How to Tighten Loose Skin After Weight Loss

If you are one of those that have lost a lot of weight recently, then you may have noticed that you have a bit of loose skin hanging around. From extra skin under the arms to a hanging pouch around the stomach, loose skin can pose an embarrassing problem, especially if weight loss has been achieved rapidly.

Why Skin Gets Loose After Weight Loss

Since it has to stretch as we move, grow, and—as in the case of weight loss— shrink, skin is an incredibly elastic living organ. Yes, that's right, skin is not just one big piece of rubber that covers the entire body, but is instead an organ,and just like all the other organs in your body, it is comprised of cells.

Different layers of your skin have different types of cells, and though the skin cells on the outer part of your skin (the epidermis) are constantly being lost and replaced with new cells, the skin cells under the epidermis are a bit more permanent.

What Happens to Your Skin When You Lose Weight?

When you lose weight, and especially when you lose weight very quickly, these elastic components of your skin not only lose the layers of fat that keep them stretched out over your body, but they also don't have much time for their elasticity to adapt to your new shape.

In addition to weight loss, age, poor nutrition, dehydration, excessive sun exposure, and smoking can all affect the elasticity of the skin and give you that elephant-like appearance you probably don't want.

How to Tighten Loose Skin After Weight Loss

As you lose fat and your loose skin begins to appear, the first rule is don't panic! Because it is a living organ, your skin will slowly take up to two years, here are steps you can take to make your skin tighten more quickly:

Tip #1: Don't Lose Weight Too Quickly

Crash diets and excessive amounts of time spent exercising can rapidly shed both muscle and fat, resulting in a double-whammy on your skin—the supportive underlying muscular structure that holds skin against your body is lost, as is the fat that keeps the skin stretched out.

Aim for 1-2 pounds of fat loss per week, and make sure your weight loss program includes weight lifting so that you do not lose lean muscle.

Tip #2: Stay Hydrated

Attend to your hydration needs. Water is a crucial component of maintaining skin elasticity. From both food and drink, you should be taking in at least two liters of water each day.

Tip #3: Eat Properly

Two necessary ingredients that keep skin plump and elastic are collagen and elastin. Protein-rich foods such as cottage cheese, milk, legumes, tofu, beans, seeds, nuts, and fish all contain collagen and elastin forming components, as well as oils to help maintain healthy skin.

Tip #4: Take Care of Your Skin

Nourish and care for your skin. Daily exfoliation can help to remove dead skin cells and increase skin circulation. A hot bath with sea salts and minerals can improve skin tone. Skin tightening creams with herbal formulas and ingredients such as aloe vera, hyaluronic acid, yeast extract, soy protein, Vitamin C, Vitamin E and Vitamin A can help to hydrate and increase collagen and elastin formation in skin.

Stay away from harsh detergents, such a sulfates in soaps, shampoos and dishwashing liquids. If you swim for fitness, use soap and shampoos that are specially designed to remove chlorine.

When to Consider Surgery for Loose Skin

Skin can only be stretched so far before it looses some of its ability to snap back. If you've had a 9-month pregnancy, then you'll be able to tighten your loose skin. But if you've carried a hundred or more extra pounds for many years, you may be a candidate for plastic surgery to tighten and lift loose skin. This fix should only be used in extreme cases, and I should warn you: my clients who have undergone this operation have actually gained more fat afterwards while they were rehabilitating from surgery!

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Aviation Secrets : Airplane contrails contributes more to Global Warming than we know!

The aviation industry has no doubt helped international airline travel faster, safer, comfortable, and affordable. There has been plenty of avalable options to the public, from passenger airlines to private jets. But it has been criticized many times for its seemingly huge environmental impact, particularly from the airplanes' climate-warming carbon emissions.

But a recent study suggests that there is another byproduct of airplanes that has significant effect on the climate —the white contrails that the airplanes paint across the sky.

Airplanes produce long mesmerizing contrails during flight as they soar high in the thin, cold air. The water vapor simply quickly condenses around soot from the plane’s exhaust and then it freezes to form cirrus clouds. These white clouds formed can last for minutes or hours. These high-flying white contrails are too thin to reflect much sunlight, but ice crystals inside them can trap heat. Unlike low-level clouds that have a net cooling effect, these contrail-formed clouds warm the climate.

A 2011 study suggests that the net effect of these contrail clouds contributes more to atmospheric warming than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by planes since the dawn of aviation. And those effects are predicted to get worse as air traffic—and the resulting cloud coverage—increases: Some estimates suggest global air traffic will quadruple by the year 2050.



One of the researchers from the 2011 study wanted to explore how contrail clouds could affect the climate in the future. Along with colleagues, atmospheric physicist Ulrike Burkhardt from the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR’s) Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Wessling created a new atmospheric model that—for the first time—gave contrail clouds their own category, separate from natural clouds. That allowed them to model particular qualities of the humanmade clouds that affected everything from their formation to how they interacted with the rest of the atmosphere.

The researchers modeled the effect of global contrail cloud coverage in 2006, a year for which they had accurate aviation data. Then, taking into account predictions for future air traffic and emissions, they modeled the effect of contrail clouds for 2050. They found a threefold increase in their warming effect over that time, they report this week in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The study is one of the first to make a detailed prediction of how these special clouds affect the future climate, says DLR cloud physicist Bernd Kärcher, who was a co-author on the 2011 paper. He says the new cloud classification scheme was crucial to the model and its results.

The researchers looked at another scenario for 2050, one with a 50% reduction in airplane soot emissions. They found that such a reduction could lead to a 15% decrease in the contrail clouds’ atmospheric warming effect.

But little is known about the relationship between climate warming and cloud coverage, and how atmospheric warming affects temperatures on the surface. What researchers do know is that high levels of soot lead to more and longer-lived contrail cirrus clouds, which could alter weather and climate at the surface, Burkhardt says. However, she adds, even a 90% reduction in soot emissions with the help of cleaner aircraft fuels would fail to bring the cloud’s climate impact back to its 2006 levels.

A more likely scenario, Burkhardt says, is that levels of soot and contrail cirrus clouds will continue to rise. That’s because most aviation regulations and pollution-reduction plans fail to consider the climate impact from anything other than CO2 emissions. A United Nations scheme, for example, requires all signatory nations to keep their CO2 emissions under a certain level, and report them annually, but says nothing about the climate impact from contrails.

Burkhardt says that considering contrails in such schemes would be difficult, however, because climate impact varies based on weather, location, and time of day. One solution, Burkhardt says, is to reroute flights. However, such rerouting may force planes to burn more fuel and release more CO2. She says it would be better to find more efficient fuels that release less soot. But with the likely increase in air traffic, even that might not be enough.

Andrew Gettelman, a cloud physicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says contrail cirrus clouds are a complex problem, but that their warming effect is still small compared with the overall amounts of CO2 belched by society. “If all we had were contrails, there wouldn't be global warming.” But, he adds, it’s still important for the aviation industry to understand the science and “get their impact right.”

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