After people lose a lot of weight quickly, it seems like they often have a bunch of loose skin left over. My officemate, for instance, lost 275 pounds in a year and a half (due to weight loss surgery) and it’s as if her body shrunk but her skin stayed the same size. Is the flappy skin inevitable after massive weight loss, or does the speed of the weight loss enter into it as well?
I’ve been trying to diet for the last year. I’m not doing anything other than eating less and trying to avoid junk food, so my rate of weight loss is consistent but not dramatic – maybe 3 or 4 pounds/month. Will this slower rate help prevent the shar pei effect? Is there anything else I could do to minimize it?
Common wisdom is that losing weight slowly helps, but if you drop 100 lbs. or more, you’re pretty much screwed. Unfortunately, there’s really not a whole lot of research on this topic, so it’s hard to give much more specific details.
My (albeit limited) understanding is that this sort of thing usually only happens to people who get liposuction or gastric bypass surgery. If you’re modifying your diet and exercising so that you lose weight slowly like you said you are, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Speaking only from personal experience, I lost 110 pounds, which was a third of my body weight, and I didn’t have loose skin. I lost it over the course of a little over a year.
It also depends on your age and the elasticity of your skin. The younger you are, the faster your skin will snap back. I imagine if you lost much more than 100 or 150 lbs, depending on your frame, you might still have some extra skin.
It’s also an age thing, since your skin’s elasticity decreases with age. So if you’re gonna lose a whole lot of weight, do it when you’re young (for more reasons than this).
Yeah I’m not sure, all I really have is anectdotal. I remember seeing a show that was talking about really obese people (like bed-ridden obese) losing huge amounts of weight. All of the people mentioned lost weight through diet and exercise (no liposuction or surgery) and all of them had extra skin and had to have surgery to correct it.
I knew a kid in junior high who was extremely fat. He lost a lot of weight over about a year in HS and his skin looked normal but if he wanted to he could stretch it out insanely. Really freaky.
Fellow in one of my classes lost just under 100 lbs in the course of a summer (just diet and exercise. NO idea how hard that musta been) no flaby skin visible anywhere.
The ego boost to him was QUITE visible too. EVERYONE noticed. Heh heh.