Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
Lots of people are self-conscious about their skin, be it from acne or conditions like eczema or rosacea. For you, it’s a different issue that makes you embarrassed of your skin: how loose and saggy it is. You’ve tried exercising and even a skin cream or two to firm up trouble areas, but to no avail. Would fasting help? How?
Fasting can help loose skin through an internal process called autophagy. During autophagy or cell recycling, your old fibroblasts are consumed. Fibroblasts make collagen, but older fibroblasts contribute to saggy skin and wrinkles, as they’re less efficient.
In this article, we’ll discuss the amazing way skin works, including how it gets its elasticity. We’ll also discuss why you may lose skin elasticity and begin having sagging skin and what role fasting can play in reversing that. Keep reading!
Understanding Skin and Its Elasticity
Our skin is by far our biggest organ, with the typical person having enough skin for 2 square meters or 21 square feet. Forefront Dermatology notes that, on average, your skin alone is 9 pounds or about 15 percent of your overall weight. All the blood vessels within the skin go on for more than 11 miles.
Your skin is pretty impressive then, as it well should be given its size. It also has several layers, beginning with the outer layer, or the epidermis. This is the layer of your skin you can see and touch. The cells here make keratinocytes or keratin, a type of fibrous structural protein that’s also found in our fingernails and hair. Other animals produce keratin as well, which is used for fortifying hooves, claws, horns, and feathers.
The newer the epidermal cells, the lower down in the layers they go. It takes about four weeks for most epidermal cells to cycle through. Your epidermal skin layer is also constantly shedding. If you see small flakes of skin–which is normal–these are the cells in your epidermal layer cycling through.
Beneath the epidermal layer is the dermis. This is an important layer for skin elasticity, as the dermis has collagen fibers. As a structural protein in the body’s extracellular matrix, collagen is contained in connective tissue. Collagen has many responsibilities for keeping our skin healthy, including providing a stretchy, elastic quality to the skin as well as making our skin more durable.
Also a part of the extracellular matrix within the dermis is elastin, the second type of protein that affects the elasticity of your skin. When you pinch or poke your skin, elastin is what makes the skin bounce back to its original form. This protein will also help the skin renew its shape after being contracted and/or stretched.
Despite containing both collagen and elastin, the dermis can at times rip, which leads to the development of stretch marks. This happens frequently in pregnant women, but physical developments during puberty can also lead to stretch marks, as can being overweight or obese.
The dermal layer has many capillaries or blood vessels as well as nerve fiber networks. These capillaries allow oxygen and nutrients to travel through the blood to reach cells. The dermal layer is also what triggers sweating, as it contains a lot of sweat glands, even though sweat comes out of the epidermal layer.
Then, beneath the dermal layer is the subcutis layer, your third layer of skin. This layer is also the deepest. The subcutis layer goes by names like the hypodermis or subcutaneous layer. It contains some connective tissue and fat. Cavities within the subcutis folds have water and fat storage tissue that protects your joints and bones from impact and insulates the body.
When you spend a few hours out in the sun and your body naturally receives a dose of vitamin D from sunlight, this hormone production occurs in the subcutis layer.
What Changes Skin Elasticity?
Loose skin occurs when your body’s supply of collagen and/or elastin diminishes, but what can cause this? Lots of things, some that are in your control and others that are not.
Age
While it would be wonderful if your skin stays supple and elastic forever, that’s simply not the case. According to skin and hair resource BioSil, when you’re as young as 18 to 21 years of age, your collagen production begins slowing down.
BioSil notes that when you celebrate your 40th birthday, you’re losing 1 percent of your collagen a year. This will continue for the rest of your life unless you actively reverse it through dietary changes, supplements, or fasting.
Pregnancy
A Healthline article on pregnancy notes that it’s normal to gain 1 to 4.5 pounds for your first trimester and then 2 pounds every week through the third trimester, which is about 25 to 35 pounds overall.
Between the weight gain and the developing fetus, your body will undoubtedly undergo changes during pregnancy. Your stomach must stretch to accommodate the baby within. Once you give birth and lose some weight, you might notice you have stretch marks on your stomach as well as loose skin.
Weight Loss
Like with pregnancy, when you put on large amounts of weight and then lose it, you’re likely to see flappy skin in the most hard-hit areas. These places can include the stomach, upper arms, throat, chin, jowls, and eyelids.
