These ads can make liposuction sound practically magical. They encourage you to imagine having a body any swimsuit model would envy, just by getting a minor procedure. No dieting, exercise, or willpower required! However, like all forms of advertising, liposuction ads are there to be persuasive, rather than completely truthful. Just as drinking a Budweiser can’t guarantee that the Swedish bikini team will show up to join your party, so liposuction can’t guarantee that you will suddenly have the body of your dreams.
The first thing that people need to understand about liposuction is simply what it does. The surgery removes fat; that is all. During the procedure, small incisions are made around a specific target area. The surgeon will then insert small needles called cannulas to break up and vacuum out the excess fat. There are a few different techniques available, but without the flourishes, this is what they all come down to.
In other wards, if whatever it is you don’t like about your body doesn’t have to do with fat, then liposuction can’t help you. Some people have broad hips because the underlying bone structure is broad. Some people don’t like the way this or that muscle bulges out on their stomach or sides. Some women discover that certain abdominal muscles have loosened and sagged after childbirth. All of these problems are real and they can affect the way your figure looks, but liposuction cannot solve any of them. All it can do is remove the fat.
Likewise, a liposuction cannot remove excess skin. Some people have a flabby, unstreamlined appearance that is actually not due to fat but to large amounts of excess skin. This can happen if someone has previously lost a lot of weight, or if they are simply getting older. In cases like these, liposuction can actually add to the problem, since surgically removing additional fat can cause the skin to droop or sag even more.
Another problem that liposuction cannot fix is cellulite. People reason that since cellulite is caused by fat, removing fat should solve the problem, but this is not the case. By and large, liposuction actually causes cellulite problems to worsen.