Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
You’ve successfully completed several fasts already and experienced a myriad of health benefits from doing so. If weight loss has caused loose skin, then you may again turn to a type of intermittent fasting known as dry fasting to see if it can help. Does fry fasting heal loose skin?
Fasting can cause loose skin to become firmer through autophagy, a form of internal cell recycling. Since fasting accelerates autophagy and a dry fast is such a strict diet, you can renew the fibroblasts that produce collagen at a faster rate. This may make your skin look younger too.
In this post, we’ll talk about what a dry fast is, why collagen is so important to skin firmness, and how through fasting you can induce the autophagy necessary to improve the look of your skin. If you have loose skin of any kind, you’re not going to want to miss this, so keep reading!
What Is Dry Fasting?
Considered to be the strictest fasting type, when on a dry fast, you cannot eat food, nor can you consume water or other fluids. As the name suggests, you go totally dry. How dry is up to you. When on a soft water fast, you’re allowed to use water in your day-to-day life, such as for washing your face, brushing your teeth, cleaning your hands, and bathing or showering.
If you’re up for an even more restrictive experience, that would be a hard dry fast. The rules are still the same, in that you cannot eat or drink, but now you can’t even use water for hygienic purposes. If you want to shower, you’ll have to wait until you can exit this fasted state. When you go to brush your teeth, you have to do it without water.
As you can imagine, this requires a lot of discipline. We wouldn’t recommend hard dry fasting for beginners; you should have months if not years of experience under your belt before you attempt this.
For as difficult as it is to remain in a dry fasted state, the results for some people are worth it. According to the Times of India in a 2018 report, when you forego both food and water for only one day, you get the same benefits as if you water fasted for three days.
Those health perks can include weight loss and fat loss. Sticking to shorter periods of no food and water is ideal too, as you can prevent the loss of muscle mass that can sometimes occur in people who have fasted for too long.
Will Loose Skin Ever Tighten Up?
Weight loss is great and quite optimal for your health, but one of the unintended side effects is often loose skin.
Even if you didn’t recently lose weight, your skin can become loose for all sorts of other reasons. As you age, sagging skin seems almost inevitable. Getting pregnant and successfully delivering a baby can leave the skin around your abdomen stretched and baggy. So too can having certain medical conditions, especially Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.
Loose skin is not necessarily a marker of a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle, but it is probably something you don’t want to have for the rest of your life. That’s completely fair.
What are your options for tackling loose skin? Will your skin firm up on its own someday or are you stuck like this for the foreseeable future? That depends on what’s causing your skin to be so saggy in the first place. If it’s a medical condition, then we highly recommend seeing your doctor and following their treatment plan for repairing your skin.
As for loose skin caused by pregnancy and/or weight loss, what seems to retain the elasticity of your skin is how quickly or slowly you lose the weight. Going incrementally slower when you lose weight will give your skin a chance to bounce back when it’s ready. If you lose all the weight all at once, then expect more skin folds and sagginess. At that point, the only thing that could really help your skin look better would be body-contouring surgical procedures.
Is Dry Fasting Good for the Skin?
If you decided you wanted to lose weight all at once, it probably felt like a healthy decision at the time. Now though, you’re left with loose skin and regrets. You can’t go back and change the way you lost the weight, but you can try to improve your skin now, perhaps by going into a fasted state. Does dry fasting heal loose skin?
Indeed, if you want to firm up your skin long-term, intermittent fasting (including dry fasting) is certainly one way to do it.
The reason your skin benefits is due to an internal bodily function known as autophagy.
Understanding Autophagy
You see, each of your roughly 30 trillion cells has a finite lifespan. Some of these cells do admittedly last for an incredibly long time. For example, heart muscle cells are good for 40 years, intestinal cells for 15.9 years, skeletal muscle cells for 15.1 years, and pancreatic cells for a year. Some scientific experts even believe that our brain cells may live for more than 200 years.
