When you see those drastic transformations where people lose and keep off a ton of weight, they have to get the excess skin removed surgically. So it can “grow” or stretch but doesn’t “shrink”. Does the skin just stretch out a lot as fat grows inside the body?
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Skin can get permanently stretch out like ears with grommets or lips with plates, And skin is less elastic the older you are.
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Skin has a concept called elasticity. It’s your skin’s ability to be stretched and bounce back into place. Elastin and collagen (proteins) promote the bouncing back. Being overweight not only stretches the skin but can also lead to loss of elastin and collagen if the person is overweight for a lengthy period. This is why you can lose small amounts and not have skin sag, you can also bounce back after drastic weight gain into weight loss, that wouldn’t be healthy in other ways though. But if you are obese for a lengthy amount of time, weight loss will have skin sag because the skin lost the proteins necessary to bounce back. These proteins decrease naturally with age too which leads to sagging skin on elderly people.
Skin grows when it is in tension. When you need a skin graft doctors can put a little balloon under your skin and inflate it over a period of months. Then they cut the extra skin they want, take the balloon out, and sew the skin back together.
This is also how being pregnant works, though shrinking the stomach area back down is difficult. Thus the “mommy tuck makeover” became something doctors can do.
Essentially the skin has stretched so much and for so long it’s unable to “snap back.” Skin is elastic, but only to a point.
The skin stretches anytime anything grows inside of it, which is great since we need skin to keep our insides, well, inside.
Stretch marks are caused by the stretching of the skin over time. They’re sort of like the skin’s self-made bandaids that hold the skin together as it stretches to accommodate the changing body shape.
With pregnancy, it stretches over a period of time and lasts a definitive amount of time, until the cause of the body shape change comes out. So the skin is sometimes able to kind of shrink back, but most of the time the stretch marks stay because at that point it’s a bit like scar tissue (in theory, not anatomy).
With fat people, typically the accumulated fat on and in the body doesn’t “come out” or reduce in a quick manner, leading to a body shape change that lasts longer than the elasticity of the skin.
Source: fat person who has lost a large amount of weight at one point, and was also pregnant twice, once while skinny and once while fat – my belly is literally a tiger.
This sub doesn’t explain things anymore like they would to a Five year old 😭😔 so i’ll try
Skin is stretchy, like a rubber band, so when someone gets fatter, the fat on their body pushes the skin out. And when they lose weight, the skin is too stretched out to return to normal, so that’s why there are stretch marks and loose skin
Skin is elastic, which means it can stretch, but that it’s also pulling back on itself. It functions in a similar way to a rubber band.
Stretch the rubber band out and then let go and it returns to its normal size.
Stretch it out and hold it like that for a few hours, and when you let go of the rubber band, it won’t return back to it’s original size and shape.
Skin is basically the same. When it comes to people who have been obese for a long period of time, any rapid weight loss (particularly if it’s surgical) is going to result in loose skin. People who lose weight through small amounts over a longer period of time will have very little (if any) loose skin because the skin can and will heal on its own, it’s just a slow process.
This is the reason why women often have loose skin on their stomachs and breasts after giving birth and nursing.
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