Avoid Loose Skin After Weight Lost
If you’re gearing up for hard-core weight loss, you probably can’t wait to show off your amazing body! But if you lose more than 20 pounds, you’ll more than likely have loose skin to contend with. While it’s completely normal and extremely common to have saggy skin after weight loss, we understand why you’d want to avoid it if possible.
We’re here to give you the skinny on why saggy skin occurs, some factors to consider, and how to avoid loose skin after weight loss. Let’s take a look!
What Causes Loose Skin After Weight Loss?
Your skin is an amazing organ. It covers your entire body and heals itself. Naturally, skin is brimming with proteins like elastin and collagen. These two proteins work together to firm up your skin and keep it tight against your muscles and organs.
If you gain weight, you can stretch the skin beyond its limits, causing damage to the elastin. When you lose weight, the damaged elastin won’t snap your skin back to its original position. Rapid weight loss can also inhibit your skin elasticity.
So, a little weight gain will stretch the skin slightly but likely won’t damage the elastin. Significant weight gain, such as pregnancy or being overweight, will damage the fibers that keep your skin tight.
7 Tips on How to Avoid Loose Skin After Weight Loss
While damage to elastin and collagen molecules usually happens gradually without you realizing it, there are some things you can do to help prevent loose skin post-weight loss. Let’s consider the following options.
Drink More Water
With your body primarily made up of water, it makes sense that your skin needs adequate water to stay healthy. Hydrated skin from the inside out won’t damage as easily as dry skin.
At the very least, drinking enough water will improve your skin’s appearance and boost collagen synthesis. It increases your skin’s moisture levels and moisture retention to boost skin tightness. It’s also an excellent tool for losing weight and keeping it off, so you can kill two birds with one stone!
You don’t have to get your hydration from water alone. You can also add healthy beverages like sugar-free flavored waters, milk, and even bone broth. While water should be the primary source of your hydration, these other liquids also play a role in collagen production.
Get Your Food Groups
Eating an excess of salty foods, sweets, and other junk food does nothing for your skin and can even dry it out or increase oil production. Instead, focus on eating nutrient-dense foods.
Your skin needs dietary vitamins C, D, E, and K along with Omega-3 fatty acids, carotenoids, and lycopene to promote elasticity. Focusing on a well-balanced diet that includes all the food groups daily is the best way to encourage elastin repair and collagen production.
A diet rich in foods like fish, fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, and green leafy vegetables can do wonders for improving your skin.
Supplement with Collagen
Collagen supplements can play a role in skin repair and hydration. Research on these supplements indicates an increase in collagen production in the body, which translates to healthier, firmer skin. Those who take it are not only less likely to suffer from loose skin after weight loss but also have fewer wrinkles.
Collagen hydrolysate in particular can give your skin extra capacity to retain water. This application of collagen can also help with aging.
Collagen peptides and lysine for collagen development is also a good supplement to consider. Your body doesn’t make lysine, a key protein that promotes healthy skin and anti-aging. If you’re dealing with damage to collagen, these supplements can be an excellent way to stimulate collagen growth.
Remember that a diet rich in vitamins and minerals will always yield the best results in collagen strength, but supplements are there if you need help.
Do the Right Workouts
Believe it or not, the right workouts can tighten your skin. As you’re losing weight, strengthening muscles can help to reduce skin sag. Muscle mass is an excellent antidote for excess fat and saggy skin.
Focus more on weight lifting exercises and resistance training rather than cardio and other gentler forms of exercise. Bicep curls, deadlifts, lunges, push-ups, chest presses, and the like will all help to keep your skin tight and healthy while you’re losing weight.
Don’t Lose Weight Too Fast
Rapid weight loss is the most common culprit of loose skin. While losing weight quickly isn’t always bad for jumpstarting a healthier lifestyle, gradual weight loss is much easier and more sustainable. The CDC recommends keeping weight loss to 2 pounds or less per week. This gives your body and skin time to catch up with the weight loss, so you’re more acclimated to it and are less likely to bounce back shortly after a major weight loss.
Avoid Bad Habits
Bad habits like smoking, excessive alcohol intake, spending too much time in the sun, and other unhealthy habits can all contribute to loose skin after weight loss.
Poor nutritional habits will also affect your skin’s appearance following weight loss. Using adequate sun protection, eating well, and avoiding excessive indulgences are key.
