What happens to all the skin after you lose 60lbs?
The younger you are, the faster your skin will snap back. Also if you find these people are slightly muscly, muscle work will tone the skin up really fast.Don’t believe the pictures of every tv ad for weight loss. A lot of the pictures are photo shopped to make people buy the products. Or the before picture may have even been altered and they were never fat to begin with.
At 17 your friend has more elastin in her skin which made her skin go back to normal faster.Great question.
Basically, some materials are elastic and they can be deformed to a certian extent in a reversable manner. Skin is one of these materials. As with all elastic materials, if the skin is deformed or stretched beyond its plastic limit, say from excess weight, the process is now irreversiable and the skin cannot adjust to the decrease in body size, therefore saggy skin will be developed.
For an example of this, if you stretch a spring out too far it will broken and it will not work like a spring anymore. This is because the spring has stretched beyond its plastic limit
The plastic limit of skin is different for everybody & dependant on many factors, such as diet, environment e.g how much time you spend in the sun, chemicals, genetics & whether you use moisturizer or not (this is why it is very important to moisturize your skin) & much more. Skin starts losing its elasticity in a process that generally starts from the age of 25. The rate of degeneration of the skins elasticy differs for everyone. Futhermore, the skin becomes less elastic is one of the reasons why as people get older there skin becomes thinner.
For example of all this, people develop wrinkles because the force of gravity acts on the skin and the elasticty of the skin is not able to resist aswell as it can for young people. It is a gradual process so don’t expect to have loose skin at the age of 25
In regard to the change of weight & whether saggy skin will develop, depends of how much extra weight someone has developed & if it’s gone beyond their skin plastic limit. If someone lost half their weight at any age they would generally have saggy skin
So to answer your question specifically of where does it go to, the skin of only deformed elastically by carrying extra weight on these people. Plastic deformation occurs when the skin stretched beyond the elastic limit & in these cases surgery would be required to get rid of the extra skin.What happens when you stretch an elastic band and then let it go…it shrinks back smaller.
The younger you are, the faster you shrink back after weight loss.
For some older people (in their 30s), it can take 2 to 5 years for the skin to shrink back. I’m talking from experience (pregnancies) and not from anything I read anywhere.
The cells in your body have a renewal cycle of about 3 weeks and your body always adapt to your needs…you need less skin to hold less fat reserves (or a baby), you’ll get less skin every 3 weeks.
Some people having plastic surgery should save their money and get some patience…wait a few years and it will get better, unless the weight loss is more than half your body, so then you might need help.
Now…be aware that those before and after pictures are fake. Either they’re photoshopped and the head of the fat out-of-shape person is put on a muscular thin body or they use twins. Some twins have weird jobs and one of them has to exercise with a trainer for 6 months, eating healthy while the other cannot exercise and has to eat a lot, not necessarily junk food but high calorie food (peanuts, avocado, olive oil, potatoes, pastas…) and gain fat reserves and flabbiness. The use of twins is more for commercials on TV where they have to move. They use twin couples, like 2 women and 2 men, the women playing the wives and the men playing the husbands. It’s sometimes funny because you can tell the twins apart because even identical twins have slight differences in their facial features, expressions and body language.
This morning, I saw a before and after picture that made me laugh because it was badly photoshopped so the guy ended up with a smaller head, like that fat out-of-shape guy became a super muscular bodybuilder but his head shrank!
The proportion of the head/body reminded me of the Men in Black movie with Tony Shalhoub and his small head…hilarious.There is a special fiber in the extracellular matrix of the skins dermis layer that give the skin it’s elasticity or stretchability called “elastin fibers”. These fibers give the skin it’s ability to “spring back” like a rubber band when stretched.
The body’s ability produces and maintains these fibers is surprisingly good for younger people, but as people age these elastin protein seem to be less maintained and perhaps even degrade so when the skin is stretched at this time it has problems coming back.
Of course this varies with genetics and other biological factors but it’s the basis of skin laxity.
Surprising new research in gene expression has shown positive outlook for future treatments in skin laxity.
Skin
Image by Kr. B.
