Loose hide

[estherann]

TLDR: Tell me your loose skin fixes

I may be taking a little bit of a liberty here, so please give me a little rope. I think it would be safe to assume that many of us in here were a different body type at some point in our lives. With age and weight loss comes our old friend, loose skin.

While surgery does exist, that's a last resort for me. I'm never going to be beach bod ready at my age, and maybe this is more of a dysmorphia question for another time, but..What are some things that have worked for you guys to tighten back up? I'm currently WAY more muscular than I really appear, if my chiropractor is to be believed, and I somewhat selfishly want to be able to shed a shirt without worrying about it. I don't like how I look compared to what I should look at this fitness level.

I'm not here to show off, so I'm going to link these for reference.

Best possible angle right now:

https://imgur.com/uJZ72s2

More Candid

https://imgur.com/lTdZWsd

Sometime I think I've gone from a doughy 20-30 something straight to grizzled scrawny old guy

 

[joseymiller]

@estherann Other than surgery, trading fat for more muscle is the way. But skin loses elasticity as we age, and muscle is also harder to build. You could also just be proud of the body you do have and the fact that you’re in better shape than your peers!

 

[nihilsinedeo]

@estherann Gaining muscle will help if there isn’t too much loose skin. If, however, you’ve lost a dramatic amount of weight, surgery would be the only real option. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done if you’re somewhere in the middle; where it’s not enough to really require/justify surgery, but it’s too much to be tightened up by gaining muscle. You can always go ahead and have a cosmetic procedure for it anyway if it really bothers you, or you can accept it and learn to live with.

 

[questioner1]

@estherann How fast did you lose the weight?

In the intermittent fasting groups you see that some say that it can promote autophagy where it tightens up loose skin. But usually, it happens when you do it is a slow even way. I've had people ask on my result posts if I had any loose skin and I didn't. I started about 5'8" and 230 and am now around 155. But it took me 2 years to drop that. The first year I only lost 20-30 pounds. But I never saw the looseness of skin so I am not sure if it was because of the slowness of the weight loss, my age, genetics, or starting weight. Likely just a combination of all of those things.

 

[estherann]

@questioner1 2-2.5 years