In this era of selfies and protagonists, the photos before and after the diet, which I now put less on my blog since some readers confided to me that they find them annoying (and you can’t blame them, in the sense that they can be considered photos diseducative, which encourage drastic diets), hide their dark side.
That of people, mostly women, who, due to a fast and extreme weight loss, find themselves with sagging skin, in excess; This is what, for example, the writer Elna Baker documents, explaining what it means to lose 50 kilos and carry ten more skin with them, emptied, that cosmetic surgery solves in the best possible way, leaving large scars and eliminating the grossest excesses, but without giving back a compact, smooth body, as we imagine instead.

Or how it happened to this woman (see photos of her here), Simone Anderson , who was accused of posting fake photos of her first and after her.
She did a brilliant thing to show that the next thin woman was really her, after losing sixty kilos: she took off her pants (photo three), showing what her new slim body hides, between stretch marks and sagging skin .

But why does it happen to so many and why does it not happen to only a few lucky ones? I personally lost about 25 kilos as a teenager, losing another 4 the following year. 25 kilos in one year, without loss of tone. Partly because I was a young girl, so I had undoubtedly more elastic skin, partly because thankfully I followed a doctor’s advice to lose no more than two kilos a month by exercising.

According to Dr. Ron Brown, personal trainer and medic , losing many pounds doesn’t have to mean sagging skin and stretch marks. If we lose weight slowly, and focus on the loss of fat mass (therefore slow weight loss associated with physical activity, to increase muscle mass), sagging skin will absolutely be a secondary problem. In fact, the skin is not dead, but vital tissue. As the body loses weight by rapidly emptying itself of water and lean mass, the fat would become trapped in sagging skin folds.

The solution therefore is to prevent. If we have to lose twenty, thirty or fifty pounds, diet alone is not the answer, because diet alone does not eliminate fat, it reduces our body weight. What we need to change is the body composition. Remove the fat, little by little, trying not to affect and indeed increase the lean mass. So? Therefore we must not lose weight quickly, but absolutely take care of physical activity and a healthy and correct diet.

Thus we will avoid the problems of Simone or Elna, or we will reduce them to a great extent.