Is cellulite normal? Is cellulite unhealthy?
Is cellulite normal? Are excessive fat accumulation, inflammation and fibrosis normal?
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Does cellulite exist? Isn’t cellulite beautiful? Is cellulite “normal”?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so cellulite is normal, right?
We live in a free world
If most women have cellulite today, isn't cellulite normal?
If all women have pre-cellulite, will everyone develop cellulite in the end?
If all women have pre-cellulite, isn't cellulite normal?
So, no, cellulite is just NOT normal
Cellulite: an aesthetic disease of the Western world today
Is cellulite an invented disease?
“Cellulite does not exist”
Back to healthy and natural
What if I already do my best in terms of healthy lifestyle?
Check our professional consultancy in radiofrequency, ultrasound cavitation, cellulite and skin tightening
Does cellulite exist? Isn’t cellulite beautiful? Is cellulite “normal”?
This is a continuation of our two articles about the nature of cellulite: “What is cellulite” and “Pre-cellulite”.
On this article we will look into whether:
“Cellulite is absolutely normal”
“Cellulite is beautiful”
“Cellulite is a made-up condition and it doesn’t exist”
“Love your cellulite”,
…as some people say.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so cellulite is normal, right?
First off, the easy stuff: “Isn’t cellulite beautiful and shouldn’t we embrace it”?
Sure, on a personal level if someone thinks that their cellulite is beautiful and they want to maintain it or - why not - even increase it in their body, because “it’s beautiful”, it’s their choice.
Likewise on a professional level, if one owns and manages a business and wants to use cellulite pictures in promotional material for their business (e.g fashion brand), it’s their call. Some members of the public will love it and some will not. Let the people decide what they like and what they don’t.
It’s a free world. Plus beauty is subjective. So if one thinks that their or someone else’s cellulite is beautiful, then for them it indeed is, and the discussion stops there. No one is to tell someone what is beautiful and what is not.
Same with overweight. If one believes that either skinny, slim, “average”, curvy, overweight or obese is beautiful, then so be it. It’s a free world and everyone has the right to their own opinions, likes and dislikes.
We live in a free world
And vice versa, if a woman thinks that cellulite is unsightly and/or unhealthy and she wants to do something positive about it, for example:
Eat healthily - and improve their health in the process
Exercise - and improve their health in the process
Walk more - and improve their health in the process
Drink less alcohol - and improve their health in the process
Stop smoking - and improve their health in the process
Quit chemical contraception - and avoid hormone side-effects in the process
Take a food supplement - and help improve their health in the process
Perhaps have a cellulite treatment - and improve local leg health in the process
Generally take good care of their body, which will lead to lower levels of water retention, skin inflammation and cellulite (as well as whole body inflammation)
…then no self-appointed woman saviour / armchair campaigner has the right to shame or bully them into complying with their politically correct edicts.
Live and let live.
If most women have cellulite today, isn't cellulite normal?
If 90% of women will develop cellulite at some point in their lives, shouldn’t we say that “cellulite is normal” and we should do nothing about it, because most women suffer from it, anyway?
That’s an arguable point to make. However, that point erroneously implies that:
Common = Normal
With this logic we could say that plastics in the ocean are normal, because they are very common these days (found literally everywhere on the planet, from your tap water and even the rainwater that falls in London, all the way to the Mariana Trench, the Himalayas and Antarctica). So we might as well keep trashing the planet with plastic junk, because microplastics in water are so common now, they are “normal”.
Or we could say that cancer, which affects one in two people today and is “common”, is “normal”. So let’s all trash our bodies by eating junk, smoking like chimneys, avoiding any exercise, polluting the planet and consuming all sorts of chemicals.
Or that heart disease and stroke, the number one killers in the Western world today, and therefore very commonplace, are “normal”. So let’s keep eating junk, drink, smoke and avoid exercise.
(More on the arrogance/ignorance of today’s Western world below.)
All those things may seem very common at this set point in time, but they are definitely not normal. They are just so common today that some people got so used to them, they think that they are “normal”.
If you lived during the Hundred Years' War you would think that war is normal, as this is all you would know during your entire life. But no one really says war is “normal” or good.
Obviously this logic of “Common = Normal” is faulty. Common is not equal to normal. It is just common at one specific point in time, not always.
If all women have pre-cellulite, will everyone develop cellulite in the end?
As we have discussed in a previous article, all women (and men) have a "pre-cellulite" collagen structure on the superficial connective tissue found within their hypodermis (deepest part of the skin).
In the absence of hypodermal water retention, excessive fat accumulation and the physiological changes that follow such adipose tissue enlargement (inflammation, connective tissue distention, connective tissue breakdown, oedema, fibrosis), this structure is either not at all visible or just barely visible with a pinch test. That's pre-cellulite. This is natural and normal.
