Muffin Tops – No Love For Love Handles
Not exactly the kind of muffin top you want...
Probably my least favorite incarnation of regional fat storage is love handle and lower back fat. This is, of course, because I personally suffer from such.
Even when I am in lean condition-I’m talking shredded pretty much everywhere else-
I store some fat in my love handles and lower back. It used to take me an extra 3 weeks to get rid of it.
The reason I tend to store fat this way is because of how my body reacts to certain hormones, and because of the effect those hormones have on fat storage.
When I was a fat kid and ate lots and lots of goodies, I screwed by my endocrine system a wee bit. Nothing too serious, but a decade of eating rapidly digesting carbs followed by…well, followed by more rapidly digesting carbs made my insulin spike and crash and spike and crash all over the place.
On top of making me fat in that immediacy, it also completely had a pretty negative effect on the way my body processes and handles insulin period.
The degree to which you are able to process and respond to glucose (sugar) in your body is called insulin sensitivity. The higher this is, the easier and more efficiently your body utilizes carbohydrates for energy, and the less like you are to store carbs as fat.
On the other hand, insulin resistance is the opposite: you don’t deal well with carbs, and anything other than a low carb diet pretty much means you’re gonna hang on to some fat.
And, to make matters worse, as I mentioned previously, there are regional effects. It’s been shown that people who store fat in the love handles are generally very insulin resistant-and therefore it can be reasoned that insulin resistance leads to love handle and lower back fat storage.
Which means, of course, that insulin resistance makes it very hard to lose fat from that area as well.
I’m sure many of you out there who have been heavy before are experiencing much the same problems that I used to have.
The good news is that insulin resistance (and the resulting regional fatness) can be mitigated with certain types of training. For example, with careful planning and selection of exercises, you can start to whittle away at love handle and lower back fat while you increase insulin sensitivity.
The better news is that I’ve figured out a specific series of training sessions that will do just that.