Smoking
Smoking cigarettes is often accompanied by losing weight, which should keep your skin firm instead of loose and saggy, right? Not necessarily. Mayo Clinic states that when you smoke cigarettes, you accelerate the aging process, making your skin wrinkly even if you’re in your 20s or early 30s. The length of time you smoke as well as the number of cigarettes you smoke in a given day can make the aging effects more severe.
That said, it takes at least 10 years of consistent smoking for your skin to be affected, says Mayo Clinic. Besides just your face, your inner arms may look very wrinkly. This occurs because your epidermal and dermal layers’ blood vessels constrict from the nicotine within cigarettes, preventing normal blood flow to the skin. Your body then lacks vitamin A as well as oxygen.
Further, all those chemicals in tobacco smoke can wreck your elastin and collagen.
Improper Nutrition
A similar occurrence can happen through a poor diet. When you eat nothing but junk and carbohydrates, you’re denying your body the vitamins and nutrients it needs to nourish your skin and keep it supple, healthy, and young-looking.
Illness
Several illnesses and diseases can also change your skin’s elasticity. One of them is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which we’ve discussed on this blog before. This rare inherited disorder targets your body’s blood vessel walls, joints, skin, and other connective tissue. Your joints may become too flexible, to the point where you can easily dislocate them if you’re not careful.
Your skin will bruise often, and you may notice it has a translucent quality. As collagen production slows from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, the skin on the face and other parts of the body can become loose and saggy.
Besides Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, cutaneous T-cell lymphoma can also cause skin loosening. This condition is also referred to as a granulomatous skin sack. It’s mostly the knees and elbows that are affected here, so the skin will loosen in those areas. It’s typically hard to restore the skin to its previous tightened state if a patient has cutaneous T-cell lymphoma specifically.
Air Pollution
The pollution in the air could worsen eczema and acne, but it can also wreak havoc on the tightness of your skin. Air pollution includes volatile organic compounds, leads, particulates, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and carbon oxides. Some air pollution can get into your pores, destructing collagen supply, dehydrating the skin, and inflaming it.
Sun Exposure
If you spend a lot of days on the beach or at the pool without sunblock, you’re hurting your skin. Sun exposure and damage can cause elastin to break down faster.
Can Fasting Help with Loose Skin?
Now that you understand more about why loose skin occurs, you want to do something about it. You may have tried skin treatments you heard about from a friend of a friend, but you’ve been disappointed in your results. How can fasting help with loose skin?
To answer that, we have to talk about fibroblasts.
Fibroblasts are cells that creates structural proteins like collagen within the extracellular matrix. Through fibroblasts, you also have glycosaminoglycans such as glycoproteins and hyaluronan as well as adhesive proteins, including fibronectin and laminin.
Like any cell, your fibroblasts don’t last forever. As fibroblasts get older, their efficiency decreases, meaning the cells make less collagen. This impacts the appearance of the skin, making it looser.
Through fasting, you can trigger cell turnover in a process called autophagy. If you’re new to this blog, autophagy occurs when your healthy cells take old and damaged cells and eat those parts so the remaining cell can work better. Sometimes, the cell as a whole is recycled. In consuming the cell before it dies, your body avoids apoptosis, which makes a large mess and gives your healthy cells an unnecessary cleanup job.
By fasting for 48 to 72 hours, you can kickstart autophagy within your body. This occurs in all sorts of organs, including your immune system. Through autophagy, you end up with healthier systems in the body as well as healthier cells. This can ward off diseases and even prolong your life.
In 2014, the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications investigated the effect of autophagy on fibroblasts in the dermal layer. According to that study, older fibroblasts tended to undergo autophagy much less often. This keeps the old cells around longer to keep working (or not working), slowing collagen production in the process.
When the old cells skip out on autophagic processes, both the fragility of your skin and the “deterioration of dermal integrity” increase, concludes the study.
Autophagy occurs within us at all times, but fasting can improve autophagic speed and efficiency. This can encourage those old fibroblasts to be recycled or consumed so only healthier, younger ones remain. Those fibroblasts will continue to work hard to keep your collagen production up so your skin is firm and taut.
This could treat your current loose skin problem as well as prevent new loose skin from developing.
