What is Cellulite

For women, cellulite as adults is so common, effecting almost 80-90% of women, that it’s almost normal, unattractive, the bane of bathing suit season and an ever present part of life particularly in your thighs and buttocks. But while cellulite is certainly related to fat, it’s not just about fat and fat is not the primary cause of cellulite. So consider these circumstances, number one, no matter how fat men get, they don’t have cellulite, no matter how obese children are, they don’t have cellulite and cellulite can occur in thin women. Now, it’s certainly true that if you have cellulite and you gain more weight and put on more fat that the cellulite will look worse and the globules or lobules of cellulite will be larger but again fat is not the primary cause of cellulite. So why do women have cellulite? Under the skin, connecting the bottom layer of the dermis to the muscles underneath all the way down here we have something called fibrous septae, these are fibers that run vertically in women and they run from the bottom of the skin to the fat and they separate lobules of fat so they’re called fibrous septae and they are what anchors everything together and as a matter of fact because these fibrous septae surround the lobules of fat and anchor everything that’s why if I try to pick up my skin this is as far as I can pick it up, it’s being held down by those fibrous septae. Now think about that lobule of fat as the big top circus tent. So, the circus tent is sitting on the ground and the ground is the muscle. The top of this tent, the round top of the tent, is really your skin and the poles or the ropes inside the tent holding the top of the tent down to the ground, those are your fibrous septae; those are the poles. Now, if you think about putting each of these tents as a fat lobule, think about putting several of them together, if we put several of them together we just can’t get them to touch each other because they’re round, that’s why you have the spaces between them and that’s where the fibrous septae are. Think about putting fifty of them together. So in the diagram that I showed you of the skin before where you have this fat layer, with these lobules on top, think if were looking down at the skin, what will we see? We’ll see something that looks like this, these round lobules which are blue and the red in-between them are the fibrous septae that are holding the sides of the lobules but the fat is pushing up creating a round tented like appearance, that’s what your cellulite is and that round appearance then gets transmitted through the overlying skin and you see the lobules. So why doesn’t this happen in men? Well in men the tents are built differently so instead of the septae that are holding the top of the tent to the bottom of the ground, being vertical like this, they’re on an angle as if they got blown over in the winds of a hurricane and as a result of being on an angle, It flattens them out, it creates shapes that can move closer together and the tops become flatter. Combine that with the fact that men have less fat in their skin and that men’s upper layer of skin is much thicker and it flattens out the appearance so you don’t see the appearance of these lobules in men’s skin. This is just another example of how unfair life can be and that men are from Mars, women are from Venus and in another episode I’ll tell you how you can treat cellulite.