Finding a perfect weight loss plan that syncs with your lifestyle is a step away from achieving a great look. Now you are ready to shed all those extra pounds that you’ve been carrying for years. Just one problem- as you are losing weight you may notice that your skin isn’t bouncing back. The same surface area that covers your new, smaller self now lags on your belly and arms. Your face can even seem a bit slack.

Why our skin does this?

The issue of loose skin starts when you start to gain weight. The skin is the largest human organ that is comprised of protein elastin and collagen. The protein elastin and collagen give your skin its firm strength and elasticity. It helps your skin stretch when you gain weight without tearing it. Weight gain will cause your skin to over inflate like a balloon.

Your skin, as an elastic organ, stretches and contracts to form with the shape of your body. Your skin surface area increases in size to accommodate the new fat tissue deposits below your skin. However, over time and with increased weight gain, the protein fibers become weak and damaged. Your skin may not be able to snap back to its original smaller shape when you lose weight too quickly due to the weakening of the fiber. This leads to saggy, excess skin during weight loss. However, the amount of saggy skin that remains after a diet varies by individual. Not all dieters’ skin sags after losing weight. It depends on several factors such as age, genetics, total muscle mass and total weight gain. The more weight you’ll lose the more difficult it would be for your skin to snap back to its original smaller shape. Some dieters have a massive amount of loose skin that only surgery can fix.

Let’s take a look at the anatomy of the skin and its surrounding area…

There are two layers of tissue underneath the skin: The adipose tissue (fat) and the muscle tissue directly beneath the fat tissue. Both the fat and the muscle tissue push up against the adjacent layer of the skin making it relatively taut before you start to lose weight. When you lose weight and burn those fat cells, your fat cell shrinks but your skin surface area still retains. The space under the larger surface area now lags and may seem to sag because there is less tissue underneath your skin taking up space. Your skin now sags.

Ways to tighten loose skin after the HCG Diet

The first rule is not to panic. Having loose skin after losing weight happens to anyone and is normal. Having a sagging skin after losing weight, in fact, is one of the most common problems that almost all dieters experience. Your skin is a living organ so keep in mind that your skin will slowly return to a shape that fits your body. However, that process may seem to take too long, at least a year or two. Here are steps that you can do to make your skin tighten more quickly:

• Lose weight at a healthy pace

Losing weight at a healthy pace allows you to retain more muscle tissue while keeping your skin tight since your muscle acts as a supportive tissue that holds your skin onto your body.

• Choose a healthy weight loss program like the HCG Diet

The HCG Diet is one of the BEST diets and weight loss program available. One of the biggest factors of the HCG hormone is its effect on the skin.

The hormone helps promote your skin elasticity so it would be able to stretch and quickly snap back to its normal state just like pregnant women do after giving birth. The HCG diet can provide a great contour to your body if done correctly. Most dieters who took their plunge into this diet have dropped their weight and seemed to be shrinking everywhere including their skin no matter how much weight they have to lose. You can only achieve a dramatic weight loss with an amazing body contouring through the HCG Diet.

• Build muscle mass

Muscle tissue is the key to minimize loose skin. If a muscle mass is lost in addition to fats due to the wrong weight loss program, it creates an even larger void under your skin surface. There are several ways that you can do to help increase your muscle tissue after losing weight with the HCG Diet.

• Strength training exercise– helps decrease the appearance of loose skin; allows you to maintain more muscle mass; build muscle if you’re new to strength training
• Hypertrophy training or muscle building training– increases the overall volume and size of the muscle; allows the skin to cling tighter to the underlying tissue (toned and tight muscle helps give your skin a strong foundation to rest on)
• Keeping your protein intake high– protein helps build muscles; protein prevents the loss of lean mass during the very low calorie diet of HCG
  

• Tighten up with exercise

Exercise is prohibited during the HCG Diet except for those light ones. However, when your protocol complete, mild training and toning can be very beneficial in improving muscle tone. Toned and firm muscle can improve the texture and the look of your skin as well as preventing it from sagging.

• Stay hydrated

Healthy skin is hydrated skin. So see to it that you are drinking enough amount of water during and after dieting to keep your skin supple, soft and to promote skin elasticity.

• Have a healthy balanced diet

Your skin needs elastin and collagen to keep it firm, plump and improve its elasticity. To do this you need to protein-rich foods such as milk, cottage cheese, beans, tofu, nuts, seeds and fish. These foods contain elastin and collagen forming component and oils to make your skin healthy. Fresh fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, will not only make you healthy in the inside but will also keep your skin healthy on the outside.

The maintenance phase of the HCG Diet can be a little bit challenging due to restrictions on carbohydrates, starches and sugar especially for those with a sweet tooth.

You have restricted all forms of sugar and starches and you will only focus on eating mostly fruits, vegetables lean proteins and whole grains. However, you are not forbidden to cut back on your calorie because in this phase you are setting a new weight set point. You are getting your body ready in maintaining its normal weight.

Worry no more because the HCG Diet is not that strict to the extent that you can’t enjoy some sweets. With little creativity, you can have your slice of cake and eat them too!

No Crust Pumpkin Pie

A tasty-licious pumpkin pie that you can make for fifteen minutes simply by combining all the ingredients in a microwave-safe pie plate:

Ingredients

1¾ cup canned pumpkin

2 tsp. of cinnamon

1 cup fat-free milk

2 eggs

½ tsp. of nutmeg

½ tsp. of ginger

1 cup no-calorie sweetener (measures like sugar)

Instructions

1. Beat all the ingredients with a whisk then microwave on high uncovered for 8 to 10 minutes. Check halfway through cooking.
2. Remove the pie from the microwave oven when the outside edges start to pull away from the pie plate.
3. . Set it aside for 5 minutes to finish cooking.
4. Cut the pie into pieces and serve warm or cold.

