Cellulite: What Causes It and How to Get Rid of It Naturally

How to get rid of cellulite naturally

A 2024 clinical guide puts a healthy diet, hydration and exercise first for mild cellulite, with creams working best as an add-on to those habits.21 Here's the plan in five steps; the sections below walk through each one.

Build the muscle underneath

Muscle is the layer you can build under your cellulite. The American Academy of Dermatology notes that having more muscle makes your skin look smoother and firmer, and that replacing fat with muscle can make cellulite less noticeable.3 We found no trial that has tested a progressive strength program against a cellulite score; this step rests on what muscle does for the skin above it.

Train your legs and glutes 3 days a week, 30 to 40 minutes a session, and add weight as you get stronger. Walk 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day, and if you like intervals, one short session a week is plenty.6

Four moves cover the muscles under your thighs and buttocks. Brace your core on every rep, and choose a weight that makes the last 2 reps of each set hard while your form stays clean.

Four moves for your legs, thighs and butt

When the last reps of every set start to feel easy, add a little weight. That steady increase, called progressive overload, is how muscle keeps growing. Our guides to strength training for women and butt workouts add more moves.

How to get rid of cellulite on your legs, thighs and butt

Cellulite shows up most on the thighs and buttocks, in the fat women carry there, so the plan for your legs is the plan above.13 To tone your legs while you soften cellulite, focus on the gluteus maximus, the large muscle that shapes the back of your hips, and the hamstrings along the back of your thighs. The bridge and the Romanian deadlift train both, and the squat and split squat add the front of your thighs.

Long hours in a chair leave those muscles idle, a pattern sometimes called dead butt syndrome, which is one more reason the plan has you up and moving every hour.6

Feed your collagen

Collagen is the protein that gives skin its strength, and it's the supplement with cellulite trials behind it. In a placebo-controlled trial, 105 women aged about 25 to 53 with moderate cellulite took 2.5 grams of collagen peptides or a placebo every day for 6 months, and neither the women nor the researchers knew who got what. Among the 97 who finished, average cellulite scores fell from 2.37 to 2.17 at 3 months and 2.08 at 6 months on collagen, against 2.44 to 2.23 and 2.19 on placebo, and the collagen group's scores were significantly lower than placebo's at both points. The benefit was largest in normal-weight women, whose scores ended about 9% below placebo's. The trial's peptides were made from pork skin, so choose bovine collagen or fish collagen instead.7

Fish collagen showed the same kind of result. In a 2026 trial, 114 women aged 20 to 50 with thigh cellulite and thinning hair took 1,000 milligrams a day of a low-molecular-weight collagen peptide made from fish skin, or a placebo, for 24 weeks. Cellulite severity, skin roughness and skin elasticity improved more than with placebo at both 12 and 24 weeks.17 In a review of 26 randomized trials, hydrolyzed collagen improved skin hydration more than placebo across the 18 that measured it and elasticity across the 19 that measured it, and the elasticity benefit didn't differ by the collagen's source.23

Aim for about 20 to 30 grams of collagen a day, counting bone broth, collagen-rich foods and powder together; our guide to what collagen is explains the amount. Drink a cup of bone broth every day, chicken broth especially, eat the skin on fish and chicken, and stir bovine or fish collagen peptides into coffee, a smoothie or soup. The trial doses, 2.5 grams and 1,000 milligrams, fit easily inside that daily total. Our list of collagen-rich foods has more options.

Pair collagen with vitamin C foods such as citrus, bell peppers and berries. Your body needs vitamin C to build collagen, and healthy skin holds high concentrations of it.22

Cut sugar and drink more water

Sugar ages skin from the inside. Glucose and fructose bind to the collagen and elastin fibers that support the skin, cross-linking them into stiff, hard-to-repair bundles called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs.20 Cut added sugar, white flour, hydrogenated oils and packaged foods, and build your meals on vegetables, fruit, clean protein such as wild-caught fish, pasture-raised poultry and eggs, seeds such as pumpkin, hemp, chia and flax, and healthy fats such as extra virgin olive oil and avocado. Get 30 to 40 grams of protein at each meal, which also feeds the muscle you're building.6 Our guide to collagen-destroying foods lists more to skip.

Drink about half your body weight in ounces of filtered water a day, so a 140-pound woman would aim for about 70 ounces. In a study of 49 healthy young women with no separate comparison group, adding about 2 liters of water a day for 30 days improved skin hydration and how the skin stretched and recovered, especially in women who usually drank less.24 Our guide to how much water you should drink a day has more.

