Loose skin on the abdomen is a very common problem. Moreover, it concerns not only overweight people, but also quite slender ones, since there are many reasons for this phenomenon. If you encounter it, you will have to start working on yourself to make your tummy slim, beautiful and toned again. The solution to the problem must be comprehensive and include a whole list of measures.
Loose skin on the abdomen: what to do
There is an opinion that stretching and sagging of the skin affects only overweight people, or, on the contrary, very thin people. In fact, this problem can manifest itself in any body type, and its main reasons boil down to the following:
- Thinning of the skin associated with age-related changes. At the same time, the synthesis of collagen and elastin fibers is significantly reduced, and it is they who create, although extensible, a strong frame of the skin.
- Severe stretching of the skin, which can occur with large and sudden weight gain, during pregnancy, with endocrine diseases, metabolic disorders - all this provokes rupture of intradermal fibers in the connective tissues. A fairly common phenomenon is loose skin on the abdomen after childbirth, since during pregnancy the abdomen increases significantly in size.
- Rapid weight loss, in which the length of collagen and elastin fibers becomes excessive for the body area, which has greatly decreased. The level of weight loss in this case is not so important, so the skin may become flabby even in those people who still have not lost weight to the desired shape.
It happens that a woman who has experienced sagging skin after losing weight wants to gain weight again.
But here it is important not to go to extremes, because it is with a healthy body that you can have firmness and elasticity of the skin. If you want to tighten sagging skin on your stomach, be prepared for the fact that it will not be quick. Even if a sufficiently prompt result is achieved, it needs to be consolidated and the problem should be prevented from arising in the future. The approach to this issue should be comprehensive. It will include physical activity, nutritional correction, and cosmetic procedures at home or in a salon. In some cases, women resort to surgical correction.
Causes of sagging skin on the face and neck
Loose skin is the result of age-related changes in the body. Due to the slowdown in the synthesis of endogenous hyaluronic acid, collagen and elastin fibers, the deterioration of microcirculation in tissues, and the effects of gravity, there is a noticeable decrease in the quality of the skin.
Before solving the problem, it is necessary to find the cause that affects the appearance of sagging skin on the face and neck. Sometimes it is enough to eliminate the provoking factor and normalize the skin condition.
So, the main reasons for sagging skin:
- age-related changes - in most cases, sagging appears after 35 years, when the natural aging processes begin (the production of hyaluronic acid decreases, collagen and elastin are synthesized in smaller quantities, metabolic processes are sluggish);
- some diseases of the nervous and endocrine systems;
- unhealthy lifestyle (smoking, alcohol, lack of sleep, strict diets);
- improper skin care (expired or low-quality cosmetics).
How to remove loose skin on the stomach with exercise
At first, it may seem that physical activity and sagging skin on the abdomen are in no way connected. But this is not so, since between the skin and muscle tissue there are connecting elements in the form of connective tissue fibers. If the abdominal muscles are toned, they pull behind them the fibers that connect it to the deep layers of the skin. An actively working muscle improves blood circulation, thereby increasing the delivery of nutrients and vitamins to the skin, which has a beneficial effect on its condition.
If you want to get rid of loose skin on your stomach, pay attention to the following exercises :
- Warm up your muscles by bending your torso laterally. Leaning to the right, stretch your left arm up along your body and try to stretch as hard as possible. Tilts to the left are accompanied by stretching of the right arm. Repeat the exercise on both sides the same number of times.
- You need to lie down on a semi-hard surface - a rug or gymnastics mat. Hands need to be clasped above your head. At the same time, lift your upper body by lifting your shoulder blades off the floor and bending your knees. Try to touch your elbows to your knees.
- Bend your legs, place them completely on the surface with your feet. Raise your torso with twists, trying to touch your right elbow to your left knee and vice versa. In this case, the feet should not leave the floor.
- Stretch your arms down along your body, straighten your legs and lift them up. Now you need to raise your legs and pelvis, trying to get into the position of a birch tree, and then smoothly lower them down.
- The plank exercise helps a lot. You need to focus on extended bows and toes, straighten your body and stay in this position for 30-60 seconds.
It is recommended to perform each exercise in addition to the plank in two sets of 10 times. The hula hoop with massage balls tightens the skin on the stomach well. This is a great way to improve the appearance of your belly as it combines both muscle work and a massage effect.
Features of eliminating a flabby abdomen
How to tighten and smooth the skin on the stomach and sides? Our beauty salon specialists are ready to offer several effective methods that will help remove loose skin. Cosmetic procedures can be used separately, but it is better to use complex treatment.
