What’s the deal with this? Does someone have to be morbidly obese for this to happen, or can anyone losing a good amount of weight be in danger of this? Who is and who’s not susceptible? What steps can be taken to prevent it?
I have been told that drinking alot of water helps with this. In my own personal experience, exercise helps alot. Having lost more than 100 now, I am not seeing alot of sag. I cannot tell you what is helping me though. I take a multi vitamin, drink tons of water, and exercise.
I think it happens to people who aren’t obese too because I noticed on Survivor when everyone had to run around after not eating their skin was sliding around in a scary manner.
I lost about 70lbs in a year once and my skin was weird on my stomach for about 2 years after. I’m not sure why it went back to normal. I just went to play with it one day and it wasn’t there. When I first lost the weight I did millions of crunches to try to make my stomach lift up again. It wasn’t too bad, really, but it was like a wrinkle from hipbone to hip bone. Very unsightly and disturbing! For a while I tried taking cooler showers too. I put lotion on it. Nothing worked. Then I lost interest in it and now it’s gone. Who knows? Maybe it missed the attention.
I think it has to do with the type of skin and type of fat (hard or fluffy) you have. Oprah once said she never had a problem with loose skin, and she’s probably gained and dropped a thousand pounds over the years.
Discovery Health Channel had a show about this very subject a few weeks ago. The subject was a woman in England who had lost in excess of 300 pounds and she wanted to have all the excess skin removed. IIRC, they removed about a third of entire skin surface. It took about 12 hours of surgery, is considered cosmetic and wasn’t covered by her insurance. Post op recovery took about a year.
That made me laugh. Is every pound different or is it the same 100 pounds put on…then taken off…then put on …
With regard to the OP, we were talking about this recently at work. A guy there has had stomach surgery and has lost over 140 pounds. I checked things out and it seems that, depending on age, skin elasticity and weight lost, surgery is sometimes the only solution.
So to avoid it:
lose the weight as young as you can (improved skin elasticity)
do it nice and slowly (skin adjusts as weight falls)
surgical correction if necessary
A google of “excess skin” and/or “loose skin” will turn up plenty of illustrative pictures. As I said I’ve already seen them.