Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
The hands of time can cause your skin to loosen and become saggy. Losing a significant amount of weight can also leave you with more skin than you’d like to have. In both scenarios, would fasting be able to help? More specifically, could the process of autophagy reduce all that loose skin?
Autophagy can promote healthier cells that boost skin tightness and elasticity, making your loose skin look less noticeable over time.
In this article, we’ll talk more about what leads to loose skin, how autophagy can make your skin look firmer, and how long it may take to see results. We’ll even throw in some suggestions for making your skin look youthful again while you fast. Keep reading!
What Causes Loose Skin?
If you pinch your skin, how quickly does it bounce back to where it was? When this happens immediately, it means you have firm, tight skin. Loose and saggy skin will take longer to recover after being pinched.
Within your skin are elastin and collagen. Elastin exists in the extracellular matrix as a protein that allows your tissue to keep its shape after you do the above pinching or otherwise contract or stretch the tissue. The name sounds like elastic because elastin itself has great elasticity. Thus, when you have a lot of elastin within your skin, it too has those elastic-like qualities.
Another key protein in the skin is collagen. This is a structural protein that’s also a part of the extracellular matrix. Fibroblasts within the body produce collagen. If elastin keeps your tissue flexible, then collagen lets that tissue stay firm, strong, and hydrated.
Mammals may have upwards of 35 percent of collagen content in their bodies. Besides its role in skin health, collagen also fortifies the bones. You’ll find collagen in muscles, ligaments, and tendons as well as the skin.
Breakdowns in elastin and collagen lead to loose skin, but what contributes to lower levels of both these proteins? Let’s explore.
Aging
If you’re getting older and your skin isn’t bouncing back the way it once did, that’s because elastin and collagen both deplete as you celebrate more birthdays.
Lifestyle and Environment
The world around you and how you live in it can also play a role in how healthy and youthful your skin looks. If you drink alcohol heavily and frequently, this can lead to a premature lack of elastin and collagen, making you look far older than your years. The same is true if you mismanage your nutrition.
Smoking cigarettes can also make your skin look older and saggy, as can other pollutants you’re exposed to in your day-to-day life. UV sun exposure can do more than cause sunburns and even skin cancer. These harsh sun rays can also accelerate skin aging.
Medical Conditions
Certain medical conditions may also contribute to your loose skin. For example, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is actually several disorders, affects the tissue and skin. Your skin lacks elasticity, so you can stretch it significantly before it bounces back. Other symptoms include loose joints and frequent bruising.
Weight Loss
You’ve lost a large amount of weight, more than 100 pounds. Congratulations are certainly in order as you’ve prioritized your health. One downside of dropping all those pounds though is your skin may look loose, especially if you gained a lot of weight and then lost just as much quickly.
Does Autophagy Reduce Loose Skin?
No matter the cause, loose skin can be embarrassing. Whether yours is in your stomach, the upper arms, the throat and jowls, the chin, or even your eyelids, you frequently hide parts of your body so no one sees all the skin.
You may have tried other methods for reducing or tightening your loose skin, and that’s brought you to fasting. Is it possible to erase your loose skin problem through a fast? Yes, it is.
When you fast, you kickstart a process known as autophagy. This form of cell recycling promotes healthy cells throughout the body, as the old, damaged ones are consumed.
You might think then that autophagy can cause your skin cells to eat the ones that are keeping your skin saggy and your skin will immediately tighten. While that would be very convenient, that’s not quite how autophagy works in this regard.
What autophagy can do is recycle your fibroblasts. Fibroblasts, as we said, make collagen as well as other fibers. These connective tissue cells, like any other cell, get old and stop working as effectively. The life of a fibroblast cell is about 57 days, so roughly two months.
In a 2018 study published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, the researchers compared the effects of autophagy in younger and older patients. Unsurprisingly, the researchers concluded that older fibroblasts made more waste and were slower than the newer fibroblasts. This promoted skin aging in the older patients.
The study concluded with this: “Regardless of the controversies on autophagic activity with age, autophagy plays a crucial role in counteracting aging, and strategies aimed at its modulation should hold promise for the prevention of skin aging.”
Younger-looking skin has more fibroblasts, so it also contains more collagen. It thus looks suppler and firmer. If your fibroblasts can recycle through autophagy so they’re always young and fresh, then your skin will have more collagen like you’ve turned back the hands of time (to a degree).
A 2019 report in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology reached a similar conclusion when the researchers here looked at how autophagy impacts skin aging.
According to the study: “…autophagy supports the differentiation of epithelial cells which allows them to protect cells against external noxae…Since autophagy achieves the removal and recycling of intracellular material only to a certain point, potential toxic cell components and dysfunctional lysosomes tend to accumulate during the life-time of cells. Some of the compromised cells succumb to cell death whereas others remain alive but lose their capacity to execute intracellular processes, including autophagy, with full efficiency. Loss and dysfunction of cells manifest in aging.”
