When did “hip dips” become something to get rid of?

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

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

When Emma June wore tighter clothes as a teenager, “the distinct non-smooth, non-rounded fat on my hips stood out to me,” she said.

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

To conceal her low hips, she even layered shorts and compression leggings under all her jeans and pants.

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

At the time, women called them “panniers” or “violin hips”. Today, on social networks, these are “hip dips”. Fitness circles on TikTok and Instagram are full of diet-centric content, much of it centered around how to spot “problem” areas – including hip drops. (Spot reduction is a type of targeted exercise meant to burn fat or change the appearance of a specific area. Experts point out that you can’t really treat areas of your body.)

But fitness experts and plastic surgeons point out that hip dips are completely natural and shouldn’t be gotten rid of by exercise or surgery.

“The visibility of your hip dip depends on several, mostly unchangeable factors, such as the width of your pelvis, the size of your acetabulum (hip socket), the size of your femur (thigh bone), the length femoral neck (the connector of your thigh bone and femoral head or “ball”),” explained Helen Phelan, certified Pilates instructor and founder of the digital Pilates platform Helen Phelan Studio.

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

The distribution of muscle and fat in the area also affects the appearance of the hips, said Arthur W. Perry, a board-certified plastic surgeon with offices in Manhattan and Somerset County, New Jersey, and adjunct associate professor at Columbia University.

“This problem is really fat accumulation on both the hip area and the outer thighs in women – men just don’t seem to accumulate fat on the outside of their thighs,” she said. Perry.

Of course, hip drops are normal, he added — just another variant of the body shape.

K. Roxanne Grawe, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Powell, Ohio, thinks the benefit of losing hip dips is directly related to the augmentation of the Brazilian buttock lift, a procedure in which excess fat is removed from an area of ​​the body and injected into the buttocks.

When women started leaning on BBLs, they also started focusing 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 them daily, from all kinds of customers: the church choir member, a mother of three, a 20-year-old model, everyone.”

Fitness Instagram influencers started talking more about exercises to get rid of hip dips as they secretly stuffed them with fat grafting or Sculptra in the plastic surgeon’s office, Grawe said.

“Apart from fillers, people concerned about hip dips have fat grafting, where unwanted fat that is collected by liposuction, and processed and re-injected into hip dips or buttock areas to improve the shape,” she said.

The surgery can range from $3,000 to $12,000.

Or there is another path you can follow: Learn to accept the plunge.

It’s normal and human to have insecurities — it’s impossible in our culture — but inhabiting or putting yourself in fitness situations that fixate on size and body aesthetics isn’t healthy, Phelan said. .

“I try to remind those affected that hip drops are genetic and exercise becomes sucking and toxic 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 controlling your appearance, especially when it’s out of control in the first place.”

Want to tap into that mindset more? Below, Pheland and body image experts explain how to stop focusing on hip dips or any other so-called “problem” areas of your body.

Again, hip dips are completely anatomy dependent and completely normal. It all depends on how your bones are shaped, how your leg bones fit into your pelvis, and how your body stores and distributes fat, says Kristie Larson, female strength coach at New York.

“No part of the body can be reduced, but trying to change the hollows of the hips is a particularly fruitless endeavor,” she said. “It’s possible to increase muscle mass and fat stores to change the shape of the hips ― although you can’t control where the fat goes ― but it’s unlikely to significantly change the appearance of the dimples. hips.”

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

“My goal is simply to help people feel comfortable in the gym, get stronger, and find ways of movement that feel good for them and their bodies, without focusing on aesthetics” , she said, noting that if your ultimate goal is to be more comfortable and confident in your own body, it’s entirely possible to achieve that without focusing on how your hips look. or any other part of your body.

“Focus on the things that make you feel good, whether that’s working on your strength, your flexibility, setting performance goals, or finding new forms of movement that make training exciting,” she said. declared.

Larson added that building strength can build confidence, increase body appreciation and improve bone density — in ways you actually have. box change your bones.

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

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, FUPAs and cankles. Like all fads, this too will fade, Larson said. Also, lots of people in the gym want to dips in the hips.

“It’s funny because women come to me asking two different questions about hip dips – it’s either ‘how do I get rid of hip dips?’ or ‘how do I get hip dips?’ “, Did she say.

Emma June, the writer who hated her hip dips growing up, said she heard the same when she posted about hip dips on her neutral Instagram account.

“One of my followers DMed me and said she thought they were so cute and wished she had them,” she said. “I was floored. Those hip dips that I grew up feeling and wishing so much to be round and smooth, she thought they were cute; sometimes we’re blinded by our own frame of reference of our insecurities that we can’t not see us from another person’s point of view.

Diversify your social media feeds so you don’t just get diet-centric or solution-focused exercise content.

Go to a next ― and an unfollowing frenzy so your social media feeds aren’t just filled with skinny Instagram models and fitness influencers.

“Don’t follow any content that makes you feel uncomfortable,” said Jess Sprengle, a licensed occupational therapist who specializes in treating eating disorders.

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

“Instead, try to fill your feed with body-neutral content and content that’s more centered around body-kindness and body acceptance,” Sprengle said. (For more on how to organize a body-neutral flow, check out this article.)

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

“I won’t say that I overcame all my insecurities about my hips and now preach self-acceptance and love of the body to anyone who is still struggling, because that’s just not accurate,” he said. she declared.

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 have one in this life, so insisting that it’s ‘too much’ one thing and ‘not enough’ another thing is not something that will feed you. Your body carries you all every day, and he deserves your kindness and your respect.