in this video I'm going to share some tips on how to deal with loose skin how to tighten up your skin and to do it naturally so you could hopefully avoid some of the surgeries they do or more invasive type treatments now what exactly is loose skin well your skin has been overstretched to the point where it has not come back to its original form it's like taking this rubber band and stretching it out but the rubber band doesn't come back to the original form so what is going on with that well there's two main
problems a problem with your collagen and also a deeper fiber called elastin which is supposed to give the collagen some elasticity and so the question people have is should I just start eating more collagen that help typically it is not a lack of the consumption of collagen that causes this problem usually this problem comes from getting older losing a lot of weight can produce loose skin excessive sun exposure going through pregnancy smoking has a risk factor being a diabetic can give you a lot of loose skin or even going through a lot of stress can
create a lot of breakdown of these collagen fibers so let's just dive into all the different component parts and the things that you can start doing immediately let's start with hormones okay you have two different sets of hormones you have those hormones that build up your collagen and elastin and then you have hormones that break down the collagen and connective tissue within the skin and the main hormone that does that is cortisol and cortisol is an a catabolic hormone which means it breaks tissue down it breaks proteins down and collagen and elastin is protein so
of course you have the stress component that activates cortisol on the flip side you have hormones that are do the opposite they're anabolic hormones like growth hormone which is also everything about anti aging and burning fat but growth hormone has a very specific purpose into helping proteins grow muscle collagen connective tissue Etc and there's three main ways to spike growth hormone number one high intensity exercise training with specific emphasis on intensity the more intense you do this exercise the more stimulation of growth hormone you're going to create so what would that be well sprinting hopping
on some type of elevation that's called Plyometrics spin bike anything that involves intensity but the key is keeping it short so you don't over train thus high intensity interval training right so you're not going to do a sustained high intensity you're going to do short bursts of high intensity with lots of rest in between so you might rest for two three four five days making sure that inflammation and that recovery is happening also what inhibits growth hormone is glucose so this is why you need to be on a low carb ketogenic diet now the other
important factor with growth hormone is getting enough sleep which also crosses over to helping you with the stress so if you're trying to build up growth hormone and you're not sleeping it's going to be a huge problem if you have a problem sleeping you probably need to watch some of the videos I have down below regarding that one topic but in this video I'm just going to cover all the different points and then you can see what you need to focus on later this next thing is very interesting there's another anabolic hormone anabolic meaning building
up proteins and that is insulin insulin induces or triggers new elastin remember that type of connective tissue that allows the elasticity in your skin to keep it like a rubber band well insulin triggers that which is fascinating because you would think just the opposite because you're probably thinking diabetics well in Diabetes Type 2 you have a situation where you have insulin resistance you have a lot of insulin going through the body but not in the cells because the cells are resistant yet the other parts of the body might have too much insulin with diabetes and
insulin resistance which is the majority of the population you have a situation where you have an insulin deficiency which could definitely create a problem with insulin so how do you correct this and get more insulin you basically fix insulin resistance and you do that with the ketogenic diet intermittent fasting and you also do that with exercise now the other problem with insulin resistance is it blocks your ability to get fuel get nutrients and receive amino acids so the very building blocks of protein that you need to build for collagen and elastin are going to be
inhibited when you have insulin resistance so ultimately part of this plan has to include fixing insulin resistance to be able to then pull in these amino acids and also prevent atrophy which is a loss of muscle all right the next thing I'm going to talk about is related to collagen and elastin there are cofactors there are nutrients that help the development of collagen and help the creation of elastin and the most important cofactor okay is vitamin A and I'm not talking about what most people think about vitamin A which is beta-carotene which is the precursor
I'm talking about the active form of vitamin A retinol which only comes from animal products right like egg yolks cod liver oil fatty fish butter versus spinach which has the beta-carotene but that has to convert into the active form and a lot of people don't convert very much of it Unfortunately they they change the definition of vitamin A to mean both the precursor beta-carotene as well as retinol but they're two completely different molecules so vitamin A is a really important cofactor for building up collagen in fact all of the fat soluble vitamins are really important
in your skin and so this is why going on a low-fat diet is very bad for skin Health here's a diet that I came across while I was in practice people were doing this diet called Ideal Protein right well was it ketogenic yes it was low carb but it was also low fat typically the healthy version of the ketogenic diet is not low fat okay it's higher amounts of fat in moderate protein in this diet it was low fat low carb and the protein that was recommended were in these packaged foods like soy protein isolates
