"Hula-Hooping" is one of those activities that can be fun and challenging at the same time, similar to rock climbing and vigorous dance. If you want to burn off your love handles, the vigorous action can be of help, though not as directly as you might expect from such a focused abdominal motion.
About Hula-Hoops
Arthur "Spud" Melin patented the Hula-Hoop in 1962, although the roots of the idea date back to a 1950s Australian toy and even to Egyptian games of 1,000 BC. A modern hoop consists of a hollow plastic, circular tube with sand on the inside to provide weight. Use it by placing it around your waist, then rotating your core and hips to keep it airborne and spinning about your waist. This game engages the muscles of your abdomen, abdominal obliques, lower back, hips, thighs and rear.
About Losing Weight
If you want to lose love handles, you have to lose weight. You lose weight by burning more calories through activity than you take in by eating. When this happens, your body makes up the difference by accessing extra energy you stored earlier as fat. When it burns that fat, the fat tissue goes away. You lose weight. Light calisthenic exercise such as using a Hula-Hoop burns about 250 calories per hour on a medium-sized person. By way of comparison, that same person would burn about 400 calories in an hour of light cycling or 500 in an hour of high-impact aerobics.
About Losing Love Handles
A Hula-Hoop won't target your love handles specifically for fat loss, despite the fact that it directly engages the muscles of that part of your body. No exercise will. The idea that working out a body area speeds up your fat loss there is called "spot reduction" and has been debunked as a myth since the 1980s. Instead, the calories you burn with the Hula-Hoop may stimulate fat loss from your entire body. This includes the fat in your love handles, but it won't target those love handles directly.
Bottom Line
In theory, yes, if you exercise with a Hula-Hoop regularly and avoid increasing your daily diet to make up for the extra calories, the activity can burn enough calories to make you lose weight. This will, eventually, erode the fat in your love handles. However, the hoop won't stimulate weight loss from your abdomen specifically. If your primary goal is shedding fat, a more vigorous exercise that burns more calories is a better choice. You can save the Hula-Hoop for recreation.
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