As we mentioned above, men also have this structure, which is more pronounced if men are exposed to estrogenic factors, such as:
Xenoestrogens from plastics and food additives
Estrogen produced in their fat cells (yes, fat cells do produce estrogen)
Or even sex change hormones, as in female to make transgender individuals
With time and an unhealthy lifestyle, this structure can progress to become cellulite proper. In most men, however, this structure is minimal and also hidden underneath hair, so it is aesthetically irrelevant.
So cellulite will indeed develop from pre-cellulite, in most women and in a small minority of men, but ONLY if an unhealthy diet / exercise / overall lifestyle is followed.
If all women have pre-cellulite, isn't cellulite normal?
In summary, although pre-cellulite is universal in women and absolutely normal, cellulite is a different thing.
Pre-cellulite does not necessarily need to end up in cellulite and hundreds of millions of women in parts of the developing world unaffected by westernisation and who follow a natural, healthy, active lifestyle, have zero cellulite throughout their life and are living proof of this.
Now THIS is what I call normal. Normal is something that spontaneously occurs in nature and/or something that is healthy.
Would one call a fat, unfit, diabetic, arthritic mountain lion or tiger normal?
Has the Western world completely lost it? Does everything need to be relative, even health?
Would one call a bird, so fat and unfit, it cannot fly, normal? Would one even call an obese cat living in a flat in London normal? That’s not normal, it’s animal abuse.
Unhealthy or unnatural is not normal. It is the opposite of normal.
Going back to our subject, cellulite does not spontaneously occur in healthy living populations around the world and it is not healthy.
In fact, inflammation, oedema and fibrosis were found in all cellulite tissue studies, so much so that the definition of cellulite is ‘Oedematous FibroFclerotic Panniculitis’ (OFSP), i.e. inflammation of the fat tissue accompanied by fibrosis and water retention.
Oedema, inflammation, free radical damage, hypoxia, glycation and fibrosis are definitely not the healthiest physical changes one can have in their body.
So, no, cellulite is just NOT normal
Cellulite, an aesthetic condition, just like many other civilisation conditions and diseases, is the result of humans perverting nature and natural living in every way possible:
Stuck on a chair for thousands of hours every year
Smoking several pounds of cigarettes every year
Drinking gallons of alcohol every year
Eating bucketloads of sugar and saturated / fried / hydrogenated fat every year
Exposing their body to horrible artificial estrogens, BPA and other hormonal disruptors, including micro-plastics and hormonal contraception
This is why people get cellulite (and water retention and diabetes and obesity and cardiovascular disease and skin ageing and cancer and Alzheimer’s and plenty of other so-called civilisation diseases) and all this is NOT normal.
Clearly, pre-cellulite, a natural body structure, and cellulite, the unhealthy, deformed state of that structure, are not one and the same thing at all.
Pre-cellulite is not cellulite and so it does not make cellulite normal.
Cellulite: an aesthetic disease of the Western world today
A few paragraphs above we asked that “If most of women have cellulite today, shouldn’t we consider it normal”?
However, after the above discussion, it becomes clear that it would be more helpful if we rephrased that question to make it a bit more accurate:
"If most women in the westernised countries have cellulite today, shouldn't we consider it normal in westernised women, in today’s world?
Now things are becoming clearer.
We, in the Western world today, are NOT the whole world and we do not represent the whole of humanity and human history, so we should not be so arrogant as to project our ills to the whole of humanity and to the whole of history and call them “normal”.
As mentioned above, there are billions of women worldwide who do not follow our artificial, unhealthy lifestyle and who do not suffer from cellulite at all, regardless of age and genetics. This is true in many parts of the developing world where people follow a traditional diet and are physically very active, as everyone should be.
In fact, the idea that cellulite is “normal”, including billions of women in the developing world who don’t even know what it cellulite is, thank you very much, smacks of Western arrogance, typical in our narrow-minded culture.
Furthermore, cellulite has been minimal or non-existent for the most part of history in the Western world itself, only "becoming a thing" around the mid-twentieth century, with the advent of:
Sedentary occupations
A crazy increase in sugar consumption
Smoking and drinking adoption by a large percentage of women
Consumption of hydrogenated fats
The use of hormonal contraception
Endocrine disruptor pollution from plastics everywhere around us and inside us
So, even in the Western world cellulite has never been a thing for hundreds of thousands of years, up until a few decades ago.
Is cellulite an invented disease?
Based on ideas such as the above, some authors have suggested that cellulite was a French marketing ploy in the second part of the twentieth century to lure women to buy cellulite treatments and creams, calling cellulite an “invented disease”.
