
Your food choices become less of a daily battle.
Then one day you catch your reflection and realize your body has been changing while you were busy living your life.
That’s the part people don’t put on the front of diet books.
Because it isn’t dramatic.
There may not be one morning when you wake up and suddenly become the person you were trying to become.
Maybe you simply notice that you walked farther without getting tired.
Or you reach for a shirt that used to cling around your waist and realize it doesn’t fit quite the same way anymore.
Maybe someone else notices before you do.
Or maybe nobody says anything at all.
But you know.
You remember how those jeans felt three months ago.
What If the Scale Doesn’t Cooperate Every Morning?
Body weight can fluctuate.
So weighing yourself one morning and expecting that number to perfectly reflect yesterday’s eating and exercise can create unnecessary frustration.
The scale can be useful.
It just isn’t a daily report card on whether you were “good.”
If you’re watching your progress, look at the bigger picture.
Your weight trend over time can tell you more than obsessing over one isolated number.
You can also pay attention to waist measurements, clothing fit, physical ability and how consistently you’re following the habits you chose.
Because the real goal isn’t to win Tuesday morning.
It’s to create enough Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and ordinary Saturdays that your body has time to respond.
Your Love Handles Didn’t Arrive Overnight
This is worth remembering when impatience shows up.
For most people, changes in body composition happen gradually.
That means reversing those changes may also require patience.
You may start exercising this week and still have love handles next week.
That doesn’t mean the exercise failed.
You may make better food choices for ten days and still see a muffin top above your jeans.
That doesn’t mean your body ignored you.
Sometimes we’re asking the body to demonstrate in two weeks what took months or years to develop.
Give it a fair chance.
The 2025 meta-analysis looking at prolonged exercise found reductions in both visceral and subcutaneous abdominal fat across the included trials.
The word worth noticing there is prolonged.
Not one heroic workout.
Not one perfect week.
A process.
You Can Make This Surprisingly Ordinary
Maybe that’s the secret nobody wants to put in giant letters on an advertisement.
Getting healthier can become boring.
And boring can be wonderful.
You wake up and breakfast isn’t a negotiation anymore.
You have a few meals you like and know how to prepare.
Walking doesn’t feel like “your weight-loss program.” It’s just what you do after dinner.
The weights in the corner aren’t part of some 30-day transformation challenge anymore. You use them because Tuesday and Saturday happen to be your resistance-training days.
You go out to eat sometimes.
You have birthdays.
You have holidays.
You have days when the plan goes completely sideways.
And then something important happens.
You stop treating one unusual meal as permission to abandon everything.
You simply return to normal.
That’s a very different relationship with weight management.
And perhaps a much more comfortable one.
So How Do You Actually Start?
You don’t need a ceremonial starting date.
You don’t have to wait until Monday.
Look at your current routine and choose a few things that seem realistic enough to survive ordinary life.
Move more often.
Include resistance exercise if it’s appropriate for you.
Find meals that satisfy you without routinely pushing your calorie intake far beyond what you need.
Pay attention to portions without turning every plate into a mathematics exam.
Get adequate sleep when you can.
And give the process enough time to reveal whether it’s working.
If something is too difficult to maintain, change the plan instead of assuming something is wrong with you.
The goal isn’t to prove how much discomfort you can tolerate.
The goal is to build a routine capable of lasting long enough to matter.
Six Months From Now
Picture yourself six months from today.
Not an imaginary version with perfect abs and a completely different life.
Just you.
Maybe your waist is smaller.
Maybe those jeans fit comfortably.
Maybe your love handles aren’t as noticeable.
Maybe your weight has changed considerably.
Or perhaps the changes are more modest than you imagined.
But you’re stronger.
You’re moving more.
Food doesn’t control quite as much of your mental space.
You’ve learned which habits actually work in your real life rather than which ones sound impressive online.
And maybe you’ve discovered something else.
The thing that finally worked wasn’t the most extreme thing you tried.
It was the thing you could keep doing.
That’s worth remembering when another miracle love handles workout appears on your screen promising a completely different waist by next weekend.
You don’t need to punish your stomach.
You don’t need to hate your muffin top.
And you certainly don’t need to postpone enjoying your life until your waist reaches some imaginary finish line.
If your goal is figuring out How To Get Rid Of Love Handles, don’t build your entire life around getting rid of your love handles.
Build a healthier routine.
Give your body time to respond.
Keep the parts that fit your life.
Change the parts that don’t.
Then keep going.
Because one morning you may put on those same jeans, button them without thinking, walk past the mirror…
And then walk backward for another look.
Not because you suddenly became somebody else.
Because somewhere between all those ordinary Mondays and Tuesdays, something quietly changed.
Sources
Igarashi Y, Akazawa N, Maeda S. An exercise program to reduce abdominal visceral and subcutaneous fat in adults with overweight and obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Obesity Research & Clinical Practice, 2025.
Chen X, He H, Xie K, Zhang L, Cao C. Effects of various exercise types on visceral adipose tissue in individuals with overweight and obesity: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of 84 randomized controlled trials. Obesity Reviews, 2024.
Yarizadeh H, Eftekhar R, Anjom-Shoae J, Speakman JR, Djafarian K. The Effect of Aerobic and Resistance Training and Combined Exercise Modalities on Subcutaneous Abdominal Fat: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials. Advances in Nutrition, 2021.
Brobakken MF, et al. Abdominal aerobic endurance exercise reveals spot reduction exists: A randomized controlled trial. Physiological Reports, 2023.