Take Care of Your Skin
Washing and conditioning your skin improves hydration, which is one of the best things you can do to promote firmer skin. Using creams and lotions that contain collagen-boosting ingredients may also help. Looks for products that include retinoids like tretinoin and Retin-A. You can even ask your doctor for a prescription retinoid to handle excess skin.
How to Tighten Loose Skin After Weight Loss
Using many of the strategies mentioned above, you can tighten excess skin to a degree. Most people who have loose skin after weight loss can use natural tactics to tighten their epidermis.
The most effective tools are to focus on exercise and nutrition. Performing strength training and resistance exercises for at least 150 minutes per week will encourage your muscles to fill in some of the loose skin and retract much of the sag.
And restoring nutrients to your epidermis is the most effective method for firming up your skin. Focus on a protein and nutrient-rich diet that will boost muscle growth and repair damaged skin cells.
Most importantly, drink lots of water. This is the age-old weight loss and skin restoration trick that has been improving the look and feel of human skin for centuries.
Getting adequate sleep, staying out of the sun, and using skin-toning creams and cleansers can also help restore skin elasticity.
If necessary, you can also seek out surgeries to remove loose skin. This is a common practice after bariatric surgeries, but it can also be a last-resort option after you’ve tried these more holistic strategies. It’s there if you need it.
Does Having Saggy Skin Cause Problems?
Physically, saggy skin is not harmful to your body. But emotionally, it can do some damage. While you should be focused on the victory of your weight loss and refocus on health, loose skin is rarely the desired result. When you’ve finally reached your goal weight, it just doesn’t feel as sweet when your appearance doesn’t match your expectation.
If you’re dealing with self-esteem issues thanks to excess skin after weight loss, start by focusing on solutions and things you can control. Small changes to your diet and exercise may be all you need to cure the problem.
You might also seek medical intervention. Talk to your doctor about skin removal options. Oftentimes, taking control of your body is the best thing you can do, but you could also seek counseling if the self-esteem issues continue.
Protein food that can help avoiding loose skin after weight loss
Are There Medical Treatments to Remove Loose Skin?
As we’ve mentioned, there are some surgical treatments to consider for loose skin removal.
The least intrusive include prescription retinoids and chemical peels that can improve the skin’s outer layer and reduce the appearance of loose skin. Here are a few other common medical treatments for those who need help removing loose skin:
Laser Resurfacing: A laser can be used to remove the topmost layer of old skin while simultaneously warming under layers of skin. Removing the top layer improves the appearance of the skin and warming the bottom layers can promote collagen production. Based on the discretion of your doctor, this can be done multiple times.
Botox: As one of the most common skin-tightening procedures for wrinkles, Botox can also be used for excess skin. It’s not for everyone, but it offers fast results and next to no recovery time, so some prefer this method.
Heat Treatments: Using radiofrequency waves, ultrasound, or intense pulsed light, a technician can heat your skin to promote collagen production in your skin’s outer layer. As the elasticity is restored, the skin can look and feel tighter very quickly after the procedure. Sometimes, you’ll receive two or more of these heat treatments together for the best results.
Body Contouring Surgery: Also called lift and tuck surgeries, body contouring procedures involve extracting extra skin and fat through a small incision. Some examples include an arm lift, breast lift, circumferential body lift, nip and tuck, and more. These are invasive options that usually mean you’ll have to stay over at the hospital. After going home, the recovery time is still several weeks. So those who experience extremely saggy skin after weight loss will appreciate this strategy for removing the skin. But it’s best to leave it as a last resort due to the cost and invasive nature of the procedures.
Will Saggy Skin After Weight Loss Go Away on Its Own?
Yes, if the loose skin is a mild to moderate case, it will go away with adequate time. It can take a while, so many people who experience this issue seek methods to improve the results. Using the techniques we’ve discussed, you can get more rapid results, so it’s certainly worth a try.
How Long Does Skin Take to Tighten After Weight Loss?
You can expect loose skin to retract anywhere from weeks to months after you lose weight.
Within a year or two, your skin should have retracted, but if yours doesn’t, it might be a permanent issue. This is the point where most people seek more invasive techniques for retracting their skin, like heat therapies and body contouring surgery.
Ultimately, your weight loss and skin-tightening journey can be a long and personal one. It’s important to do your research and seek medical advice from a trusted healthcare provider before undergoing any procedures.
written by Julien Raby.