When Did ‘Hip Dips’ Become A Thing To Get Rid Of?

Growing up, Emma June hated her hips, or more specifically, she hated her “hips.”

hip bottoms are natural indentations or depressed curves below the hip, located on the outside of the upper leg. For some people, the appearance of the indentations is more prominent than for others.

When Emma June wore tighter clothing as a teenager, “I was struck by the distinctive untight, unrounded fat on my hips,” she said.

“It wasn’t shaped like an hourglass and that seemed to be what everyone, myself included, wanted to be,” Emma June, a writer from West Virginia who asked to use only her first name, told HuffPost.

To disguise her hip sagging, she would even wear compression shorts and leggings under all of her jeans and pants.

“I also wore my belts so tight they hurt because I thought even if my hips weren’t hourglass shaped, maybe people wouldn’t notice if my waist was small,” she said.

Back then, women called them “saddlebags” or “violin hips.” Today on social media, they are “hip dips.” The fitness circles on TikTok and Instagram are full of diet-focused contentMuch of it focused on how to spot reduce “problem” areas, including hip dips. (Spot reduction It is a type of targeted exercise intended to burn fat or change the appearance of a specific area. Experts stress that you can’t really treat any area of ​​your body.)

But fitness experts and plastic surgeons alike emphasize that hip dips are completely natural and not something you need to get rid of through exercise or surgery.

“The visibility of hip drop depends on multiple, mostly immutable factors, such as the width of the pelvis, the size of the acetabulum (hip socket), the size of the femur (thigh bone), the length of the femoral neck (the connector of the thigh). bone and femoral head or ‘ball’), explained Helen Phelancertified pilates instructor and founder of the digital pilates platform Helen Phelan Studio.

“No amount of exercise will change the shape of your skeleton,” he said.

The distribution of muscle and fat in the area also affects how hip bottoms look, he said. Arthur W Perrya board-certified plastic surgeon with offices in Manhattan and Somerset County, New Jersey, and an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University.

“This problem is really an accumulation of fat in both the hip area and the outer thighs in women; men just don’t seem to pack fat on the outer thighs,” Perry said.

Of course hip dips are normal, she added, just another variation on body shape.

K. Roxanne Grawe, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Powell, Ohio, believes that interest in losing hips is directly related to increasing Brazilian Butt Lifta procedure in which excess fat is removed from an area of ​​the body and injected into the buttocks.

As women began to search for BBLs, they also began to focus on their hips.

“Instagram influencers really started to take off around 2017 and 2018 and the whole world changed when it came to plastic surgery,” Grawe told HuffPost. “Everyone wanted a BBL, and we started getting orders for them every day, from all kinds of customers: the church choir member, a mother of three, a 20-year-old model, everyone.”

Fitness influencers on Instagram started talking more and more about exercises to get rid of hip sagging while secretly filling them up with fat grafting or Sculptra at the plastic surgeon’s office, Grawe said.

“Aside from fillers, hip-conscious people have fat grafting, where unwanted fat is harvested with liposuction, treated, and reinjected into the hips or buttock areas to improve shape,” he said.

Surgery can range from $3,000 to $12,000.

Or there is another route you can take: Learn to accept the dip.

It’s normal and human to have insecurities — it’s impossible not to have them in our culture — but living or putting yourself in physical situations that obsess over body size and aesthetics is unhealthy, Phelan said.

“I try to remind concerned people that hip dips are genetic and that exercise becomes toxic and soul-sucking when we focus on what we perceive to be wrong with our bodies,” she said. “It’s much more fun and productive to focus on function and mental well-being in your movement and exercise practice than it is to control your appearance, especially when it’s not controllable in the first place.”

Want to tap into that mindset more? Here, Pheland and body image experts share how to stop obsessing over hip sagging or any other so-called “problem” areas of the body.

Again, hip dips are completely anatomy dependent and totally normal. It’s about how bones are formed, how the leg bones fit into the pelvis and how the body stores and distributes fat, he said. Kristie Larsonwomen’s strength coach in New York City.

“There is no part of the body that can be reduced in a localized way, but trying to change the hips is an especially unsuccessful effort,” he said. “It is possible to increase muscle mass and fat stores to alter the shape of the hips, although you cannot control where the fat goes, but it is unlikely to significantly change the appearance of the hips.”

As a gym owner and trainer in Denver, Colorado, Zabrina Motwani works from a “neutral body” lens.

“My approach is simply to help people get comfortable in the gym, get stronger, and find ways of moving that feel good to them and their bodies, without focusing on aesthetics,” he said, noting that if your ultimate goal is to feel more comfortable and confident in your own body, it’s entirely possible to get there without focusing on the way your hips or any other part of your body looks.

“Focus on the things that make you feel good, whether it’s working on your strength, flexibility, setting performance goals, or finding new ways to move that make exercise exciting,” she said.

Larson added that building strength can boost confidence, increase appreciation of the body and improve bone density, a way that really they can change your bones

“Focus on improving your hip mobility and increasing your functional strength through training with moderate to heavy weights.”

Hip dips are just the latest in a long line of unrealistic beauty standards popularized in women’s magazines and on social media: love handles, FUPAand calves. Like any fad, this too will fade, Larson said. Also, a lot of people in the gym. want hip dips.

“It’s funny because women come to me and ask me two different questions about hip droop: ‘How do I get rid of hip droop?’ or ‘how do I get hip dips?’” she said.

Emma June, the writer who hated her hips growing up, said she heard the same thing when she posts about hips on her body neutral instagram account.

“One of my followers sent me a private message and told me that he thought they were so cute and he wished he had them,” he said. “I was floored. These hips that I grew up resenting and wanting so badly to be round and smooth, she thought they were cute; sometimes we are blinded by our own frame of reference to our insecurities that we cannot see ourselves from another person’s perspective.”

Diversify your social media feeds So you’re not just getting diet-focused or solution-focused exercise content.

Follow a next ― Y an unfollowing spree, so your social media feeds are not only full of thin thick Instagram models and fitness influencers.

“Unfollow any content that makes you feel uncomfortable with yourself,” he said. Jess Spranglea licensed professional therapist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders.

“Report ads that seem to target your insecurities,” she said. (Think: content that claims to have “fixes” or claims it can help you “get rid of” certain body parts.)

“Instead, try filling your feed with body-neutral content and content that is more focused on body-kindness and acceptance,” Sprengle said. (For more information on healing a body-neutral diet, take a look at this article.)

Emma June admits that she still has good days and bad days when it comes to her body.

“I won’t say I got over all my insecurities about my hips and am now preaching self-acceptance and body love to everyone still struggling because that’s not accurate,” she said.

But these days, she said she knows there’s nothing “wrong” with her body or her hips that aren’t perfectly rounded.

“My advice would be to remember that your body is your home,” she said. “You only get one in this lifetime, so stressing about how it’s ‘too much’ of one thing and ‘not enough’ of something else is not something that feeds you. Your body carries you every day and deserves your kindness and respect.”