What to do if there is loose skin on your stomach? We solve the problem using the following methods:
- hardware figure correction – modern equipment Vela ShapeIII and PowerShape are used;
- manual massage – a complex effect on all body systems, stimulating the functioning of the circulatory and lymphatic systems;
- Wraps are an effective way to reduce body volume and achieve complete relaxation.
All of the above procedures are carried out in courses, can be combined and complement each other perfectly. The duration of the course is 10-15 sessions.
Nutritional Features
Any fitness trainer will tell you that body beauty largely involves nutrition, and only then workouts. In how to remove sagging skin on the abdomen, a proper and healthy diet is very important. Initially, remember that your enemies are overeating and starvation, since both sudden weight gain and rapid weight loss lead to deterioration of skin tone.
The main enemy of a beautiful belly is simple carbohydrates and saturated fats. These are everyone’s favorite sweets, fast food and other similar harmful things. A balanced diet should be based on proteins (they are very important for muscles, for the synthesis of collagen and elastin), fruits and vegetables, and cereals as sources of complex carbohydrates. Polyunsaturated fats, the sources of which are fish and seafood, are healthy.
Try to exclude sugar, alcohol, and sweet carbonated drinks from your diet. It is also important to accustom yourself to eat often and in small portions - fractional meals significantly speed up the path to a beautiful belly.
Avoid crash and short-term diets. They give completely unstable results, can have a negative impact on health, and for sagging skin this is the main enemy. Safe weight loss is 1 kilogram per week. If you lose more, the skin will not keep up with such changes, and the risk of it sagging is very high.
When to ask for help
Why did my stomach become loose? This can be caused by several factors:
- Flabby belly after losing weight. The problem appears with a sharp weight loss, when the skin simply does not have time to adapt to the changed body volumes.
- Loose skin on the abdomen after childbirth. During the period of intrauterine gestation, the fetus strongly presses on the inner wall of the abdominal cavity, causing relaxation of the abdominal muscles. As a result, the skin loses its elasticity and cannot recover on its own after the birth of the baby. The situation is aggravated if a caesarean section was used.
- Lack of physical activity. A sedentary lifestyle leads to muscle atrophy and contributes to disruption of metabolic processes in the body.
- Diet. An unbalanced diet, occasional snacks, a passion for fast food and carbonated drinks lead to the appearance of fat deposits. First of all, fat begins to appear on the stomach and hips.
- Aging. With age, all natural processes in the body slow down, as a result, muscles gradually lose elasticity and skin elasticity.
If your stomach has become loose, you should not expect that the problem will disappear on its own. In addition to disrupting the aesthetics of the body, loose skin negatively affects the functioning of internal organs, in particular, the motility of the stomach and intestines suffers.
Cosmetology measures at home
Cosmetology can give you the answer to the question of what to do with loose skin on the abdomen. In some cases, you don’t even have to resort to the help of specialists – effective home measures are enough. These measures are aimed at improving the internal structure of the skin and increasing the density of the collagen fiber framework. To develop fibers and make them stronger, you need to take care of your skin regularly.
At home, you can perform the following procedures, alternating and combining them to improve the result: wraps, peelings, self-massage and home mesotherapy. You can also buy a good cream for sagging belly skin, which will help speed up the achievement of results. Of course, cosmetics alone will not be enough, but as an additional, securing measure, it will not be superfluous.
Self-massage
There are many massage options that will help improve skin tone. But in any case, it is important to use massage oil (you can use vegetable oil: olive, almond, apricot).
The simplest version of massage is performed with the palms of your hands. must be performed sequentially :
- stroking;
- rubbing with the edge of the palm;
- vibration movements with finger pads;
- shading movements with fingertips;
- final strokes.
Vacuum massage, for which special jars are used, gives good results. You can find out about abdominal massage with cupping for weight loss here. They can be bought at the pharmacy. Japanese medicine offers its own massage method to improve the tone of the skin of the abdomen. You need to roll a terry towel into a tight roll, lie on your stomach and roll it up and down, thus kneading the anterior abdominal wall.
A simple way to remove sagging skin on the abdomen is a home hydromassage with a change in temperature.
Wraps
Wraps are a great way to saturate the skin with useful substances, tighten it, and speed up the processes of fat burning and metabolism. One or another mixture is applied to the skin, then the abdomen is wrapped with film, and its area is insulated. There are a large number of mixtures for tightening the abdominal skin, including the following:
- Honey-butter. Mix 2 tablespoons of liquid honey and 50 ml of olive oil, add a couple of drops of liquid vitamin E.