No Crust Pumpkin Pie has just 62 calories per serving. It has 4.3 grams of sugar, 7 grams of carbohydrates, and three grams of fiber and one gram of fat.

Strawberries and Chocolate

Give your sweet tooth a delicious concoction of chocolate and strawberries.

Ingredients

Strawberries

1½ tbsp. of cocoa powder

1 tbsp. virgin coconut oil

Stevia to taste

Almond, peppermint extract or vanilla (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat 1 tbsp. of virgin coconut oil in a pan over low heat.
2. Add 1½ tbsp. of cocoa powder. Gently stir to combine.
3. Add stevia to taste your liking.
4. Dip the strawberries into the mixture. Lay them after on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.
5. Refrigerate or freeze.
6. You can add some chopped nuts, almonds or flavor extract like peppermint or vanilla to the chocolate to spice things up a bit.

Bread-Crusted Chicken Breast

Ingredients

1-part Parmesan cheese

1-part almond meal

Your favorite herbs or spices

Chicken breasts

Finely-chopped walnuts, peanuts, or almonds, optional

Instructions

1. Combine one-part Parmesan cheese and one-part almond meal.
2. Coat the chicken breasts in the mixture.
3. Fry or bake as usual.
4. Add your favorite herbs and spices to the mix if you want to get creative. You may also add some finely-chopped peanuts, walnuts, or almonds.

 

You probably tried a diet or two in your life. Perhaps a diet that you’ve heard from your workplace, relatives and even neighbor. Perhaps, you always kept a paper and pen with you to count the calories in all the foods you are eating.  You have succeeded, you’ve lost a little or maybe a lot but the problem starts to arise once you go back to your normal eating habits. Gaining the weight back after all those efforts is such a curse for most diet.

How a Normal Diet Works

According to Dr. Simeons, the original creator of the HCG Diet and author of Pounds and Inches: A New Approach to Obesity, when an obese person goes into a diet, the body burns first the normal fats before burning the structural fats. However, the abnormal body fat will only burn if the normal and the structural fats are already depleted. During this time, dieters will go back to normal eating due to hunger, weakness and fatigue resulting from the restrictive diet.

How HCG Diet Differs From Any Other Diets

The HCG Diet is one of the most popular diets in recent years. The HCG Diet, which uses the Human Chorionic Gonadotropin hormone, enables the body to lose the abnormal fats without compromising the normal and structural fats. The hormone unlocks the fat reserve so the body can use it as a source of fuel during the diet phases. Even though with only 500 calories intake a day, the body is consuming up to 4000 calories in abnormal fat. This makes hunger issues during the diet, not a big deal. If in case you become hungry, try to look back in your journal to see what went wrong. Maybe you ate or used something out of the protocol or maybe you are not using the right hcg injections dosage.

The HCG Diet is proven to work for the majority of dieters. Most dieters who complete a round of the HCG Diet without cheating and without altering the protocol up loses a significant amount of weight. Although it’s one of the diets with lots and lots of restriction, it’s by far one of the most effective diets.

The HCG Diet is faster than any other diet. You’ll start to see results real quick. You can lose up to 15 pounds in just three weeks or even up to 40 pounds in six weeks. Other diets won’t give you the same results. Once the diet is over, you can transition to a healthy eating lifestyle. From there, you can start improving your eating habits and avoid all those foods that are making you big.

 

Your body may undergo amazing changes after doing the HCG Diet. You will lose a great deal of weight. You will notice inches off your body and your appetite will also change.

After the HCG Diet

• Healthy weight loss reductions. HCG burns excess fat from all over your body. You will shed fats from your hips, thigh, waist, arms, neck and butt. However, the weight that you are going to lose will not be the same for all dieters. How much weight you lost depends on factors like:
  1.  How overweight you are at the beginning of the diet.
  2. The states of your hormone like the estrogen and the progesterone.
  3. Your age
  4. If you have some type of adrenal or thyroid problems.

If you do not belong to the perfect picture of health, you will lose weight but not as fast as other healthy dieters. No matter what your weight loss result be (whether the number is big or not), be happy with the results. Your body is unique. You cannot force your body to work the way someone else’s body does.

• Change in appetite. You will experience a decrease in your appetite after doing the HCG Diet. A small amount of food seems to be sufficient enough to keep you going. The HCG diet is simply not just a diet that will allow you to lose weight. While you were doing the diet, you are following a very strict calorie intake. After the diet, you slowly introduce new foods back. These are all part of the process in training and preparing your body to eat the right kind and the right amount of foods. Your body also becomes more sensitive to different types of food.

• Increased energy level. Once weight loss has occurred, you will notice an increase in your energy level. The HCG in your body will help release adipose fat and converts it into valuable energy.

• Better endurance. As you shed weight, you are able to exercise more easily and you breathe more freely. You will be able to work out harder and longer using your reserve energy.

• Lower cholesterol. HCG together with low calorie intake helps reduces blood cholesterol level thus reducing also your chances of having heart-related problems.

• Look good and feel great.  You will look and feel great once you see amazing results. Once you are on the right path to health and wellness, you can continue with a healthy diet to maintain your weight loss.