If you like to go to the beach, you probably have noticed that some women have some silvery-white scars on the skin, especially on their belly or on the upper parts of their legs.

These signs are called stretch marks and they appear in cases of fast weight loss, or in cases when the weight goes through rapid fluctuations. Pregnancy is one of the causes which cause stretch marks to appear. Obesity and rapid muscle growth are two other causes. In general stretch marks are formed in those body areas that store big amounts of fat, and they occur in the dermis, the skin layer which determines its shape.

Once they appeared, stretch marks are forever. All you'll be able to do is to make them fade and pass unobserved, but they'd never disappear again for good.

In medicine, stretch marks are also known as vergetures, striae atrophicae, stria distensae, striae cutis distensae, striae gravidarum (when pregnancy is the cause), lineae atrophicae, striae distensae, linea albicante, or simply striae.

Scientists are actively seeking for treatments, and they managed to develop some laser-based and surgical ones, but none of them can remove the stretch marks without undergoing an invasive procedure on the skin. Some cocoa butter creams were showing satisfactory results, but research is still going on in this field. The best way to stay away from stretch marks is prevention: you can prevent them by avoiding drastic weight loss diets like the Atkins diet, the cabbage soup diet or other so-called fad diets which would only amplify the yo-yo effect, endangering your health and making you even fatter.

I agree that sometimes staying low carb can give you competitive results when it comes to weight loss, but you should take care not to gain your weight back, once you return to your normal nutrition habits. It's better to stick to healthy diet plans, even though your weight loss may not be that rapid.

Regardless how much you wish to have a thin and elegant body, you should never forget that some of the severe diets which are very popular nowadays may disturb your metabolism, leading to serious ailments and conditions, or to unpleasant secondary effects like these stretch marks. Although they are harmless, no woman is happy to show such scars on her body, thus her self esteem would diminish, and complexes would start to appear.

Besides, rapid weight loss is most of the times followed by even faster weight gain, because of over-eating after a monotone and boring diet. It's always better to aim for balanced diets, for slow and steady weight loss, for fitness and exercise, rather than for quick fix solutions.

Likewise stretch marks, there are other affections which are  incurable, so take care what you do to your body.

This is not only a cliche, it is a truth that we know but we so often ignore. I'll give you one single example: allergic asthma. Why wait until your child becomes a grown up and gets to the doctor by himself to get tested for allergy and solve the mystery of his permanent suffocation and narrowing of the airways, when you could have tested him in early childhood, at the first signs of medical disorder, and give him a chance to a better life quality?