Okay, I ruffle feathers every time I bring this sort of thing up but I can't help it! It's sooo frustrating!
People ask me constantly if I have loose skin and when I tell them that my skin is just barely loose, they ask me how I managed to pull that off after being morbidly obese for years and years and then losing over 100 pounds. I explain to them that during my weight loss process that my skin was much looser and that proper diet has restored much of my skin elasticity and strength training has helped plump out the difference. I outline all of this in detail along with a more thorough explanation of my opinion on and experience with loose skin after weight loss in this article.
So, in case you don't like clicking links to other posts, let me tell you in a nutshell why I had such loose skin in the middle of my weight loss and almost none now...
Because I still had lots of fat to lose and it was weighing the skin down and not allowing it to shrink back up.
Last night I had TLC on in the other room while I was cooking dinner. There was a show called "Skin Tight" on. Let me start by saying that I don't generally watch this show and this woman's individual case may not reflect other cases on this show. I heard from the other room her talking about how she felt self-conscious to go around the other mom's because she still looked overweight because of the extra skin. I walked into the living room to see what this thin woman with all the extra skin looked like and what I saw was a still very overweight woman whose fat was weighing down her skin. Her arms were large, she had a double chin....she was overweight!
Sure enough, they said they removed THIRTY-NINE POUNDS of "skin"!! Okay, common sense should tell you something is wrong with this picture. Skin is paper thin. They removed FAT! And I know this because when they showed her afterward she looked like an overweight person who had her stomach cut off. Her arms were still large (not flabby, just very large), she still had a double chin, and her breasts were huge...and yes, I understand a thin woman can have large breasts but my point is, she was thin NOWHERE!
I'm not saying all this to be harsh. I'm saying all this to emphasize the point that we shouldn't be so quick to let someone take a knife to us. I think it's great that this woman lost 200 pounds or whatever it was and no doubt drastically improved her health but, quite honestly, she needed to probably lose another 50-75 pounds. THEN she could've seen what she was left with before risking her life for this procedure. If nothing else, the trauma to her body would've been way less if not as much work would've needed to be done to remove so much excess fat in addition to the skin.
Sometimes I have no doubt that people absolutely need skin removal surgery and we are all entitled to that decision but a lot of plastic surgeons are making a lot of money off of our misunderstanding of what is skin and what is fat.
Comments
Post a Comment