Rene:  What happens if you gain weight after liposuction, and where does it go?

Dr. Salzhauer: For those of you who have been listening to the show, you know that I’ve explained liposuction a few times. When you’re born and by the time you’re aged let’s say 3 or 4, you have a fixed number of fat cells in your body. Those fat cells generally don’t reproduce and make more fat cells, but each fat cell can grow. They start out fairly microscopic. If you gain a lot of weight, you will … if you look a the fat cells of extremely overweight people each fat cell can be visible by the naked eye. That’s how big they grow. The number of fat cells is fixed, but each fat cell can get bigger the more you eat. Now when we perform liposuction, we take out the fat in a particular area of the body using a long tube and a suction machine. So that in the area that we liposuction, they generally don’t come back in that area. So if you have love handles and you do liposuction, you can kiss those love handles good bye forever. And also your abdomen or your thigh or your saddle bags, a lot of ladies have extra fat around the lateral side of their thighs. The fat won’t grow back there. Now, if you gain let’s say 30 or 40 pounds after surgery, you will still gain weight, you will get fat. But it will go to other areas of the body first where fat cells are abundant. So you might gain in your breasts, you might gain in your arms, you might gain weight in other areas. But that only happens if you gain a significant amount of weight. Not 5 or 10 pounds. 30, 40, 50 pounds, And if you gain enough weight, if you gain a hundred pounds, you will get fat, because even though we perform liposuction in the abdomen, there may be 5 or 10 or 15 cells left. And eventually they will reawaken and they will each one start to grow. So if you gain enough weight you may even gain back some fat in those areas. But that is very rare.  The most I’ve ever taken out was 10.5 liters, in one sitting. And that’s only in a hospital setting, and only in rare cases. The average liposuction procedure takes about 2.5 liters of fat cells. We can take up to 4 liters of pure fat. That’s the equivalent of 2 giant coke bottles of pure fat. And that being a very safe amount. Now you can do liposuction repeatedly, so you can do procedures even 3 or 4 weeks apart and take more and more fat each time. There are in this country major treatments for obesity. It is gastric bypass, or banding, which you see a lot of cases after massive weight loss. Now in other countries, where that hasn’t caught on as much, particularly in south America there are surgeons that do serial liposuction for obesity. In other words they come in and they’ll take 4 liters, and 4 liters 6 weeks later, and 4 liters .. and so on and so forth. And they can do 10 sessions like that and accomplish the same thing. Now obviously if you continue to eat you will gain weight.  Now what a lot of women do is they use the tummy tuck or the liposuction as a stimulus to get them back into an active, exercise healthy lifestyle pattern. And it works. Because once you get rid of the first 10 or 15 pounds, you get rid of the loose skin, you look down, you feel better, you feel like a regular person again, and it becomes much easier to stick with whatever.  And then you do exercise, and you do. It is important that you do change your lifestyle. It’s not you can come in and have a tummy tuck or liposuction and go back and eat that bag of potato chips every day. You do have to change, you do. I mean it’s just the way it is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Lifestyle Changes, Liposuction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.