I would indeed agree that cellulite is an invented disease, but not for the naive reasons those authors suggest.
Cellulite is an aesthetic condition (and not “disease”, not everything needs to be medicalised and treated by doctors with injections and surgery), “invented” by the artificial, unnatural, imbalanced lifestyle of the Western world from 1950 onwards (smoking, vaping, alcohol, drugs, hormonal contraception, plastic endocrine disruptors, air pollution, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics in food supply, sugar overload, trans fats, junk food, fried food, convenience food, “comfort” eating, overeating, binge drinking, lack of physical activity / exercise, TV bingeing, 12-hour desk jobs, anti-social media, all sorts of medication etc).
Don’t blame the messenger (cellulite) if you don’t like the message (that our artificial lifestyle is decaying our bodies).
This is the equivalent of saying that cancer and heart disease (both products of our unnatural lifestyle) are “normal” and “invented diseases”.
These diseases are as real as the health aspect (water retention, inflammation, fibrosis, excessive and ectopic fat accumulation) and the aesthetic aspect (skin laxity and overall cottage cheese appearance) of cellulite.
Cellulite exists in Western people living an artificial lifestyle, it does not exist in people in the developing nations living a natural lifestyle. And it was not “a thing” in the past 150 thousand years. Same as heart disease and cancer.
Let’s stop being hypocrites and lie to ourselves.
“Cellulite does not exist”
Look at the picture above. You cannot tell anyone that what they see with their eyes or that what the owner of those legs feels, does not exist.
It is evident that there is plenty of inflammation, fibrosis and oedema on those legs, and most probably the skin feels painful to the touch. Plus it evidently suffers from skin laxity too.
For a 20-year old, cellulite may be just a minor and superficial aesthetic condition. However, fast-forward 30 years of unhealthy living and neglect of the body, and cellulite becomes a health condition, as the picture demonstrates.
Yes, cellulite is not cancer and it does not kill, but if you asked the owner of those legs she would not agree with the “female empowerment” mantra of “cellulite does not exist and it’s a made up disease” and she would love to have healthier, not-painful, not-puffy, not-lumpy legs.
And she would definitely not “love her cellulite”. She would love herself, love her body, love her legs, but she would not love her cellulite. Nobody says that, except Twitter “campaigners” and Z-list celebrities hungry for a few extra minutes of publicity.
The problem is that if we bow to political correctness and deny the existence of at least the water retention and inflammation that characterises cellulite in our 20s, we won’t be able to do much about them in our 50s. There is nothing “empowering” about denial in our 20s followed by water retention, inflammation and fibrosis in our 50s.
Of course, not everyone’s cellulite will become as oedematous and inflamed as in the picture, but physiological research has repeatedly shown that inflammation, oedema and fibrosis are integral aspects of cellulite, regardless of severity. And inflammation, oedema and fibrosis are not good. Period.
Back to healthy and natural
So if we care about our body we should do something about it, be it:
Healthy eating
Exercising / playing sports
Walking more
Drinking less alcohol
Quitting smoking
Avoiding estrogen-like endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastics and hormonal contraception
Taking a nutritional supplement
If possible: having a good cellulite treatment
If possible: applying a good cellulite cream
Or all of the above
We should do something about it because cellulite is not an abstract aesthetic problem that comes from outer space and suddenly lands on someone’s legs, as the “female empowerment” warriors want us to believe. It is not a “social construct”, as they say.
Cellulite is a manifestation of, and should serve as an alert for, our highly unhealthy lifestyle. same as a big stomach in men - which everyone agrees is unhealthy.
Doing some things about cellulite (or a big stomach, for men), namely the first seven bullet points above, also means doing something about reducing the risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, water retention, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and a host of other civilisation diseases in the future.
Lifestyle-wise it’s all one and the same.
Burying our heads in the sand and pretending those problems do not exist, in case we “stress“ men and women, is disingenuous.
What if I already do my best in terms of healthy lifestyle?
If you already follow a healthy lifestyle and cellulite is still there:
Either because of unfavourable genetics
Or because of previous unhealthy living, which caused the cellulite in the first place
…then there are two things you can do:
Either have a course of strong cellulite treatments and/or apply a concentrated cellulite cream to give you some extra help in improving the health and appearance of your skin. Just don’t obsess about it, given that you already do your best for your health/appearance. There is nothing wrong with a little cellulite.
Or do nothing else, resting in the knowledge that you already do your best, primarily for you health and secondarily for your skin. And also resting in the knowledge that no one (men, women or yourself) should calculate your self-worth by the appearance of your body. If you live a healthy lifestyle there is nothing wrong with some cellulite, plus there are plenty of other aspects of someone’s body or personality that are important in life.
Let’s agree that it can’t get more “body positive” than that.
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