How Long Does It Take to See Smoother, Tighter Skin Through Autophagy?
If you want to begin fasting for less loose skin, you may wonder how long it will take to see results. For autophagy to work its best, you need to fast for at least two days, or 48 hours. For some fasters, it takes three days or 72 hours for autophagy to be kickstarted.
Yes, that’s quite a long fast, and some types of intermittent fasting won’t apply. For instance, an alternate-day fast, where you spend up to 24 hours in a fasted state, would be insufficient. The same would be true of a 16:8 fast, as you’re not fasting for more than 16 hours a day.
Instead, you’d want to look into fasting types such as water fasts and even dry fasts if you’re more experienced. These are longer fasts that will allow you to get into an autophagic state so you can begin lessening your loose skin.
How do you know whether autophagy is working? You don’t, which is the hard part. Even a 2017 study in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences that compared the means of autophagic flux measurements had this to say: “Presently, there is no established method to measure autophagic flux in humans; therefore, it remains practically impossible to monitor autophagy properly in humans.”
You have to keep at it and take a wait-and-see approach for your results.
Now, how many fasts it might take for visible skin results to manifest will absolutely differ from person to person. If you have only a bit of aging-related loose skin, then your skin would likely tighten up faster than someone who lost a lot of weight and has multiple areas of loose skin.
Patience is key here, as is consistency. If you maintain your fasts regularly, be that every week, every other week, or on a schedule that otherwise works for you, then you’ll be well on your way to skin that has more elasticity and collagen so it both looks and feels younger.
Other Methods for Firming and Tightening Your Skin
If you don’t want to wait for autophagy to do its thing, you don’t necessarily have to. You can also try the following methods to accelerate your skin tightening. Most of these suggestions are advisable when fasting as well, so you might as well incorporate them into your new lifestyle.
Drink Plenty of Fluids
Remember, we mentioned before that collagen is part of what promotes hydration in the skin. With less collagen through weight loss, aging, or even medical conditions, you have to take extra care to ensure you keep up on your fluids.
Skin that lacks hydration has clearer fine lines as well as uneven complexion and tone. It also feels dry and may look dull compared to its usual appearance.
When fasting, you’re more prone to dehydration, especially on fasts where you consume very few calories. That’s because about 20 percent of your daily hydration comes from food, so without that, you have some making up to do.
Get Your Vitamins
You also need to stick to a daily vitamin regimen. Most micronutrients, when consumed individually, should not break your fast, nor should multivitamins free of added fillers and sugar. Here are the vitamins and nutrients you need packed into your diet for healthier skin.
- Vitamin B7: This B vitamin, which is also referred to as biotin, promotes the health of your nails, hair, and skin. If you’re allowed to eat on your fast, you can also get vitamin B7 through foods such as mushrooms, fish, avocados, eggs, and organ meats.
- Vitamin A: Fibroblast stimulation through vitamin A makes this a great vitamin to incorporate into your routine. If you don’t want to take a vitamin A supplement, then get foods like kale, sweet potatoes, squash, and liver meat into your fasting diet.
- Vitamin E: The antioxidants within vitamin E may be able to prevent UV damage that can prematurely age your skin. Outside of supplements, you can eat sunflower seeds, sweet potatoes, avocados, spinach, and almonds for natural sources of vitamin E.
- Phytonutrients: The carotenoids in some phytonutrients can restore collagen so your skin looks fresher. Augment your diet with dandelions, collard greens, spinach, and kale for lots of phytonutrients.
- Vitamin C: By repairing damaged tissue, gelatin and collagen levels within the skin can be restored. That’s all thanks to vitamin C, which you can get through a supplement or by eating peppers, berries, fruits, vegetables, and some fermented foods.
Eat a Protein-Rich Diet
Don’t forget the protein, as it’s important for rebuilding loose skin. Protein-heavy foods also tend to contain proline, glycine, elastin, and other beneficial amino acids. Some proteins have sulfur as well, which your body will use during collagen production. These foods are onions, garlic, and leafy vegetables.
Proteins can also contain collagen itself, among them oysters, eggs, sardines, salmon and other fish, bone broth, chicken thighs, beef collard, and tendon meats.
Exercise
Whether you’re fasting or not, exercise should be part of your regular routine to maintain your health and ward off future weight gain. Resistance training may help with loose skin, as can other higher-intensity activities that develop muscle hypertrophy. This causes the muscles to grow, giving your skin something to stretch into so it looks less loose.
Conclusion
Do you have loose skin? If so, you don’t have to hide it anymore. Fasting kickstarts an internal process called autophagy, which can prevent skin aging that may cause loose skin. Autophagy also ensures the cells responsible for firm, young-looking skin–such as the fibroblasts that make collagen–are continually recycled so they work their best.
Now that you know the key to tightening up your skin, you can begin fasting for a healthier, better-looking you. Good luck!