Losing the handles

Who knows, there might be a Pamela Anderson smiling at you at the end of the day? But if you don’t, at least we don’t know a single woman who’ll talk dreamily about getting a handful of lard, your lard. Now, it’s not as if those fatty folds (conveniently called `love handles’) signal the end of the world as we know it. Here’s how to get rid of the handles.

First, accept the fact that it’s going to be hard. Like pushy party guests, love handles are the first fat deposits to arrive and the last to leave. The fatness order, in general, is: face, thighs, back, front of stomach, love handles. So even if you jog three miles a day, lift weights and say no to French fries, Silly Putty still might sag over the towel each morning when you cinch it around your waist.

But it’s not impossible. Any man who’s less than 10 pounds overweight (more, and you have other problems to worry about first) can have an arrow-straight waist the kind pretty women like to put their arms around as they saunter into expensive restaurants. What you need to do is tone your zone, in addition to losing body fat. And, that takes some tinkering with your three modes of attack: aerobics, weight training and diet. Plus the dedication to stick with it.

In fact, the success of this programme relies greatly on your ability to monitor your eating and match it to your energy expenditure. And you must be ready to push yourself really hard. Aim to expand slightly more energy than you consume each day if you wish to lose any bodyweight. If you want to remain a constant weight then you must match your energy intake with your expenditure. Remember, a lot of people have great abdominal muscles, it’s just that they’re covered in too much fat. No matter how much you work out, you must drop fat to get definition.

Aerobics
“Go slow to burn fat” is a slogan that started millions of Americans walking. The only problem is, “it’s false,” says 65-year-old cardiologist Ashish Ray, better known as India’s `Marathon Man’ for having run more than 30 marathons, including the famed Boston, USA. “Easy exercise 50 to 60 per cent effort burns a higher percentage of fat per minute, but it doesn’t burn as much calories per minute as the faster-paced stuff does,” he says.

Ray continues: “You can walk off fat, but you’d have to do an awful lot of walking.” So pick up the pace. To burn fat, he recommends exercising continuously at 75 to 85 per cent of your maximum heart rate, roughly the point where conversation becomes difficult and visions of Cindy Crawford feeding you grapes on a divan fill your head as a reward for your hard work.

If you don’t have a heart monitor, a more exact — but less stimulating — method is this one: subtract your age from 220 to get your maximum heart rate, then figure out your percentage from there. For instance, you are 40 years old. 220-40=180, which is your maximum heart rate. Seventy-five per cent of 180 is 135 beats/minute. Eighty-five per cent is 153 beats/minute. So, 135 to 153 beats/minute is your target zone.

Running, cycling, swimming and aerobic dancing burn more fat than other exercises, but the StairMaster and rowing machine at your neighbourhood gym are good, too. Just make sure you’re working hard. An added bonus is that fast-paced workouts also burn fat at an accelerated rate rather after you stop. That’s because the stoked fire that burns calories to supply you with energy (metabolism) takes time to die down, sometimes more than an hour before it returns to its normal rate.

A good workout to kick this `after-burn’ effect into high gear is intervals with brief rests: for example, five 90-second bursts of running, cycling or swimming at 95 percent effort (i.e. roughly the point where Cindy is joined by Claudia and Elle, who fan you with palm branches and laugh at your jokes).

Weights
Can you pinch more than an inch from your sides? If so, do squats. (Why not side bends?). In a squat, you stand upright with the barbell behind your head and across your shoulders, bend at the hips and knees, keeping your back straight as you lower yourself into a squatting position, then come back up again. Weight work burns fat in two ways: during the workout, and during everyday life.

Says Anil Kaushik of Muscle Beach, Munirka, and a personal trainer on call, “The more muscle you have, the higher your resting metabolism, because muscle burns more calories than fat does.” But some muscles are better than others. The large muscle groups burn more calories during and after a workout than the smaller muscles do. So by adopting a weight-lifting programme that targets the large muscle groups, such as the butt and thighs, which are used during squats, you’ll maximise fat burning.

To tone the love-handle zone, work in side bends. (With a dumbbell in your right hand hanging at your side, place your left hand behind your head and bend to the right as far as you can go: shift the dumbbell to your left hand and repeat.) “But don’t overdo this at the expense of other exercises,” advises Kaushik. “Ask the trainer at your gym if you’re confused about any lift.”

A simple thumb-rule is: try for 10-15 repetitions of each exercise. If you can’t do 10, the weight is too heavy; if you can do more than 15, it’s too light. Go directly from one lift to another. Do two to three circuits.

Diet right
You can lose love handles on a diet of doughnuts (if you eat one a day and nothing else) and gain weight eating bagels and pasta (if you have, say 22 bagels and 14 bowls of vermicelli). The point is, fat isn’t necessarily the enemy when you want to lose body fat. “Calories are,” says Rekha Sharma, Chief Dietitian, All India Institute of Medical Sciences. “In order to lose body fat, you’ve got to create a calorie deficit.” That means consuming less calories — in any form — than you burn every day.

A typical active male burns about 15 calories per pound of body weight each day. And if he works out — hits the weights or the StairMaster or plays basketball for an hour (not on his son’s video game) — he burns an extra 400 to 800 calories. That’s 2,550 calories burnt per day for a 80-kilo man. To lose body weight, then — to lose those love handles — a 80-kilo man needs to eat fewer than 2,550 calories a day.

Sharma recommends skimming calories from the top rather than wiring your mouth shut and subsisting on carrot juice. Other tips: eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an afternoon snack, and don’t be afraid to eat some fat. Skipping any meal may slow your metabolism and drive up hunger. So, you’ll not only overeat at your next meal but you’ll burn off less of it.