To lipo or not to lipo?

This is when we start playing with the thought of a liposuction. I understand though that the decision to engage in plastic surgery is not the easiest one. It involves great debate, a lot of fear, much excitement, lying to parents, partners and sometime friends and the burning questions: To lipo or not to lipo? And am I at the right place to do it?

Liposuction is permanent

From the moment we’re born, we start manufacturing fat cells, a process that stops just after adolescence. The average person ends up with 40 billion – give or take 10 billion fat cells. Those cells are permanent, changing size as we gain or lose weight.

Liposuction is also permanent. If you remove fat from one area and gain weight, you’re going to regain it in other areas, most commonly in areas that were not treated, such as the back, arms, and breasts.

The amount of fat that we can remove with liposuction varies a lot from patient to patient. Even the slightest amount of 500cc of sucked fat can make a big difference to the form of the body. What I like to always repeat during my consultation is that the ultimate goal of a liposuction is not the fat reduction, but the body reforming or remodelling, which I find more important. The change of the body’s curves is what brings attractiveness and confidence back, not the reduce of volume.

It is an intervention, not a big operation

As a procedure, liposuction is quite safe nowadays. I consider liposuction more as a small intervention, rather than surgery. I perform it with local anesthesia or twilight sleep, depending on the operation time and the areas I need to work. All patients feel fit immediately after and are able to be dismissed 1h after the procedure only with a painkiller and sometimes a prophylactic antibiotic.

Working with the WAL method (water assisted liposuction), all my patients have only a slight swelling and bruising and are able to go back to work on the 3rd postoperative day.

Technically, it is performed with a tumescent solution. That means that during a tumescent liposuction the area is flooded with saline solution spiked with both lidocaine to numb the nerves and adrenaline to shrink the blood vessels. Fat, being the lightest and weakest of all tissues, floats around in the saltwater, which is then sucked back out of you using a cannula two to three millimetres thick. The incisions are so small, that most of the times no stitches are required.

Because WAL is the most atraumatic liposuction procedure, all patients come to the 5 days control with a smile. They can already see the results. By the end of the month their body is the body they would never had without the procedure.

And another notable point about liposuction:

I don’t like to just waste the fat from the liposuction. I like to reuse them to a better use: in the lips, nasolabial folds, tear trough, breast, butt, fat can do wonder.

Fat micrografting, if done properly, is long lasting and can be ”the gold standard” of fillers. Using a teensy needle, I inject the fat into the area in delicate strands the size of saffron threads. This allows room for healthy tissue to envelop the strands and grow into them, feeding them blood and oxygen. I’m very meticulous when I perform a fat grafting, if you’re not, it doesn’t last long-term.

Knowing that some fat cells won’t survive in their new habitat, I sometimes slightly ”overcorrect” the area. But even if a greater amount of the transferred fat gets absorbed by the body, patients profit from the grafted stem cells and the consequent skin rejuvenation.

”I wish I had lipo ages ago”

The best part of a liposuction is the comment that almost all patients make during the month control: ”I wish I had lipo ages ago – it would have spared me years of self-criticism and dieting”.

But as your beauty adventuress, I implore you, don’t rely on luck before you decide for the procedure. As easy as I described it, it is a procedure that demands accurate planning and experience. To suck fat may be easy, to deliver an aesthetic result that suits the curves of its body, is harmonic and symmetrical and lacks complications such as irregularities is a work of competence.

As I always tell my patients in the first consultation: ”The three most dangerous words in plastic surgery are ‘it’s just liposuction.’ “