A friend is a 34-year old female who has been in her low 300s & has lost 100 lbs. She is very self-conscious about her loose skin. She exercises & goes through skin-wrapping treatments but she doesn’t feel as if they help that much. What effective way can she tighten her skin short of plastic surgery (which she does want eventually)? She also needs help with bags under her eyes- she thinks they are fat & not fluid as cucumbers & tea bags are not helping.
Nothing. I mean, she can buy awesome underwear, but she needs surgery.
Sorry. 
Nothing.
After my gastric bypass surgery, I became an active member of a forum, where this question comes up often. The consensus is that while the sagging skin does get a little better over time and excercise, nothing else helps but plastic surgery. What she does now sounds like a waste of money. Think of it this way: such sagging skin needs to be lifted inches. Sagging in a face needs to be lifted millimeters. And there isn’t even a decent facial cream that can do the job of lifting skin those millimeters. All even the most expensive cream can do is plump the skin up a little.
Your friend can stop all those treatments and save up for plastic surgery instead.
Bags under her eyes she can camouflage with make-up.
I am struggling with this issue myself, but a couple of things.
Is she done losing weight? If not, she’ll have to live with it until she is.
I was told by my doctor to wait a year before I did anything like surgery, as it takes a while for skin to catch up. I’m not done yet, so a year after I’m done, I’ll see what happens.
Good foundation garments help, yeah.
Other than that, the only treatment I’m aware of is surgery. Which I may or may not have, depending what I get after about a year or so of maintenance. Exercise does help, though - it has helped me, anyway.
underwear is where it’s at. i was 104 lbs and still employing the use of badass underwear when needed. :o
Same boat here after 160 lbs lost. Look OK from the bellybutton up, but it’s disheartening on the whole. I still need to buy pants that are larger in the waist than I should, which exacerbates my pre-existing no-ass syndrome. 
Unfortunately given other health issues (lifelong warfarin need due to blood clotting risk), surgery is not an option.
I’ve been afraid of that myself. Will it ever go back at all or will I be sporting an “apron” for the rest of my life? I’m 41 so I’m probably doomed because there’s no way I’ll have surgery.
What I’m curious about is if it’s easier on the skin when you lose the weight slowly than quickly. If a person lost a hundred pounds over five years, would they be in the same boat as someone who lost a hundred pounds in less than a year?
Lots of myths about sagging skin. Losing weight slowly doesn’t help. Skin either snaps back or it doesn’t. Usually it doesn’t.
I also think a big myth is the portion of your sag that is skin. Obviously some people that lose immense amounts of weight do have genuine sagging skin. But a lot of times it is just yet more fat hanging off your body.
Example: Someone goes from 165 at age 18 to 265 at age 40, and then goes on a diet and gets down to 165. However, their “new” 165 they are still flabby and have skin “hanging” off them. First thought might be “loose skin” but many times it is just the fact that the second time around at 165 your muscle mass is far less than it was when the person was 18 and 165. “Visible fat” isn’t a function of weight, but is a function of what portion of your weight is made up of lean mass (bones, organs, and muscle, basically.) Because any diet which creates a caloric deficit will consume both muscle and fat alike, any diet will destroy muscle mass.
Professional body builders have found that by “cutting” with a high protein diet and lots of exercise they can minimize the muscle mass lost while losing fat, but they cannot eliminate the loss. However someone who is just on a general caloric restriction diet will probably be getting a pretty small amount of protein and could be losing a huge portion of muscle mass.
Lots of people with “loose” skin have remedied the issue by bulking up with protein and weights (building muscle mass) and then doing periodic cuts. While most people don’t want to be a body builder, their techniques in this regard can be very good for changing one’s overall body appearance after a large amount of fat loss.
Basically they bulk up with a good protein-rich diet and a good lifting plan. This maximizes the portion of weight gain that is muscle versus fat. However, any increase in size demands that you’ve created a caloric surplus (you can’t increase your permanent weight without a caloric surplus) and so you will have to create some fat. But by doing it properly you can gain say, 15 pounds of muscle while only gaining a small amount of fat. Then you can cut with a protein rich deficit diet and cut fat while only getting rid of a small fraction of the new muscle you’ve built, thus bringing you to 165 @ a good lean mass versus 165 with a large remainder of fat.
If at that point you still have a lot of visible loose skin, it’s time for the plastic surgeon. But from what I’ve seen there are far more cases of people who get to lower weights through dieting that has destroyed muscle mass and equate their low weight/flabby appearance with loose skin. What it really often is in fact is your body is going to be very different at the end of a diet than it was before you gained all that fat the first time, because the diet will have destroyed a lot of your muscle mass.
Yeah I’ve actually heard that weight lifting and building back some mass can help some people. But on the other hand I could just be contributing to the pile of bullshit surrounding weight loss!
My friend says she did get substantial benefit from the skin shrinking wraps. Her thighs did change shape & are firmer and her stomach is more lifted after four sessions. She even gained back 30 lbs & it has retained the improved shape instead of going back. She thinks it’s definitely worth doing. She’s lost many inches from that treatment but no more weight, and her skin got a lot tighter from where she lost inches of it & now she can’t even pinch it. The results have maintained. While she thinks the treatments have been worth it, they have not done much for her underarms or face. She thinks it’s worth looking into for those of you who can’t have surgery & her practitioners lowered her rates from $100 to $50 a session. She suggests using the homeopathic wraps. Others do not work the same. She suggests a trial expenditure of $50-$100 is preferable to $1000s in surgery.
Holy cow–that’s me :eek:
Well, almost. I’m down to 180 at the moment, and obviously still have some padding keeping the skin relatively taut. It’s taken about a year and a half so far of diet and exercise (cardio and weights) and there’s been no sign of sagging–but I haven’t made it to the 165 level and don’t know what to expect.
When I finally deflate to the goal-ish weight, what’s the worst-case scenario? Is the OP talking about literal skin-only? As in when held up there will be an “apron” about centimeter thick but much larger in area? I’m afraid to Google for pics
In an episode of Extreme Makeover, there was this guy who lost quite a bit of weight and looked quite svelte. In one shot of him, pre-op, jogging shirtless on the beach though, you could see the folds of his abdominal skin ripple and bounce up and down with every step he took. The skin on his upper arms hung down and made him look like he had mini bat wings. I don’t remember how much weight he lost, but it was probably a dramatic amount.
So do they surgically remove the excess skin on most of the Biggest Loser contestants? Or what do they do for them? Is it the rigorous exercise regimen that tightens up the skin?
Surgeons and insurance companies count acoording to the Pittsburgh scale. (NSFW). One is normal, three is a deformity worth operating for.
Poor girl is just throwing her money away, chances are she would have snapped her skin back just fine without those wraps. After all, homeopathy is 100% complete bullshit.
They switch the girls to full clothing to cover that up. The men have highly visible flab. So in other words, they don’t do anything for them.