Sagging Skin After Weight Loss
What causes sagging after skin weight loss?
There is an inherent elasticity in everyone’s skin, but once you get beyond age 25 or 30, the elasticity decreases.
The tissue expands and your body literally makes more skin by producing more skin cells. And those annoying stretch marks? They are the artifacts of the breakdown of the normal architecture of skin..
Solution: Keep your skin moisturized with inexpensive lotion and water.
What are the biggest factors that determine my skin’s elasticity?
The two biggest factors that determine skin elasticity are age and genetics. And, unfortunately, both are out of our control. How quickly you’ve gained the weight, as well as how quickly you’ve lost it, may also be a factor.
Losing weight slowly, as I will always recommend, over a longer period of time, may give you more of a fighting chance. If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, say in excess of 50lbs., then you are giving your entire body a chance to adjust to the weight change.
Solution: As I’ve said, slower weight loss – no more than one to two pounds a week – is the key to safely dropping the unwanted pounds, and keeping your body in great shape. Also, you need to make a promise to keep exercise in your life every day.
Can my diet help me to lose some of the extra skin?
In some ways, it can. Your intake of food and fluids before, during, and after losing weight is a factor for your skin.
First, by maintaining a lower fat diet and eating lean proteins helps to minimize the extra skin, even after you’ve lost the weight. Second, hydration is crucial. That means drinking plenty of water , 64 ounces or eight cups per day, as your norm.
Also, when someone exercises vigorously, they lose electrolytes, such as sodium and potassium, through sweat; water alone can’t replace this. Adding a bottle of a sports drink per day to your diet solves this problem.
Solution: Carry a water bottle around with you all day.
Are there specific exercises I can do to tone up my skin?
Yes there are, in a roundabout kind of way. It’s not the skin itself that you are firming, instead you are building and toning the muscles that lay beneath the skin, which will give the appearance of plumper, smoother skin. The best course of action is to preserve muscle mass, and build your muscles while losing fat. When you diet without including proper exercise, you risk losing necessary muscle that will make the sagging skin issue all the worse. Solution: Work with weights, resistance bands, medicine balls and balance (stability) balls. Emphasize higher reps with lower weights.
Can all this extra skin be healthy?
It’s far better to have extra skin than the alternative – extra weight. Sagging skin puts much less stress on your heart and metabolic system than fat.
There are times, however, when the skin can become yeasty and infected, which is uncomfortable and a medical problem.
Plan of Action: Keep an eye on changes to your skin and if you have any concerns at all, consult your doctor. Surgery is very likely the only solution that gets rid of the skin for good, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. It involves general anesthesia, suturing, recovery time, and scarring. Thus, the consultation with a qualified surgeon is the only way to be sure it's right for you.
Remember that no information from me is a substitute for a qualified medical opinion.