For most cells though, their lifespan is far briefer, such as a few weeks or months. As these cells begin to near the end of their lives, their efficiency lessens considerably. In that regard, your cells are sort of like you as a whole. Once you begin getting older, you may find it hard to do the activities you used to readily engage in.
There are two problems with older, less efficient cells remaining in your body. The first is that these cells are dragging down all the other faster, healthier cells. If you think of your cells’ job as a factory assembly line, imagine if someone in the middle of that assembly line got held up doing their job. Now everyone else’s job is impacted by the delay. Thus, a few older cells can make organ functioning less effective across the body.
The other problem with older cells is that they will die eventually. When a cell dies, it doesn’t go quietly. Instead, the cell will explode. This cell death or apoptosis is incredibly messy. Now, besides doing their regular job keeping you healthy, your younger cells also have to clean up the old dead cell contents. That again takes away from their primary job.
This is where autophagy comes in. When your body undergoes autophagy, your healthy cells will remove those damaged old ones. If a cell is somewhat old but still in decent enough condition, then it may be recycled for better productivity.
In doing this, your body ensures that only the strongest cells survive. These cells will work hard to support your health until they too get recycled someday. Then the process keeps repeating infinitely for the rest of your life.
Autophagy is a process that occurs naturally in all of us, but you can accelerate it in several ways. One of these is through exercise, and another is through fasting. To kickstart autophagy, you need to increase your glucagon and decrease insulin. The peptide hormone glucagon sends fatty acids and glucose, a sugar, to your bloodstream.
When your glucagon goes up, this signals to your body that it’s time to begin autophagy. That’s why both exercise and being in a fasted state are some of the best ways to enter autophagy. It may take between 12 and 24 hours for autophagy to start while fasting. However, considering you’re dry fasting and your results are normally faster, you could have to wait even less time.
Autophagy and the Skin
So what does autophagy have to do with loose skin? We’re glad you asked.
Two proteins in the intracellular matrix keep your skin looking and feeling supple, tight, and young. These are elastin and collagen. Elastin lends that bouncy, elastic quality to the skin that holds it firm and prevents loose sagginess. Collagen provides hydration, suppleness, and elasticity to your skin.
Fibroblasts produce both elastin and collagen. This connective tissue cell helps your wounds heal and also releases collagen proteins for the skin. Yet unfortunately, fibroblasts live for about 57 days, so their lifespan is incredibly short, lasting not even two months. If your fibroblasts are left to keep working even when they’re close to death, or–even worse–they undergo apoptosis, then your skin suffers for it.
This 2010 report from the Biophysical Journal found that fibroblasts can stiffen at a rate of about 60 percent as you get older. That explains why with age your skin becomes loose, wrinkly, and drier.
Autophagy may be one way to combat and prevent the loose skin that comes with age. In a 2019 publication of Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, the researchers said this of autophagy: “Several of the aging processes are triggered or enhanced by the presence of damaged molecules and organelles within cells, and their turnover is controlled partly by autophagy. Besides proteostasis and organelle maintenance, other factors that are accepted as the hallmarks of aging…, such as nutrient sensing and genomic instability are under control of or elicit the activation of autophagy, making autophagy a major counter-regulatory process that supports skin homeostasis and healthy aging.”
This 2012 report from the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology supports that autophagy can ward off aging and even prolong your life. According to the report: “Rapidly accumulating evidence suggests that the cellular recycling process of autophagy could be one such integrative mechanism, which maintains cellular homeostasis and plays a pro-survival role, and thus contributes to increased longevity.”
Not only can you live longer through autophagy, but you can improve your loose skin too. Through repeated instances of fasting, you may notice that your skin seems firmer, healthier, and younger-looking.
Is Dry Fasting Good?
If you want to forego both food and water the next time you try a fasting diet, what kind of benefits can you expect besides autophagy and less loose skin? Here are some other health perks to keep in mind.
