There are several natural ways to restore elasticity and tightness to your skin. The effectiveness of the natural remedies depends on your age, how long your skin was stretched, the amount and how rapid you lost the weight. Read on here for how to tighten skin after major weight loss.

Are you worried about loose skin, especially after a major weight loss or pregnancy? If so, then this article is for you!

When you work hard to lose a bunch of pounds, what you aim for is a tighter, firm, toned body. You don’t envisage extra, ugly saggy skin, but that can happen sometimes after losing a great deal of weight and it really is very frustrating. You may feel like you’ve won in one battle and lost in another. In this article, we are going to do an in-depth study of the loose skin problem and tell you about the ways to increase the skin’s elasticity and tighten your skin after weight loss in order to have a lean, strong, healthy body that looks and feels great. The results eventually will depend on how much weight you’ve in fact lost, the length of time your skin was stretched out, and your age.

Keep reading for the best valuable tips on how to tighten your skin after weight loss or pregnancy.

Skin Tightening Tips After Weight Loss

1. Don’t Loss Your Weight Rapidly – Weight Loss And Loose Skin: Make sure to lose your weight gradually, so as to let your skin get adjusted to the loss during the process. If you continue to drop weight quickly, your skin will continue to loss elasticity and it can make your skin sag. On the other hand if you lose your weight in a gradual pace, your skin will have more of a tendency to shrink to your new size according to the weight loss.

Family Fitness Tip: In case you are trying to shed off the baby fat after a baby, just tone a lot and don’t abruptly hop onto a crash diet (crash diet will make you lose lots of weight in a short amount of time) to avoid sagging skin.

2. Keep Your Body Hydrated: Drinking a lot of water will help your skin to get tighter, toned-up, and look more radiant. Make sure to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day to maintain elasticity of your skin.

Fitness Tip: Keep sipping water during and after your workout to stay hydrated to maintain glow of your skin and tighten it up!

3. Add Weight Resistance Training: There are two layers of tissue beneath your skin: fat and muscle, both these provide support to your skin and keep it from sagging limply.

When you put on a large amount of weight, your skin expands commensurately to accommodate the increase in body size. On the other hand, when you lose fat (particularly when you lose it quickly) your skin doesn’t always shrink at the same rate as your fat cells. This disparity can result into sagging skin.

Building muscles is the answer to this problem as it really fills in the bagginess in the skin, resulting into tighter and firmer skin. As per Cedric Bryant, Chief Science Officer for the American Council on Exercise, weight training strengthens muscles because it produces a layer of muscle beneath the skin. And creating toned, lean muscle underneath your skin will help it look tightened …. so sexier! It is recommended that you do strength training three times a week (every other day) because it helps tighten skin after major weight loss.

Skin Tightening Tips:

(i) Strength training is particularly crucial when you cut down your caloric intake considerably because when you loss major weight, you generally lose muscles too. Rebuilding your muscles will not let your skin sag.

(ii) This advice applies – whether you have already lost a lot of pounds or just beginning. If you’re currently facing the issue of loose skin, you should start lifting weights. If you’re initiating a weight loss regime, make sure to include weightlifting in it. Your aim should not be to lose weight, but lose weight and not muscles.

4. Skin Firming Lotions: Skin tightening cream is certainly one of the best methods to tighten skin after weight lossand even after a baby birth. Choose creams that are filled with herbal ingredients, aloe vera and especially vitamin E and A. These all constituents are devised particularly to boost up the collagen and elastin in the skin.

5. Limit Sun Exposure: Too long time in the sun and too much exposure to hot and chlorinated water can have a negative impact on the skin’s elasticity leading to loose skin. This can happen with tanning beds also, since the rays can loosen up your skin. Thus limit your exposure to these things. Spending a limited time for sun bathing and swimming in chlorinated water is ok, but make sure to shower afterwards and apply a moisturizer that contains aloe vera, especially vitamins.

6. Mineral/Salt Scrubs: There are some studies suggesting that sea salt and mineral scrubs promote blood flow to the skin, which lead to tightening up of the skin over time. Try using a quality scrub in the shower each day and see how your skin respond and look after a couple of weeks.

7. Try Massage Therapy: Weekly or biweekly message therapy helps to enhance blood circulation, which can be useful for tightening skin after weight loss. And best part is you don’t essentially need a message therapist to do it, since you can do it yourself or your partner can do it for you. Try it. At best, it will firm up your skin, at worst, you will have a rejuvenating message.

