SolveYourProblem Article Series: Exercise & Fitness
What Are The Most Effective Ways
To Exercise & Get Into Shape?

Toning Your Hips and Thighs

For the vast majority of women, shapeless hips and thighs with excess fat are a major complaint. Thanks to female physiology, women’s bodies are simply designed to retain fat in the hip/thigh area to assist with childbearing and be available for energy in case of famine. That was great back in the caveman days but in modern times the typical woman is not likely to need several months’ worth of fat stored on her hips. Physiology is not likely to change any time soon, though, so women have to combat fat on the hips and thighs in a different way. Fortunately the area can be slimmed down through a combination of diet, exercise and specifically targeted toning movements so that your hips and thighs no longer resemble that of a cavewoman.

Begin by assessing your diet – do you eat a lot of junk food or dine out frequently? Oftentimes a busy schedule can prevent people from eating as healthy as they would like, especially since it can difficult to get away from work for a real meal. What about cravings? Women especially are prone to cravings for high-fat, high-calorie foods that have no real nutritional value. Premenstrual syndrome can be responsible for many of those cravings but often emotional eating is a factor as well. You should take an honest look at your diet and keep a food diary for a few days. Write everything you eat and how you felt at the time. That can provide insight into your choices for nourishment. If you’re dealing with stressful situations at home or work, that can reflect itself in your daily diet. Make a commitment to yourself to change your eating habits and take care of your body by providing yourself with healthy, nutritious foods that give you the right kind of fuel to make it through the day. Eating a properly balanced diet can actually help to alleviate many symptoms of stress and may help you deal with your situation more effectively. When you know how to use it properly, food is a powerful tool.

As part of your program, you should keep a food journal to track your eating and also motivate yourself to eat better every day. Knowing that you will have to write down two chocolate bars including the amount of calories and fat can deter you from eating them in the first place – one of the reasons that food journals are so powerful. Being able to track your feelings at the time you ate can help you identify emotional issues and encourage you to eat because you want to, not because your boss yelled at you. Consider also using your food journal to keep track of your weight and measurements once a week to provide yourself with an accurate record of your progress over the weeks.

Consider your exercise program – do you have one? You should! When the hips and thighs are chubby and out of shape, that’s typically a situation that will require a lot of fat-burning. The issue is not so much that the muscles aren’t in shape but that there’s too much fat over the muscles to show any real definition. Fat-burning activities will be a vital part of reshaping your lower body and you should plan to work out at least four times every week for about thirty to forty-five minutes each time. The good news is that you don’t have to work out all at once – fit three 10-minute workouts into your day and you’ve done your exercise. Recent studies show that short, intense spurts of exercise can be just as effective as longer workouts. That’s good news for everyone with busy days and busier nights. The best choices for fat-burning are swimming, power-walking, and high-intensity aerobics. All three of these options will blast calories from your body and help torch the fat from your body. Burning the fat off is your first priority in order to see the true shape of your body underneath. In between your fat-blasting workouts, make time to strengthen your hip and thigh area by doing squats and lunges as well as lateral raises to tone the outer thighs. You may want to wait to focus on the strengthening exercises until you have lost fat from the hips and thighs, but fortunately this is an area that builds muscle fairly quickly. Squats are an especially powerful move to tone up the buttocks and increase the power of your workouts.

Shaping up the hips and thighs is by no means impossible. Make your plan, keep a daily food record, and burn fat through cardiovascular exercise – your lower body will start to reshape itself within a few weeks. There’s nothing better than looking in the mirror and knowing that the strong, beautiful lower body is thanks to your hard work and effort.

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SolveYourProblem.com : 2005