Surprising Facial Fat Loss

[Builderman]

My weight has gone up and down for as long as I can remember. At one point, I even dropped 60 pounds without medication. Since starting Reta in the first week of June, I've shed 27 pounds. What caught me off guard the most is how much fat I've clearly lost from my face.

In every previous weight-loss experience, my face was the very last area to reflect any change. With Reta, though, it's the first spot to show results, and that has been a welcome surprise.

I'm just wondering whether anyone else has had a similar experience.

 

[Mochizuki0124]

Builderman said:

My weight has gone up and down for as long as I can remember. At one point, I even dropped 60 pounds without medication. Since starting Reta in the first week of June, I've shed 27 pounds. What caught me off guard the most is how much fat I've clearly lost from my face.

In every previous weight-loss experience, my face was the very last area to reflect any change. With Reta, though, it's the first spot to show results, and that has been a welcome surprise.

I'm just wondering whether anyone else has had a similar experience.

Research does exist on this topic, but in general, men tend to put on pounds starting at the lower body and moving upward, while shedding them in the reverse direction—from the top down. It works somewhat like the inverse of FIFO. Naturally, you said that for you it used to happen the opposite way, but as a rule the face tends to shed fat earliest, which explains why a person can appear to have dropped a great deal of weight once their jawline emerges, even though they remain soft beneath their shirt.

 

[lessthanhalf]

A whole bunch of research exists on this topic, though I can't be much help since I haven't gone through them myself — I just know they're out there, so searching it up could be worthwhile. "Ozempic face" is what people typically call it; fat loss patterns and where it comes off with glp medications don't necessarily match what happens when you lose weight through dieting, and given how many studies there are, it's clearly a fairly widespread thing. For me, my face has shed more fat than dieting ever managed, even when I was at basically the same weight I'd reached 10 years back.

27 lbs over ?6 weeks is pretty fast. If we figure around 7 lbs of that is water, then 20/6 works out to 3.3/week — not a huge concern. Gallstones are the big danger with losing weight too quickly, and they can hit as many as 10% of people if the loss is rapid enough, plus there's the obvious feeling terrible, exhausted and lightheaded. Still, if that pace feels okay to you, then congrats and best of luck.

 

[Builderman]

lessthanhalf said:

A whole bunch of research exists on this topic, though I can't be much help since I haven't gone through them myself — I just know they're out there, so searching it up could be worthwhile. "Ozempic face" is what people typically call it; fat loss patterns and where it comes off with glp medications don't necessarily match what happens when you lose weight through dieting, and given how many studies there are, it's clearly a fairly widespread thing. For me, my face has shed more fat than dieting ever managed, even when I was at basically the same weight I'd reached 10 years back.

27 lbs over ?6 weeks is pretty fast. If we figure around 7 lbs of that is water, then 20/6 works out to 3.3/week — not a huge concern. Gallstones are the big danger with losing weight too quickly, and they can hit as many as 10% of people if the loss is rapid enough, plus there's the obvious feeling terrible, exhausted and lightheaded. Still, if that pace feels okay to you, then congrats and best of luck.

Honestly, I've been feeling really good. That said, during the past week I made a conscious choice to reduce how quickly I'm shedding pounds, so I raised my calorie intake compared to earlier weeks. The result was a loss of just about 2 pounds over that week. To me, that pace seems sustainable over the long haul, and my hope is that it also lowers my risk of ending up with gallstones.