Weight Loss
Fasting remains a recommended means of losing weight, with dry fasting an especially good way to see results quickly. Since you’re consuming no food nor beverages on this diet, there’s no question as to whether you’re burning more calories than you consume. You may notice the numbers come down on the scale quickly as you begin losing weight.
If you exercise while following this diet, your weight loss results could be accelerated even further. Also, you can maintain your muscle mass. That said, you do want to take precautions if you exercise while in a fasted state. Stick to very low-intensity activities such as walking or yoga instead of cardio or heavy weight-lifting.
Fat Loss
Besides weight loss, expect fat loss too. That’s what happens when fasting, after all. Your body, which usually burns the glucose you get from food, switches to burning fat instead once you stop eating. Of course, before that happens, your body has to go through its excess supply of glucose.
By adding exercise to your fat loss plan, you could have an even trimmer body with more muscle definition by the time your fasting window closes. Just do make sure that you follow the same precautions as above to stay safe.
Less Inflammation
In a 2012 publication of the journal Nutrition Research, when a group of participants observing Ramadan were reviewed for their pro-inflammatory cytokines both before and after Ramadan, the participants had fewer of these cytokines when dry fasting for this religious occasion.
Controlling your inflammation can be incredibly good for your health. You may notice an improvement in both your mood and your energy levels. Further, you can better control your triglycerides, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Reduced inflammation is also tied to a lower risk of cancer, depression, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
Healthier Immune System
Your immune system is crucially important in keeping you healthy in your day-to-day life. Autophagy safeguards the immune system by recycling the cells here. The stronger and fresher the immune system cells, the better this system is at combatting the foreign invaders that can make you sick.
Digestive System Healing
Another area in which autophagy is especially advantageous is in improving immune system functioning. We just wrote a post about this, but your digestive system works more than 24/7 to process all the foods you consume. It can take upwards of 30 hours for digestion to occur for a single meal, so your digestive system always has a backlog.
When you stop eating, such as through fasting, you give the digestive system a chance to take a vacation. Autophagy can activate cell healing and renewal so your digestive system is stronger, healthier, and more raring to go when you eat once again.
How to Go on a Dry Fast Safely
If you’re ready to go on a loose skin diet through dry fasting, here are the tips we’d recommend to get you started.
See Your Doctor
Some people who are more experienced fasters can stop eating and drinking for a few days just fine. Other people have a difficult time with it. Since this type of fasting is such a strict diet change, we strongly encourage you to see your doctor before doing anything else.
Tell your doctor what you plan on doing and why (to help with your loose skin). Your doctor may recommend a physical before they give your plan the green light. If they tell you they don’t think you’re a fasting candidate, ask your doctor if they have another suggestion for treating or reducing your loose skin.
Plan When to Start
You definitely want to keep your fasting widow brief this first time, around 24 hours or a little under. Select on your calendar the day you plan on getting started. Make sure you don’t have a lot scheduled for this period, as being in a fasted state could cause side effects like dizziness, crankiness, and exhaustion in some people.
Wean Your Way Into It
You don’t just want to stop eating and drinking immediately. Instead, in the days to come, begin whittling your diet down. First, shrink your portion sizes. Then, if you can, eat twice a day instead of three times each day. As you get closer to fasting day, switch to primarily liquid meals. Make sure you get in a good, nutritious, filling meal before you stop eating and drinking for a few days.
What follows can be a difficult time, but remind yourself of your skin goals or fat loss goals to help you get motivated. Then, stick with it, and before you know it, you can say you fasted successfully.
Conclusion
Does dry fasting heal loose skin? Indeed, it can. These skin changes happen through a process called autophagy. With autophagy, your body recycles fibroblasts so your skin can keep producing collagen and elastin. The two proteins can reduce loose skin and help your skin look younger too!
Although dry fasting can promote fat loss, help you lose weight, trigger autophagy, improve the skin, and otherwise benefit your health, it is a strict diet and definitely not for everyone. Thus, you’ll want to see your doctor before you make this huge dietary change. Best of luck!