Just Fitness Tip: Consider adding an essential oil of your choice to your message oil. Inhaling its aroma will soothe down your nerves as well. Lavender essential oil is really one of the best! You can even massage a little lavender essential oil every night onto your loose skin from weight loss or otherwise and watch its magic over time!

8. Eat Enough Lean Protein: Including enough lean protein in your diet helps to tighten loose skin after weight loss. There are enough studies to prove a correlation between protein intake and skin youthfulness and health. High-protein diet helps reduce wrinkles, dryness, and skin degeneration, which will make your skin appear more toned. The lean protein also has the crucial collagen and many other nutrients that your skin requires to remain elastic. Here is a good article on High Protein Food Ideas And Recipes.

Fitness Tip: Consuming lean protein foods post a workout will help build-up your muscles.

9. Soy Protein And Aloe Vera: Try these two natural ingredients, which can contribute a lot to improve the elastin in your skin and tighten it up! You can include soy in your diet and look out for creams, which contain both of these natural ingredients. Apply such a cream twice a day, each day, for firming up your skin.

10. Eat Fruits And Vegetables: Some studies have shown that higher intake of fruits and vegetables every day are helpful in weight loss skin tightening because they have a high water content, which your skin requires to recover its firmness. The USDA recommends for five servings of fresh fruits and veggies in our diet every day to provide us with the necessary nutrients that we need to help us keep a healthy weight and tighten up our skin – whether our weight loss is after baby birth or we are doing it just because we want to slim down.

11. Try Calisthenics: Calisthenics are ideal for building lean muscles, good for your heart, and they’re also wonderful for tightening excess skin after weight loss. Include a set of calisthenics in your weekly workout regimen, 3 or 4 times per week. Enjoy the dips, pull-ups, push-ups, windmills, and what you like ….. they can be exciting, and will help your skin readapt at the same time.

12. Avoid Sulfates/Harsh Soaps: Many body washes, soaps, and shampoos contain sulfates as they’re cheap cleansers and make plush lather. But the biggest minus point in them is, they tend to over-dry, irritate skin and strip off vital moisture, so making your skin less elastic. If you have got loose skin after weight loss, look out for sulfate-free products. L’Oreal offers a good range for a reasonable price.

Family Fitness Tip: Do you know you can make your own natural cleanser at home? Here are some best natural cleanser recipes.

13. Natural Skin Tightening Astringent: If you believe more in natural things, you can use a little organic honey, some rosemary, and some witch hazel to tighten up your sagging skin.

14. Almond Oil: Almond oil works as a wonderful moisturizer that helps in getting rid of stretch marks and firming up your skin. Simply, messaging a little quantity of almond oil onto your stomach area every day will literally make your belly skin supple and tightened. You can also apply this super natural oil onto other skin areas of your body to make it look gorgeous!

15. Castor Oil: Castor oil is another amazing natural ingredient to firm up your skin. Sound strange to you? Give it a try. Just combine a little castor oil with some freshly squeezed lemon juice or even lavender essential oil and massage it into your skin, you will observe your skin getting tightened up in a couple of weeks. You can apply 1 or 2 tablespoons of castor oil every night to have quick results!

16. Belly Toning Exercises: If you have excess skin after weight loss, you need to take out some time to exercise your tummy area every day. Perform some belly toning exercises, like planks, crunches, leg raises, air-bike, side bridges, etc. Just devote about 20 minutes 5 days a week to have a flat tummy area.

We need to understand that elasticity conditions and loose skin respond differently at different ages and stages in life. Above all, genetics do play an important role too. Otherwise also everybody loses skin as he or she gets older. In case of a young mother who just gave birth, it will take small amount of time and efforts to tighten up her skin. On the other hand, it will take much longer time and much more efforts to firm up skin, and even then the skin may not fully bounce back to its original state due to old age.

Now start following above tips to firm up your skin and look forward to wear your pretty party dresses in about 6 months’ time! If you know any other skin tightening tips, please do share under the comments below!

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About Author: Renu Bakshi, AKA Fitness Buffhq, is ISSA Certified Elite Trainer. He passed Personal Fitness Trainer Course, Nutrition Health Coach course & Specialist Exercise Therapy course from ISSA, USA obtaining + 97% marks. He shares his experience and knowledge about nutrition and effective workouts to get you in the best shape of your life, no matter how old you may be. The author says: “For me age is just a number!”