Why everyone is wrong about what a "double chin" actually is

Basically the jaw is trapped out of position under the soft tissue... and you need to move it back. But how?

The youtube version

A few folks who have read my stuff and watched my videos have said the equivalent of… “But hold on Ken…. you don’t look like you’re about to have a perfect spine and skull. Who’s leg are you pulling here?”

And I always find this hilarious.

Because it’s the first logical question anyone should ask. Hell… if i was reading my stuff.. it would be the first thing i’d be thinking.

And if I was trying to pull a fast one on you and was halfway intelligent… I would not then put myself in all of these Youtube videos that i create. hahaha

Rather i’d wanna hide myself. Logical no?

But now you will understand my chess game a level deeper. I want you to see me now. I want you to see that I have a bit of a double chin and do not have a very good profile.

I want there to be plenty of timestamped evidence of this.

Because then what I am very confident is about to come (hopefully within a couple months) when I ‘finish’ will be that much more shocking.

It will leave you thinking… “but wait.. how the hell did he do that? That goes against everything I’ve been taught to believe.”

And that my friends… is my checkmate in this whole game.

What is a double chin?

A double chin, medically known as submental fat, appears as a layer of fatty tissue that creates a fold beneath the chin.

It creates a rounded appearance under the jaw that softens the profile and can make people look older or heavier than they are.

While it's commonly associated with excess weight, many lean people also have it. Because in reality it’s not about being fat… it’s about skeletal structure.

And it reflects the jaw being out of position and the cervical spine being somewhat collapsed.

If you think about the people that have no side profile… they also have much shorter necks.

And so if you then put your Sherlock Holmes hat on you should be thinking… “hmmm if people that have a poor profile also have shorter necks than perhaps this is not just a case of some excess fat because that shouldn’t make your neck shorter. Rather it must be skeletal!”

"Elementary, my dear Watson!"

What the world thinks causes a double chin?

Conventional wisdom attributes double chins to genetics, weight gain, aging, and poor posture.

However, this explanation has obvious flaws:

• If it were simply about weight, then extreme dieting would result in a sharp, defined profile. Yet you never see a person with no profile get a good one simply by losing weight. Trust me it does not happen… i’m paying attention for nearly a decade.

• If it were about genetics than you would not see the rocketing up of this lack of profile that you see in Americans the last few decades. I’d estimate only less than a third of Americans have a halfway decent profile these days whereas it was probably more than two thirds when I was a kid.

• And there are way too many exceptions in my view to make aging plausible.

• Finally posture is a function of other things. And so i do not see it as a ‘cause’ of anything.

What I think causes a double chin?

Think of it like a tennis ball trapped under a rug - the ball represents your jaw, and the rug represents the soft tissue of your face and neck.

The jaw becomes trapped in a posterior (backward) and downward position by the surrounding soft tissue. But it is not just the jaw that has changed position.

Rather as in the diagram below the cervical spine has slightly collapsed and the skull is pointing a bit up. Plus the whole body has compensated.

Which if you pay closer attention to people with no profile… is true of each and every one of them. No exceptions.

To correct this, you need to work systematically to "free" the jaw, similar to working a tennis ball toward the edge of a rug.

Only when the ball reaches the very edge and pops out from under it can the rug be completely straight.

This is how I am pretty sure it works with the jaw and the structures around it like the cervical spine. As you see in this pic above.

How am i sure?

Because i already did it once. I may have even done it twice… but my memory of that time is a bit fuzzy at this point.

I dont remember exactly when this happened in 2016 but I believe this pic on the right was from around that time. When my son was not yet 2 years old as you can see in the pic.

I released my double chin in about 2016

Using my "fast method" combined with nighttime wear of a rubber mouthguard (the myobrace a1 at the time), I actually did what I described above in about 2016.

The process involved the same thing i am doing and experiencing now.

Each day the skin on my scalp and facial skin would actually break and shed. As I have described in this post:

I rip through the soft tissue of my face and scalp daily

Toward the end, the skin of the jaw and face broke and shed like after a severe sunburn and my scalp shed in small chunks.

This dramatic process resulted in my jaw repositioning forward, my bite normalizing from edge-to-edge to Class 1, and my spine lengthening noticeably.

Also as in the diagram above I became more symmetric than I had been probably my entire life. The face just sort of glowed for awhile and had nice angles.

After this happened I remember feeling like I was literally pulling my neck longer, as if letting out rope from an anchor. And i got my profile back.

It completely blew my mind.

Because it went against everything I had been taught to believe about how the human body works.

But then I screwed it up again

At the time, I was still influenced by the idea that you needed to eventually lock the bite in a fixed position.

Remember that my initial relief from the shitty situation i was in back in 2014 was with Starecta which teaches you to lock a bite position with the appliance. Essentially like an indexed splint.

And because of this.. i basically screwed up my profile again.

Then I went in circles for the next several years till late 2019 as I was heavily influenced by a string of ALF dentists. And was flipping back and forth between what they were telling me and my own experiments, which were based on what i’d achieved in 2016.

I will fix this for the final time in a couple months

In late 2021 I ‘rediscovered’ the basic principles I was using in 2016 when I’d first done this. And have been coming back strong ever since.

I’ve also remembered some small nuances that help optimize the process.

Despite this.. it is a longgggg process. I’m doing it for about three years now and I’m still not done.

But i have some strong reasons to believe that I am nearing the end, which i hopefully achieve in the coming months.

And this has to do with the releasing of the soft tissue in this chin area that is shown in the pic above. In 2016 it would very visibly stretch and get redder as I improved and the crease (from the tissue under my gums) would change.

Which is what I am now using to gauge my progress and proximity to ‘the end’.

Closing thoughts

In my very strong view the prevalence of double chins isn't about weight or genetics - it's about the positioning of the jaw and surrounding structures.

And the fact that the soft tissue covering these structures is holding everything out of position. Kind of like a tennis ball stuck under a rug.

So the only way to move these things back into the correct position is to stretch the soft tissue covering them using the process that I talk about in this blog (a mouthguard).

Till eventually the ball gets to the edge and pops out. And the whole spine and jaw reposition.

Let’s see if i’m right… or whether my memory of what I achieved in 2016 was just some fantasized memory that I dreamed up :)