Liposuction removes fat.
The fat removed is permenantly gone.
But that doesn’t mean you can go hog wild eating Ben and Jerry’s. Fat is stored energy. It is a simple intake vs. output kind of thing. If you eat calories, and you don’t exercise and burn off those calories, your body will store the energy as fat. In general, I like to think if you gain more than 5-10 pounds, your body will create new fat storage.
Once you have a fat cell, it is yours to keep. Diet and exercise can shrink the fat cell, but it can’t make it disappear.
A study in Nature, May 2008, showed the number of adipocytes (fancy way for saying fat cells) is determined in childhood. They found:
- The fat mass in an adult is related to the number of adipocytes.
- The number of fat cells stays constant in adults, whether you are obese or skinny. (so if you were skinny as an adolescent and gained a lot of weight as an adult, you still have fewer fat cells- the number of fat cells you had did not change- but those cells are now larger because of your weight gain. Conversely if you were obese as a adolescent and lost weight, you as a skinny adult still have the same higher number of fat cells you had as an overweight teen.)
- The number of fat cells is set in childhood
- You gain weight likely by increasing fat storage in the already present fat cells
- You do not lose fat cells with weight loss
This research makes you think about the childhood obesity epidemic differently, doesn’t it? Will those kids be behind an 8 ball when trying to lose weight as an adult if they were overweight as a teen? And what about the “freshman 15” pounds many put on that first year of college? Does that fall at a time where you are still actively increasing the number of fat cells which will be your baseline as an adult?
Getting back to the plastic surgery of all this…. Liposuction removes fat cells. Those cells are in medical waste containers and shipped far away from you. But you can still get fat again after liposuction. The fat will initially go to wherever you have a pocket of fat, causing those cells to enlarge. For this reason, I don’t spot treat one area. I don’t want that first 5 pounds to all go to your inner thigh or your back, and cause an issue where you have not had one before. When we remove a fat pocket, we change the dynamics of how and where you first gain weight. I want your result to be smooth and natural.
Before you do liposuction, make sure your weight is STABLE. I don’t care if it is 10 pounds higher than you want, I care that you are not vacillating. You need to have good habits- exercise and eating- in place. You should have them in place and stable for months prior to surgery. If you are going through a big life change, menopause, etc, wait until you are stable on the other side. Otherwise, you will lose your results.
Liposuction will remove fat cells. Those cells are permenantly gone. But the ones which remain can get larger. In the end, as an adult, your fat cell number stays constant. How you look depends on not just number of fat cells, but how large those cells are.