Keep your blood and lymph moving

Cellulite tissue shows sluggish blood and lymph flow, so build movement into your whole day.13 Stand up and move at least every 60 minutes,6 and take a brisk 20-minute walk or bounce gently on a mini trampoline, called rebounding, for the same time. Our lymphatic system guide explains how lymph moves fluid through the body, and this trampoline workout shows how to rebound safely.

If you want hands-on help, a lymphatic drainage massage is a gentle massage that moves fluid toward the lymph nodes. In a study with no comparison group, 15 of 20 women finished 14 weekly sessions; their quality of life improved and their hip circumference fell about 0.3 cm, though their thigh measurements didn't change. The researchers judged it safe but not enough on its own, which is why it sits alongside the other steps here.25

Dry brushing is a traditional daily practice for the skin and lymph. Before you shower, brush dry skin with a natural-bristle brush in long, light strokes from your feet up toward your heart. It exfoliates and gets you working the skin over your thighs every day. Our guide to dry brushing walks through the technique.

Do cellulite creams work?

Yes. A caffeine cream and an essential-oil gel each beat a plain cream in trials where women used both, one on each thigh, and in both trials the women rubbed them in twice a day.45

In a 2026 Australian trial, 24 women aged 18 to 51 rubbed a 2% caffeine nano-cream, made to carry caffeine into the skin, into the back of one thigh and a matching cream without caffeine into the other, twice a day for 12 weeks; neither the women nor the researchers knew which thigh got which. Cellulite scores fell from 3.96 to 2.50 on the caffeine side and from 3.88 to 2.83 on the plain side, the caffeine side pulled ahead from week 4, and skin-fold thickness fell only on the caffeine side.4 Caffeine helps fat cells break down stored fat and increases blood flow in the skin, a proposed explanation for the effect.26 Across creams more broadly, a 2014 review that pooled 7 controlled trials found they trimmed thigh circumference by an average of 0.46 cm more than the comparison treatments.27

Retinol, a form of vitamin A, is a slower option. The American Academy of Dermatology says a 0.3% retinol product may help by thickening the skin, and that it takes 6 months or longer to judge.3 In a 6-month trial of 15 women aged 26 to 44 who had asked for liposuction and used retinol on one thigh and a placebo cream on the other, skin elasticity rose 10.7% and viscosity fell 15.8% on the retinol side, though the lumpy texture itself changed little.28

Essential oils have human evidence too. Researchers in Thailand built a gel from a traditional Thai herbal compress used for sore muscles: ginger essential oil, black pepper essential oil, and the oils of Java long pepper, turmeric, plai (a ginger relative), lemongrass and kaffir lime, with camphor and tea and coffee extracts. In their trial, 18 women with severe cellulite rubbed the herbal gel into one thigh and a plain gel into the other twice a day for 12 weeks, and neither the women nor the researchers knew which thigh got which. The herbal side started at a severe 13.4 out of 15 on the Cellulite Severity Scale, and three evaluators grading photos saw its cellulite fall clearly over the 12 weeks, while the plain side improved a little.5

Keep the massage up, because its results fade when you stop. In the herbal-gel trial, the cellulite partly came back in the 2 weeks after the women stopped.5 In a 24-week randomized study of 40 women who used a hand-held vibration massager on one thigh and left the other untreated, cellulite on the outer thigh was reduced at 12 weeks, came back soon after one group stopped, and stayed down in the group that kept going.29 Dermatologists say the same of caffeine products, which need daily use to hold their results.3

To make a massage blend at home, use our grapefruit cellulite cream recipe: 30 drops of grapefruit essential oil in 1 cup of coconut oil, about a 0.6% blend. Ginger, black pepper or cypress essential oil can replace some of the grapefruit, and ginger and black pepper are two of the oils from the trial gel. Massage it into your thighs and buttocks for 2 to 5 minutes once a day, working upward. A coffee scrub in the shower is a good way to exfoliate, and a leave-on caffeine cream is the form the trial tested. Our guide to essential oils for cellulite has more blends.

If you're losing weight, protect your muscle

Losing extra fat usually helps, as long as you keep your muscle and your skin's support. Extra weight can make cellulite more visible, and for some people, losing weight and keeping it off reduces it.3 In a small study that followed women through medically supervised weight-loss programs, most saw their cellulite improve, especially those who started heavier, lost more weight and thigh fat, and had more cellulite at the start. Some got worse, mainly women who started leaner, lost less weight with no drop in their share of thigh fat, and whose skin had grown looser.30

So lose fat slowly and keep building muscle. Keep your calorie deficit modest, around 300 calories a day below what you burn. Eat 30 to 40 grams of protein at every meal, keep lifting and skip crash diets.6 Keep up your collagen too, since loose skin can make cellulite more noticeable as you lose weight.3