Woo! So you've lost weight! Slap me some extra skin, bro!

Down to 215. I'm 35 pounds lighter.

Confessional time: Here's a dirty little secret about weightloss. For a while I think I actually looked slightly LESS flattering at 35 pounds down than I did when I had lost only 25 pounds.  That's changing now that my skin tighted up, but for a while the excess skin was noticable to me.

**cough**

It wasn't super prounounced, but I could see it. My skin just felt looser. Like I'd put on some sort of fat suit or something, even though I'd lost weight.
Turns out, it takes a while for your skin to shrink to match your actual size. This is a new concept for me. I know, I know. I'm a slow learner. But one of my goals here is to chronicle the process of weightloss and this is one of them. Extra skin.

Extra skin is one of the many reasons you're supposed to lose weight at the recommended 2 pounds or so per week. Cuz any faster and your skin doesn't have time to keep up with weightloss and could actually lose some of its elasticity. I may be frustrated at the slow pace of weightloss, and that I've failed to meet my goal two months in a row....but on the plus side, my skin had tightened up considerably over the past two months so I FEEL a little thinner even though I haven't really lost much.

Obviously, the bigger you are, the more loose skin you're going to have.

But the good news is that for most of us our skin is going to tighten back up over time.  Here's a great article with details about the process of your skin returning to normal. Hint: It's complicated. Eat a healthy diet, hope for a good genetic code for your skin, don't lose weight too fast. That's pretty much how it goes. Don't panic too soon, you probablly won't need surgery. Give it time. Lost of time. Like a year or two before you start to worry.

Extra skin or not, you're going to be healthier and live longer when you lose weight.