What Is the Best Type of Fast for Loose Skin?
Keeping in mind that autophagy happens after fasting for two to three days, here are some types of fasts we recommend for combatting your loose skin.
5:2 Fast
The 5:2 fast earned that name because the ratio refers to the days you spend non-fasting versus the days you’re in a fasted state. For two days every week, you should fast, skipping food and most caloric beverages. Then, for five days of the week, you eat, but only about 25 percent of the calories you should consume. That’s no more than 600 calories a day, by the way.
Some intermittent fasters will follow the 5:2 diet by spending five days in a row eating and then two consecutive days of fasting. Others will alternate their fasting and eating days to manage their week more easily.
If you spend at least 48 consecutive hours fasting, then you could enter autophagy through a 5:2 fast. When you can eat, try incorporating foods known to boost autophagy, such as:
- Elderberries
- Pomegranate
- Reishi and chaga mushrooms
- Garlic
- Ginseng
- Ceylon cinnamon
- Ginger
- Turmeric
- Green tea
If you’re allowed to take supplements on your fast, then consume MCT oil, resveratrol, berberine, and bergamot supplements to keep autophagy going.
Water Fast
The next type of fast for tighter skin is the water fast. When on a water fast, you consume no foods, only beverages. Despite the name, water fasting allows for other beverages, especially black tea, green tea, and black coffee.
For 24 to 72 hours, you drink when you feel hungry, sipping nine to 13 glasses a day, with nine glasses recommended for women and 13 glasses suggested for men. We recommend drinking your beverages slowly to make them last longer.
Water fasting is not ideal for new fasters because this fast takes a lot of discipline.
When you go on a water fast, don’t exceed 72 consecutive hours of fasting, as this could be dangerous for your health. You can break up your water fast and stretch it longer if necessary, but again, we don’t advise this for beginners.
Extended 36-Hour Fast
The 36-hour fast is within the same vein as a water fast, in that you refrain from consuming food for at least 36 hours. Since it takes about 48 hours for autophagy to really begin, you’ll need to extend the length of your fast by about 10 more hours.
Other Things You Can Do to Firm up Your Skin
Fasting is a great way to reduce loose skin, but it’s not your only option. The following tactics may also work, especially combined with the autophagic benefits you get from fasting.
Laser Therapy
Intense pulsed light therapy and non-ablative fractional lasers, two forms of laser therapy, may be able to activate collagen production, found a Lasers in Surgery and Medicine study published in 2019. Further, your skin tone could improve too.
Consume Cocoa Flavanols
Between your fasting windows, you might want to incorporate more dark chocolate into your diet. Yes, seriously! In a 2016 study from the Journal of Nutrition, a group of Korean women between 43 and 86 years old consumed dark chocolate by drinking or eating it for 12 weeks.
A dark chocolate compound known as cocoa flavanols was found to lessen the appearance of wrinkles in the face while boosting the elasticity of the skin.
If your dark chocolate doesn’t contain at least 320 milligrams of the stuff, then it might not have enough cocoa flavanols to really make a difference in the condition of your skin.
Take Witch Hazel Extract
You may already use skincare products with witch hazel in them, but the Hamamelis virginiana extract taken on its own may help especially well with skin tightness. So says a 2018 report from the Journal of Cosmetic Science.
This report found that witch hazel extract can boost skin firmness, lessen the appearance of wrinkles, and alleviate elastosis, a condition that reduces elastin over time.
Augment with Collagen Supplements
You can also restore what collagen your body has lost through supplements. In 2018, a journal called Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology did a study that involved adult females taking collagen supplements. The study lasted for 12 weeks, and all the women received Macqui berry or Aristotelia chilensis extract. The participants diluted the berry in water and then drank the fruit as a tea every day.
By the time the study wrapped, the participants had firmer and more elastic skin, the journal found.
Conclusion
Collagen and elastin are two proteins produced in the dermal layer that make our skin supple, bouncy, and young-looking. Aging, disease, weight loss, pregnancy, and environmental conditions can cause the skin to prematurely age, but fasting may be able to help.
Fasting accelerates autophagy, or cell recycling, which can push out old fibroblasts that hinder the production of collagen. This ensures your body produces enough collagen to prevent further skin loosening and possibly improve your skin’s current look.