Solutions to Prevent, Minimize, or Manage Excess Skin After Losing Weight

The excess skin is usually abdominal skin that reaches down well past the belly area. Loose skin after weight loss can happen in other areas as well.

How Do I Get Rid of Extra Skin After Weight Loss?

Some dieters experience saggy skin in the arms and around the bra line. Some even get loose skin in the thigh and buttocks area. A slow and steady weight loss one or two pounds a week is the ideal rate and will help save your skin's elasticity. In addition to slow and steady weight loss, you can also build muscle to shape the tissue underneath sagging skin.


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If you notice loose skin, and especially if you are getting chafing or find the movement of loose skin annoying during activity, you may want to wear compression garments. These are widely available for both men and women for sports as well smoothing your shape under clothing. There are different types of surgery available. Some patients consider a body lift , a cosmetic surgery procedure that lifts and tightens skin at various locations on the body.

Some plastic surgeons can also perform a thigh lift for loose skin in the lower body. The procedures to remove loose skin are serious operations and, like other surgeries, pose a risk of complications.

Solutions For Extra Skin Post Weight Loss At Emory Aesthetic Center

Insurance rarely covers these types of procedures. If you have loose skin after weight loss, talk to your doctor about skin tightening surgeries and methods that can improve both the function and the look of your body. Couple that with the fact that collagen and elastin an elastic protein in the skin naturally decrease as you age, and you've got a recipe for excess skin, explains Manish Shah, M.

Can You Get Rid of Loose Skin After Major Weight Loss?

On the other hand, some have lost as little as 60 pounds and have more. If after one to two years skin is still loose, it may not get any tighter, she says.

Sadly, probably not. For instance, abdominal binders can help relieve back pain but do nada for skin. Shah says that if you have small amounts of loose skin, then devices like Bodytite and Renuvion , both of which are minimally invasive body-contouring technologies, may help.

After Huge Weight Loss, Sagging Skin Remains

Prachand and Dr. Chen say there are certain indicators they look for before recommending loose skin-removal surgery to patients:. That means you might not see the results you're looking for aesthetically until that point, either. Still, you probably will be too exhausted to go to work: During the first couple of weeks, a simpler daily routine is a must, says Dr.

You should also know going in that you may need touch-up surgery. Long-term, this surgery may actually help you keep the weight off.

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It can happen when the weight is lost through diet and exercise, but it happens more often to weight-loss surgery patients. To get rid of the loose skin, exercise helps, a little. Jasmin Maldonado, a year-old living in Brooklyn who lost pounds after weight-loss surgery nearly a decade ago, says a daily routine of squats, sit-ups and pull-ups has made a difference.


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  • How to Tighten Loose Skin While Losing Weight?

You've done all this work, you've made this big, massive change that you see on the scale, but you don't necessarily see it in your clothing, or the way you feel about yourself. The most effective way to remove the excess skin is through cosmetic surgery, in one or more of an array of procedures known as body contouring. People who had weight-loss surgery, and subsequently had the excess skin removed, were less likely to gain weight back than those who had the surgery but did not undergo a body contouring procedure, according to a recent study published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Side Effects of Loose Skin

Those who did not have any cosmetic procedures to remove the resulting excess skin ended up gaining back about 50 pounds, but those who did have body contouring done only gained back about 13 pounds. About , bariatric procedures are performed each year in the U. Ali Modarressi of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, go so far as to argue that body contouring should be a routine part of bariatric surgery. About 21 percent of bariatric surgery patients undergo at least one kind of body contouring procedure.

Those who choose to have body contouring done usually pick the circumferential body lift: Doctors make an incision across the back, then around the flanks and abdomen, cutting away some of the excess skin and tightening the rest of it by suturing the incision back together. After the body contouring is done, patients routinely lose another 10 to 15 pounds of loose skin alone.