Dermatologist Shereene Idriss explains why rapid weight loss ages your face. As you lose weight, skin doesn't tighten fast enough, especially with GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Gradual loss with strength training and protein preserves the facial structure that keeps you looking young.
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Did you know that losing the exact same 10 pounds at 25 makes you look younger, but at 45 it makes you look old AF? Same body, same 10 pounds, completely different face. You're not imagining it, and I'm going to explain to you why medically that happens, plus 2 mistakes that I would avoid at all costs if I were trying to lose weight without aging my face.
And here's the part that no one tells you about, but weight loss itself is not what's aging you. It is simply revealing the natural aging process happening underneath the surface of your skin. And in order to better get this, let's explain your face as if your face were a couch. The frame is your bone structure. The cushions, that's your fat and your muscle. And the fabric stretched across your couch, that's your skin. Now watch what happens as we age. That frame of the couch starts to get smaller and narrower, and our bone structures get hollower, and we look like thumbs. Eventually, the cushions start to deflate, and all of that fat and those muscles start to shift downwards, leaving us looking jowlier and less defined. And last, that beautiful top fabric on your couch eventually gets worn out by UV exposure, love, and life, and so does our skin. It starts to look looser and flabbier. So when you lose weight, you're not just shrinking your waistline, you're taking the volume out of those cushions, leaving your face looking deflated. This brings me to the first mistake, which makes it super easy for Ozempic to fall into. You do not want to try to lose weight as fast as humanly possible, because if you do, you will not give give your skin the chance to adapt to that weight loss and to shrink around your face, and you will be left with a flabby mess. So it's about consistency over intensity, because after a certain age, it is your face or your ass. Like, number 2, and this is the one that most people ignore— most focus just on the number on the scale, and they completely forget to preserve muscle. Now, muscle is one of those few things that you can preserve as you get older, but as you are losing weight You are not discriminating between fat and muscle, especially after a certain point on a GLP-1 like Ozempic. So you want to make sure that you're preserving your muscle mass by eating adequate protein and strength training, which, bonus, is going to help hold on to your bone density, which is the framework of your face. Remember the analogy of the couch? The structure holding the couch? That's your bone density. So will losing weight age your face? Not necessarily, but it will reveal that aging process that is happening underneath the surface of your face at a much faster pace. And the goal with weight loss is not just to lose fat, it is to lose fat while preserving muscle mass and keeping the structural integrity of your face aligned and supported and your bone density strong. So you, my friend, can have a great ass and a great face. Let me know if you have questions below.
