Did you catch the New York Times article regarding redistribution of fat after liposuction?  To summarize, it says that if you get liposuction done, the fat WILL come back in other areas. This angers me. Let me point out significant issues with this study. I will debunk their conclusions! Firstly, there is no stratification for patient’s nutritional profile before and after liposuction. Nor, is there stratification for exercise patterns before and after. This is critical because these two factors greatly determine long term success in body contouring. Let me explain. If you eat poorly and don’t exercise and have no plans to change your lifestyle, even with successful liposuction, your good surgical outcome will be short lived. Eventually, you will gain fat mass back. Only now it will go to non- suctioned areas. Liposuctioned sites are less likely to uptake fat due to cell wall disruption from the procedure.

Now take a patient who has not exercised nor has she gone to the gym. What if her poor eating, and lack of exercise is because she is depressed that she is fat or has fat in disproportion to her body. She may be fearful of going to the gym for fear of being the fattest person there. So if she has a plan for lifestyle change, she is apt to be successful! The question some would then ask is why not just make the lifestyle change? Well, for many women fat may be located in difficult to eradicate areas. You can’t wish fat away or spot reduce. Liposuction can be a great jump start. What the article and the New York times fail to account for is the very real changes in pre diabetes, insulin resistance and successful dramatic additional weight loss many women achieve after liposuction.

Finally, this is why some women who eat reasonably well, and exercise moderately, can’t seem to lose weight, but after liposuction, the poorly understood paracrine effect of fat on other hormones, allows some women to loose additional significant weight!!

I hope this helps – be careful how “studies” are set up. They may be trying to prove a point prior to beginning or may not have enough patients enrolled in the study to format it validly with enough stratified groups!