so you have this lean process protein that they were giving these people and what I noticed a person in this program they just look older with their skin the skin look very unhealthy they look like it aged it was dried out it looked wrinkly and so did the hair so you can tell a lot about what's going on internally by just looking on the external part of someone's body and the more low fat you do the less fat cyber vitamins you're going to have and your skin needs a good amount of fat the next cofactor
that's really important in collagen and elastin especially is iron but not your regular iron the heme iron which is the more bioavailable iron which is in red meat it's in shellfish it's not in vegetables that's the non-heme form of iron you need the bile available form so just the fact that I mentioned these two cofactors tells us what kind of diet you need you need to do animal products that are not lean okay that are a bit more fatty to get both the retinol as well as the iron that you need so if someone is
going to do a plant-based vegan diet they better figure out how they're going to get these key nutrients I'm not saying it's not possible you can do it it's just a lot more difficult unfortunately a lot of people do plant-based end up eating too many grains to omega-6 fatty acids which just filled their body up with inflammation and worsen the situation all right the last cofactor is vitamin C and I want to mention something about vitamin C vitamin C well you probably heard that it's connected to your your collagen but most people are taking the
synthetic version of vitamin C it's not the type that comes from nature so the best way to get your vitamin C is to make sure that you're either doing a food-based concentrate or you're doing foods that are high in vitamin C and one of the best foods for that would be sauerkraut sauerkraut hands down has more vitamin C than any other food it's like 10 times the amount of vitamin C that our bodies require but but you can also get vitamin C from peppers from berries things like that the next topic is exercise is a
necessity but make sure you don't over train when you exercise you're creating new vascularization it's called neovascularization and you're getting new blood vessels where you're carrying more nutrients and more circulation which is what you want to do you're also going to build up more muscles just underneath the skin to fill in this Gap that occurred from the overstretching of the skin so it will fill up the space and give you a nice appearance that there's less loose skin and of course exercise will stimulate the growth hormone if you do the high intensity animal training and
then there's prolonged fasting okay prolonged fasting gives you what's called an epigenetic effect on skin because you're putting your body into an autophagy state where it's recycling old damaged proteins and let me explain old damaged proteins when someone has insulin resistance or they're a pre-diabetic or a diabetic they have a lot of glycation going on what is glycation well it's a situation where you're eating too many carbs and this protein is combining with the sugar to make the protein unavailable so a diabetic has a lot of glycated proteins and that's how they measure it in
A1C for example is a situation when you have this average blood sugars for three months so we have this interaction between a certain amount of sugar with your protein in your blood and it's creating damage okay and you can measure that with this test and you can see how much or how little you have of this glycated effect but that damage or glycation effect also happens in the eyes and the kidney and the arteries and the brain and the nerves all over but it also happens in the Skin So if you have glycation going on
in the collagen and elastin it's going to make that tissue unavailable and it's not going to stretch and be elastic anymore it also happens in your arteries too which can lead to high blood pressure so the cool thing is that you can get rid of some of this glycation by doing prolonged fasting like three days or longer when you do that your body starts to clean up this damaged protein and recycle it and rejuvenate it so that's a really cool thing that you can do and the next thing is part of the last two things
I mentioned which is basically you're creating a a hermetic effect which you're adding a little bit of stress to the body to cause the body to adapt and become stronger so prolonged fasting gives you hermetic effect so does exercise but there's other things too like heat in cold putting ice cold water on your face and then putting warm or hot water in your face back and forth can create this harmonic effect and there's some interesting research on that which I'll put down below creating this hermetic stimulation of your skin cells and causing the tissue to
tone but again that's for loose skin on the face but what if it's on the rest of the body well then you're going to have to do it for the rest of the body now I want to mention something about Sun for a second because too much sun is very bad on your skin and what I mean by that is if you expose to the Sun to the point of burn but a little bit of sun which is the point before you burn is a good thing on a regular basis because it creates a hermetic
effect that can actually stimulate healthy skin but that also depends on how much melanin you have the color of your skin and if you're very very fair complected you're going to burn very easily so that is the other variable you have to watch out for so I covered a lot of different things that you can do to improve your skin right now pick one or two of them and just get started and keep working on it over time but out of all these points I think the most important one for your skin would be prolonged
fasting now I have a video on this which I also include an additional thing you should do if you have loose skin if you're doing prolonged fasting and that is taking certain amino acids so that way you're not going to really break the effectiveness of your fast because you're not eating like protein per se you're eating the building blocks which is very low calorie so you can get the benefits of fasting but also get the benefits of the amino acids that can help build this connective tissue and elastin and I put that video up right
here check it out
