If you've been obese for a while, you might be used to your fat being relatively hard - pushing out the skin. As you loose weight, that fat will become squishy / loose.

Your fat cells in your body are never destroyed. They are like little water balloons beneath the surface of your skin. When they're full, they bulge out, making your skin taut. As the fat cells empty out, they deflate. Naturally, for a while at least, your skin relaxes. The fat is now "squishy" beneath the skin. As your body regains its equilibrium, the skin tightens back up over the new quantity of fat in your body, and your body feels more tight again.

Part of this retightening effect will depend on your age and skin tone. If you are elderly with loose skin, you're probably dealing with a reduction in collagen and elastin. This causes your skin to become more "droopy" and relaxed. This might mean if you lost substantial weight in your eighties - let's say a hundred pounds - that the skin at your stomach wouldn't "spring back" into place as it might have when you were twenty.

So this is a normal, natural part of weight loss. First the fat cells will empty out, meaning they are half-full water balloons jiggling around in a space that used to be jammed with quite-full water balloons. Then the skin reduces in, fitting more neatly around the new, smaller set of items it is enclosing. Hopefully this process repeats until you are the weight you seek!

Note that some people feel that squishy fat is associated with the "Whoosh" effect of losing a few pounds in a single day. They're not related. Squishy fat is one stage of the body's tightening-up process as it reconforms to your new body shape. The "whoosh" effect is due to glycogen in the liver and muscles releasing.

Glycogen, Water, and the Whoosh Weight Loss Effect




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