Loose skin

Lucy020679 · July 2021

I’ve currently lost 59 lbs and still have more to lose. But I keep getting told that I must feel so happy but I’m not. I look good clothes but I hate the way my stomach and boobs look. I have lose and saggy skin. I’m hoping as the loss continues that I’ll get used to it. Has anybody got any tips to try and help myself adjust sooner?

88olds · July 2021

Tip? Yes, but you might not like it. Focus on something else. I’ve been involved in weight loss quite awhile including a couple of message boards and years of Weight Watchers meetings. (You don’t have to stop going after you get to goal.)

There have been a bunch of times when the first mention of loose skin is last time I see or hear from someone. It’s destructive. I was at WW with a guy over 400 lbs. He had lost 70 lbs. Last time I saw him he was concerned about loose skin.

This is how I look at it- loose skin is in the general category of “not good enough.” I think our brains hate weight loss and are always trying to get us to quit. Now your brain has found what it thinks it can use to get you to give up. It’s telling you “all this work and the result won’t be good enough. It’s just not worth it.”

But this- even if you solved the loose skin, your brain will find something else. Truth is getting to goal weight won’t make our lives perfect. Just how it is. Something that helped me was a saying I read somewhere - Perfect is the enemy of the good. Just because we can’t make our lives perfect doesn’t mean we can’t make them better.

Something else that helped me was keeping a list of things that were getting better for me as I lost weight and referring to it when I caught myself having negative thoughts. Try it. It helped. Good luck. Never quit.

girlinkaz · July 2021

I don’t know if this is necessarily a tip or a trick, but I’ve lost 53lbs and am starting to have a little sag as well. I do a vigorous full body scrub 1-2x a week and have maintained that the entirety of the time I have been losing weight. In my head at least, that helps to stimulate the cells in the skin to regenerate quickly. In my workouts, I am focused on building muscle (not just burning calories), which also will help to tone and reduce the amount of saggy skin. I remind myself that (ideally) a lot of the loose skin will go away within a year or two if I stay consistent and maintain well. And finally, I remind myself that I would rather have some sag and stretch marks than look like I did before! Hang in there!

MargaretYakoda · July 2021

Loose skin beats grinin’ at the lid.
And if it’s a lot of lose skin, you may wish to have it removed.

Right now my upper arms are looking like chicken wings from the world’s largest bird. I have found that arm sleeves help. You can get them on Amazon. Look for sun protection for arms. They come in lots of colors, are cheap, and (bonus!) they actually do protect your arms from sunburn.
But they also control that wiggle. And I hope they will encourage the skin to shrink. Not sure if that is a thing. But I’m hoping.

j3ffr3y · July 2021

I have about 50-60lbs to lose and have wondered about loose skin as well. Wondering what non-surgical options for removing it over time are out there, and if anyone knows how long it can take for everything to naturally tighten back up, or is surgery the only way to remove it?

springlering62 · July 2021

I’ve lost nearly a hundred, starting almost three years ago.

It will get better, with continued good nutrition and exercise, and a healthy dose of patience.

I have very little loose skin now, unless I pluck at my belly. Even the loose skin there is slowly diminishing.

I’ve reached a point where every few days I realize, “oh, snap! That’s looking way better right there!”

AnnPT77 · July 2021

When it comes to self-perception of loose skin, an unfortunate truth (IMO), one that discourages many people, is that many of us will look worse part way to goal weight than we will at goal weight, and worse at goal weight than we'll look some months down the road in weight maintenance.

Fat doesn't neatly melt off starting with the outermost layer, then proceed tidily inward. Instead, fat cells anywhere in the fat mass may deplete, so that we get squishy or even floppy, like a water balloon part full of water (no air) as compared to a water balloon totally full of water. That remaining squishy fat conspires with gravity to keep skin stretched out.

When a particular body area has lost nearly all its fat, the skin shrinkage can *start*. Then the shrinking process itself takes time.

It may be instructive to go over to the Success Stories part of the Community, and look at before and after pictures of people who've lost a lot of weight, and perhaps even maintained that weight for a while. Some of them even share bathing suit pics, or equivalent.

I'm not saying they have zero loose skin, or that you'll have zero loose skin. There's no way to know for sure. But I think many, many people have fears about loose skin that are more extreme than what they'll actually experience in the long run. Part way through loss, though, things can look a little scary - I get it.

I only lost 50-some pounds, but did so at age 59-60. My loose skin kept shrinking at least into year 2 of maintenance, and maybe beyond. Nowadays, I think I don't look *dramatically* different from women my age who've always been slim. A little different? Sure. But most people wouldn't notice, even in a bathing suit. When I'm in normal summer street clothes, people are visibly surprised if it happens to come up in conversation that I was obese or near-obese for most of my adult life.

It can come out much better than you're anticipating. Try to find a way to wait for those long-term results, not be discouraged by what you might imagine they might be.

I posted photos to show other women my age what my loose skin looks like, or did look like a few months back.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10809632/loose-skin-50lbs-loss-at-60-4-years-maintenance/p1

I'm going to take the liberty of posting a before and after thread by @springlering62, who posted on this thread just a few posts above, who lost more weight than I did, and looks better than I do.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10763291/my-turn-to-overshare-my-adventure/p1

Might you have worrisome results long term? Possible. Also very possible - I'd say likely - that it won't be as bad as you're thinking right now.

springlering62 · July 2021

To save you some time, page 2, towards bottom, has two year anniversary photos of skin “results”
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10763291/my-turn-to-overshare-my-adventure/p1

I’ll be posting an update at three years. Skin has continued to shrink, and I now understand that when I see fine lines, especially around elbows and knees, it usually indicates I’m severely dehydrated.

I also recently did a timeline of face photos during weight loss, trying to illustrate what happened to my face:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10838173/loose-facial-skin

Loose skin

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