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How to Deal with Massive Weight Loss and Loose Skin

loose skin

The goal of plastic surgery is to be able to help yourself look and feel your best, but plastic surgery isn’t the only option. Eating healthy and exercise are both great ways to help shed unwanted pounds and get your body back into shape.

When you start eating healthier and working out the pounds will start to fall off if you stick with it. Your body will start to feel better, you’ll have more energy, and you won’t feel as worn down as you might have in the past.

But depending on how much weight you plan on dropping, you could run into an issue that a lot of people face, loose skin.

Why Does Loose Skin Happen?

Loose skin is something that happens when you gain a lot of weight and then lose it. When you’re gaining weight, your skin stretches out to accommodate the added layers of fat that your body is developing, which in turn causes the skin to lose its elasticity.

After gaining the weight and then working to lose the weight, a lot of people notice that the skin that expanded while they were gaining weight, did not tighten up and go back to how it was after losing the weight.

Because the skin has lost its elasticity through the weight gain process, it is impossible for it to regain the strength it needs to be tight against the body again once you lose the weight. Because of this plastic surgery is often required to remove the excess skin that has formed.

Treating Loose Skin

There are non-surgical ways to help treat loose skin, but in the case of major weight loss, surgery is going to give you the best results.

Minor skin tightening can be achieved through procedures like CoolSculpting and SkinTyte, but these cannot help with large areas of loose skin.

Loose skin in the stomach, face, legs, and arms are best treated with skin removal surgery. This procedure will physically remove the loose skin from your body while helping you achieve the tight, fit, look you are striving for. It can also help remove stretch marks that may have developed due to the stretching of the skin.

There are a few downsides to having loose skin corrected via plastic surgery though.

Loose Skin Surgery Downsides

The biggest downside to having loose skin repaired is that oftentimes when you lose a significant amount of weight, you end up having loose skin in multiple places across your body. You’ll most likely end up with large amounts of loose skin around your mid-section, breasts, under arms and even your legs.

Because this loose skin is spread out across your body, it will require multiple surgical procedures in order to fix everything. This can be time consuming and painful to go through, but in the long run it will help boost your self esteem and help you feel better about the new body you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

The other downside of having your loose skin removed is that while the loose skin will no longer be on your body, the existing skin will still not have the same elasticity that it did previously.

Think of it like a rubber band. The more you stretch out a rubber band the less elastic the rubber band becomes. And no matter what you do to the rubber band after that, there’s no good way to return it to its original form. This is how our skin reacts to stretching as well.

Your doctor will be able to help explain what you should expect from the surgery based on your specific case. Every person is different in how they react to large amounts of weight loss. Some people develop loose skin in their face some in their mid-section, and some in your breasts. This is why it’s important to discuss all your options with your doctor to help manage expectations and get you the best results possible.




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