Know your body
Hip Dips vs Love Handles: Different Things, Opposite Fixes
Hip dips and love handles are neighbors, not the same thing: hip dips are inward curves caused by bone spacing below the hip bone, while love handles are fat pads sitting above it at the waistline. Love handles respond to overall fat loss; hip dips respond (partially) to muscle gain. Opposite levers.
Half the frustration in this niche comes from people fighting the wrong feature with the right tool. These two get confused constantly because they live three inches apart — and everything about fixing them is opposite.
The three-second identification
Stand side-on, find your hip bone (iliac crest):
- Above it, at the waistline, pinchable? Love handles — that’s a fat pad.
- Below it, an inward curve you can’t pinch because it’s a valley, not a roll? Hip dip — that’s bone spacing (the full anatomy).
The pinch test settles it: love handles are grabbable tissue; hip dips are the absence of tissue over a bony span.
Why the fixes are opposites
| Love handles | Hip dips | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Subcutaneous fat storage | Skeletal geometry + thin muscle coverage |
| Responds to | Overall fat loss (deficit, time) | Muscle gain over the dip (glute med work) |
| Doesn’t respond to | Endless oblique exercises (“spot reduction” isn’t real) | Fat loss — often deepens the look |
| Fully removable? | Yes, with sufficient fat loss | No — softenable only |
Here’s the cruel combo move: someone with both decides to “tone up,” runs a hard deficit, loses the love handles — and watches their hip dips get more visible as the fat pad over the trochanter thins. They conclude their body is broken. Their body executed both changes perfectly; the plan just never distinguished the two features.
If you have both and one summer
Order of operations that actually works: build glute-med muscle while eating at only a slight deficit (the muscle is small enough to grow on modest calories), because muscle over the dip buffers the deepening effect as waist fat drops. It’s the difference between a plan designed for your anatomy and a “get snatched” mood board. The 8-Week Protocol handles the muscle half; the deficit half is groceries, patience and no purchase necessary.
And if reading this you realized yours are love handles after all — congratulations, honestly: you have the more solvable feature, and you never needed a hip dip product. We just talked ourselves out of a sale. Club rules.
Real questions, real answers
Can you have both hip dips and love handles?
Very commonly, yes — they're independent traits. Fat stored at the waist can even make the dip below it read deeper by contrast, which is why people often blame the dip for what's mostly a waistline shadow.
Do love handles cause hip dips?
No, but they exaggerate them visually. Fullness above the dip deepens the apparent valley. Reducing overall body fat can soften that contrast — while making the bony landmarks slightly more visible. Bodies are annoying like that; the guide explains the trade.
Which is easier to get rid of?
Love handles, by far — they're subcutaneous fat, which responds to a sustained calorie deficit (location can't be targeted, but they shrink as overall fat drops). Hip dips are skeletal and only soften via muscle over the dip. Neither responds to the other's fix.
What’s your hip dip type?
Four questions, one honest answer: what actually works for your silhouette — training, styling, or just reassurance.
Take the quiz