Looking for Insight on loose skin

You can try intermediate fasting to fasting 2/3 days each week. If IF make sure you still get your maintenance calories for the day. If a couple days a week, add the missed days calories to your feeding days to even out.
You can look into it, but the basic premise is that after a certain number of hours in fast, approx. 14-16, your body begins eating weaker, less important cells. This includes fat cells and excess skin cells. It's more beneficial to stay in this state as long as you can (2/3 days), than in IF with just a few hours doing 18/6 or 20/4. I'd say doing the weekly one would be easier as well to get enough calories within the feed window.
Up to you if you want to try it. Results won't be instant of course, but it would be faster than not doing it at all.
There are plenty who fast on this site, if you want to ask for advice in the matter.

I think my skin really improved after about 2 years in my goal weight range. Right after hitting my "goal", my upper arms and belly felt a lot looser and fleshier than they do now. Still not perfect, but better. I also noticed that my face looked pretty gaunt and I definitely had a bit of veiny turkey neck happening in the first year or so and that's really improved with time. I think everyone has their problem areas. Mine are belly and arms. My thighs and knees look great with no loose skin. I have a friend who lost a similar amount to me and her arms look fabulous but she will never bare her legs because of loose skin. You can't really control it 100% even with targeted weight training in my opinion (she does that, I have not).

I am now almost 5 years at roughly the same smaller size and believe I've reached the point where I will remain and that's okay with me. I still have bingo wings and a spare tire but they're small and easily hidden by clothing. In form-fitting clothing, I don't feel as self-conscious with a spare, say, bicycle tire versus my previous semi truck tire around the belly! haha I am never going to run around in tank tops & very short skirts, but I never did before, either, so I don't care.

For reference, I am 42 but weighed around 250-270 lb for almost twenty years (with a couple of years at 300) before losing the weight I am now (169) at age 36. Not a lot of yo-yo dieting and no pregnancies etc. Just got very big and then lost the excess weight and this is how I've fared.

I’ve been researching this for a few weeks. There are too many answers and they all vary. Too really know if you have loose skin or just squishy fats is to lower your body fat percentage. Loose skin is really just wrinkles. Loosing more than 2lbs a week, you’re for sure going to get it if the weight loss is rapid. People think that loose skin is saggy bellys, I thought this too, came to realize that it’s squishy fats. Stubborn squishy fats.. Lower the body fat percentage, eat more lean foods, healthy protein, etc. do lower abs workouts. Leg lifts, butterfly kicks.. it won’t be an over night we but we all can never pull an overnight we with fat.

That’s my opinion and I’m keeping to my word. I’m on that journey right now. Down 4 milestones and need to be more cut to even see the mommy belly vanish.

Hopefully what I said was understandable. Pretty tired from a long day.

I think, to my mind, the bottom line is that if you have lost a large amount of weight (100 lbs +), what you have left when you reach a healthy BMI may well be a combination of actual loose skin and "stubborn" subcutaneous fat, but in my own experience it's unevenly distributed such that most of your body will be extremely lean, even gaunt, and you'll still have these big rolls of skin hanging off. So, yeah, theoretically you could continue to starve yourself down until you're Holocaust-survivor-esque and maybe there'd then be a small enough amount of residual fat left inside the rolls that maybe it would stand a chance to shrink significantly, but, um... I suppose some people are up for that, but I'm sure not and I don't think it's a reasonable suggestion for most people who have lost massive amounts of weight.

I'm at a good place weight-wise, some parts of me are even leaner than I would like (my neck is kinda scary looking, I think!), but as I head into maintenance the reality is that I still have rolls of skin/fat hanging off my ribs, apron belly, upper arms, and inner thighs and have no doubt gravity is going to keep them from shrinking very much ever. Either I'll just live with them, or I'll get them surgically removed. Not sure just now which way it will go. But I've got to admit I find the whole "if you just keep going until you've got no body fat left at all your skin will shrink!" advice more annoying than anything. Might be true for very young people who have not had to lose very much weight at all, but for a middle-aged woman whose lost 150-ish... yeah, nope, not for me.

sgriska wrote: »

I think, to my mind, the bottom line is that if you have lost a large amount of weight (100 lbs +), what you have left when you reach a healthy BMI may well be a combination of actual loose skin and "stubborn" subcutaneous fat, but in my own experience it's unevenly distributed such that most of your body will be extremely lean, even gaunt, and you'll still have these big rolls of skin hanging off. So, yeah, theoretically you could continue to starve yourself down until you're Holocaust-survivor-esque and maybe there'd then be a small enough amount of residual fat left inside the rolls that maybe it would stand a chance to shrink significantly, but, um... I suppose some people are up for that, but I'm sure not and I don't think it's a reasonable suggestion for most people who have lost massive amounts of weight.

I'm at a good place weight-wise, some parts of me are even leaner than I would like (my neck is kinda scary looking, I think!), but as I head into maintenance the reality is that I still have rolls of skin/fat hanging off my ribs, apron belly, upper arms, and inner thighs and have no doubt gravity is going to keep them from shrinking very much ever. Either I'll just live with them, or I'll get them surgically removed. Not sure just now which way it will go. But I've got to admit I find the whole "if you just keep going until you've got no body fat left at all your skin will shrink!" advice more annoying than anything. Might be true for very young people who have not had to lose very much weight at all, but for a middle-aged woman whose lost 150-ish... yeah, nope, not for me.

If that's what I seem to be advising, then I'm failing to communicate what I intend (something that happens way more than I'd like, despite my efforts ).

I mention the subcutaneous fat issue because sometimes people think, part way to goal, that they're looking at loose skin, when it's more than that. (Some of us look worse at "part way" than at goal, let alone long after.) Appearance can change on the way to goal, and at goal. The actual (thin) loose skin may have a decent chance to shrink more after goal weight; IME, the other parts not so much.

I want to be saying that people should stop losing at a healthy goal weight, not madly pursue losing every last pocket or pouch of fat, which would be grossly unhealthy.

I didn't do that "lose every fat flap" thing myself. I have fat on my inner thighs and abdomen that keeps things stretched out, even at goal weight. I had more locations with that sort of thing part way to goal, and it looked worse. I stopped when I got to a rational overall goal weight, considering all factors (pretty much none of which, in my case, have to do with appearance). At goal, my abdomen and thighs, but especially my rear, had very noticeable droopy thin wrinkles of skin, too. Over 2 years, those shrank pretty well, even at age 59-60 (I may have good genetics; no way to know . . . but it's possible this can happen for others).

Once at a healthy goal, there are a couple of possible options for further progress (not necessarily perfection).

One is the long, slow process of recomposition, which adds muscle mass, and ever so slowly continues to shrink body fat, while staying at the same weight. There are examples of people here who achieved further improvement (again, not necessarily perfection) that way. (Some of them have lost very substantial amounts of weight.)

The other option is surgery, something I would not do myself in my personal case, but it's the best answer for some, certainly those with medical complications from the excess skin, but even for aesthetic reasons. There are also examples of people here who've achieved further improvement (still not perfection, typically) via that route. Some of them have also lost very substantial amounts of weight.

(There's also the "bulk and cut" option; but I think that's less likely to help in this kind of scenario, and I haven't seen as many good examples of large weight loss + bulk/cut. They may exist: Dunno.)

I still think it's important to tell people how to assess their personal situation: Thin wrinkles, good chance of shrinking; thicker wrinkles, not as good odds. I don't intend that to be an exhortation to lose body fat to an unhealthy or extreme state. That would be wrong.