- Composition with cocoa. Knead the cocoa butter in your hands, apply it to the anterior abdominal wall and wrap with film.
- Honey mustard. Combine four tablespoons of honey and two tablespoons of mustard. Before application, the composition must be warmed up.
You can also buy powdered seaweed and clay at the pharmacy for wraps. usually recommended to perform wraps in courses of 10-15 procedures, repeating them periodically.
Peelings
A procedure such as peeling perfectly helps to tighten sagging skin of the abdomen. Exfoliation of the dead layer of skin helps to activate regenerative processes. You can use store-bought scrubs for peeling or prepare them yourself. You can pay attention to the following recipes:
- Combine two tablespoons of ground coffee and one egg.
- A combination of liquid honey and coarse sea salt works well.
- Mix three tablespoons of medium-leaf green tea and two tablespoons of vegetable oil.
Home mesotherapy can also be used. To carry out this procedure, you need to purchase a special device called a mesoscooter, equipped with a mass of tiny needles. They puncture the skin and inject medicinal compounds into it. Hyaluronic acid serums, vitamin mixtures, and protein concentrates can be used as active substances.
Muscle strengthening
Many women are often mistaken about their external belly. If after giving birth a young mother begins to put her body in order, it may seem to her that the “bump” in the abdominal area is just stretched skin. In fact, there may also be fat deposits in this area, which are not so easy to get rid of. The skin will look beautiful and smooth only if there are elastic muscles underneath it, and not a layer of fat. That is why you cannot do without proper physical activity.
First of all, you should understand that you cannot lose weight locally, in any one zone. That’s why all kinds of crunches and other popular abdominal exercises, which are often presented in women’s magazines as “fat-burning,” are completely useless. In fact, fat is burned evenly throughout the body, but perhaps problem areas, individual for each person, are the last to be affected by the weight loss process.
Fitness will help tighten the skin on your stomach
So, in order to dry out your abs, you need to fulfill two conditions - ensure a daily calorie deficit and correctly combine strength and cardio training. At the same time, more than half of the success is proper nutrition, which means avoiding unhealthy foods and maintaining a balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
Without working on the body, it makes almost no sense to restore the skin, so it is necessary to start from this point.
Professional cosmetology for abdominal skin tightening
Home measures are not always enough to combat the problem of sagging skin. For example, not everyone manages to remove sagging abdominal skin after childbirth using only these measures. Then professional cosmetology can come to the rescue. It is significantly more expensive, but gives quick and lasting results. Modern experts can offer us the following methods:
- Skin reinforcement with slowly dissolving hyaluronic acid gels. The specialist makes numerous subcutaneous injections, forming a framework that provides nutrition and support to the skin.
- Bio-reinforcement with mesothreads, which help keep the skin from sagging, providing it with a kind of fixation.
- LPG massage that tightens elastin fibers. It is performed with a special device that retracts an area of skin and kneads it with roller massage elements.
- Cryotherapy , which involves tightening the skin due to low temperatures.
- Mesotherapy at a professional level also involves the introduction of compositions with active ingredients under the skin.
In particularly difficult cases, aesthetic surgery can help combat sagging skin on the abdomen. The procedures have contraindications and require a rehabilitation period, so you should decide on them only after examinations and consultation with a specialist. They usually do not leave scars and are not fraught with negative consequences if performed by qualified professionals.
Now you know how you can overcome the problem called sagging belly skin, and you can start working on it right now. Remember that, having achieved results, you need to continue to maintain a healthy lifestyle, since no one is immune from re-sagging skin.
2. Reasons
If we talk about age-related changes in the skin, they are caused by the natural process of weakening tissue structures, a decrease in the production of elastin and collagen, as well as a gradually progressive deficiency of endogenous (own, produced by the body itself) hyaluronic acid, a multifunctional high-molecular substance that has received so much attention recently attention and which is responsible, in particular, for the hydrobalance of tissues. In addition, sagging skin accompanies many endocrine and metabolic (metabolic) disorders, diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, etc. It is known how overwork and lack of sleep, excesses in the diet (abuse of sweets, fatty drinks, alcoholic beverages) and chronic malnutrition, hypovitaminosis, situations of constant stress, and hormonal changes have a deplorable effect on the condition of the skin. Important risk factors include the fanatical use of cosmetic products, including “anti-wrinkle”, “for sagging skin”, etc. The skin almost always becomes sagging with a sharp loss of body weight, for example, due to extreme diets. In addition, sagging and atonic skin may be due to hereditary causes, childbirth (if the stretched skin of the abdomen does not return to its original volume and density), and a decrease in the tone of the subcutaneous muscle fibers.
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