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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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.
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