People are becoming more conscious about their appearance and how they look. There are certain terms on the internet that define beauty standards and define certain aspects of the body that aren’t aesthetically pleasing.
To fit into society’s beauty standards and to get rid of body parts that they don’t think are attractive, many have taken on the prospect of reducing and enhancing areas of their body that they don’t think are attractive through natural and surgical means.
Two commons that are quite frequent on the internet and around the cosmetic community are love handles and hip dips. To know what exactly are love handles and hip dips and what are the difference between these two terms, continue reading.
What Are Love Handles?
Love handles are also known as muffin tops. They’re areas of skin that extend outward from the hips. Wearing tight clothes and body-hugging dresses can make your love handles more visible and pronounced.
More visible love handles indicate excessive fat around the hips and abdominal areas. People who are overweight tend to have more visible love handles.
What Causes Love Handles?
The main cause of love handles is the fat retention around the hips and abdominal area. Fat cells accumulate when your body takes too many calories. When you consume calories more than your body needs, fat retention happens which is the main cause of excessive fat around your hip area.
Fat can accumulate anywhere in your body and in any part of your body, but there are a few factors that increase the possibility of retaining fat around the hip, lower back, and abdominal area. Here are a few factors that contribute to lobe handled formation:
- Hormones
- Age
- Lack of physical activity
- Unhealthy diet
- Lack of sleep
- Undiagnosed medical condition
What Are Hip Dips?
According to Dr. Rekha Tailor, medical director and founder of Health and Aesthetic, hip dips are the “colloquial term that is given to the inward depression—or curve—along the side of your body, just below the hip bone.” This is also known as violin hips. And scientifically, this is called “trochanteric depressions.”
People nowadays call it the new thigh gap, an obsession that is persisted since 2010. The interest in hip dips has significantly increased during the lockdown. People are now more interested in Hip dips and searches for hip dips have doubled in the past few years.
What Causes Hip Dips?
Hip dips are mostly caused by genetics. Your body type depends on your gene, therefore so people have hip dips and some don’t.
Ross Perry, medical director of CosmedicsUK says that hip dips are a completely normal anatomical phenomenon. He further says that “They are caused when one’s hip bone is located higher than his or her femur, causing fat and muscle to cave inward.”
Hip dips are totally natural and depend on your bone structure and how your bones are built. There are a few factors that affect the visibility of your hip dips. For example, the skeletal structure of an individual’s pelvis, the width of their hips, and their overall body fat and muscle distribution will all have an impact on how noticeable their hip dips are when observed externally.
The most important thing that you should know about hip dips is that they aren’t caused by weight gain or fat. If you have hip dips then this doesn’t mean that you are unfit.
Most people think that a lack of hip dips means that they’re fit and healthy. Though the amount of fat stored in that area does make hip dips more noticeable. If you have extra mass and muscles in that area then it’ll make it more visible, also, losing weight around that body part won’t make it go away. However, it will make them less noticeable.
What’s the Difference Between Love Handles and Hip Dips?
Love handles are also known as muffin tops. It’s caused by excessive fat that accumulates on the sides of the abdomen.
The main difference between hip dips and love handles is that love handles are located much higher on the body, settling around a person’s waistline. Similar to hip dips, some people are simply more genetically prone to having love handles than others.
How to Get Rid of Hip Dips?
It’s not possible to get rid of hip dips entirely from your body. However, working out and building muscles can help you to reduce the appearance of hip dips and make them less visible.
There are a few exercises that you can practice to reduce the appearance of hip dips, such as Bulgarian split squats, glute bridges, and lunges. Running and walking are also great for shaping the legs while core workouts, especially those targeting the abs and obliques. It will help to shape the waist.
Hip dips are also known as dancer’s dents. People who are into dancing have more prominent hip dips due to the serious amount of booty squeezing, hamstring, hip, and leg work dancers get through.
How Common are Hip Dips?
Hip dips are pretty common, more than you think. Almost everyone has hip dips, although the visibility and appearance of hip dips vary from person to person everybody has some degree of hip dips.
Hip dips are more common in women than men, that’s because of the body type and bone structure of women. The body structure and type of women are different from men therefore women are more prone to hip dips.
That said, on some people, hip dips are barely visible, while on others it can be very apparent, it simply depends on your genes and on the position of the hip bones, and genetic fat distribution. Hip dips are more noticeable when you stand straight in front of the mirror and look at your front profile.
However, it’s quite difficult to tell the exact number of people who have hip dips and who don’t. So it’s better to accept how you are and be comfortable with your body
Are Love Handles the Same as Hip Dips?
Technically, love handles aren’t the same as hip dips. Love handles extend outwards from the hips and comes from a woman’s skin structure. Wearing tight clothes and body-fitted clothes make your love handles more prominent and increase the appearance of love handles.
But the real reason behind love handles isn’t tight clothes. The real cause of love handles is the excessive fat around your hip area due to excessive eating and consuming more calories than your burn.
However, hip dips aren’t caused by excessive fat. Hip dips are due to genetics. Hip dips are caused by a certain type of body type and bone structure. Although excessive weight does make hip dips more obvious, it’s not the main reason behind hip dips.
Exercises to Get Rid of Hip Dips
Here are various exercises that might reduce hip dips, but keep in mind that they will not vanish completely:
Final Thoughts
Love handles and hip dips are two different terms with different meanings. Although people tend to get confused between these two terms, the major difference between love handles and hip dips is that love handles are caused by excessive fat, while hip dips are caused by a certain type of body structure.
The reason behind love handles is fat retention around your hip area and abdominal area. Consuming an excessive amount of calories causes weight gain which results in love handles.
Whereas, hip dips aren’t caused by fat retention. It’s caused by a certain type of body type. Genetics is the major reason behind hip dips.
Whether you have love handles or hip dips, you shouldn’t be conscious about how you look. Everyone wants to fit into the beauty standards of society, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should go for surgeries to get rid of body parts that you think are unattractive.
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