At Aesthetic Surgical Arts in Overland Park, KS, we know that improving the appearance of the midsection is often difficult to do on your own, even when paired with a healthy diet and consistent exercise routine. Sometimes too much stubborn fat combined with excess skin and general skin laxity can interfere with your goals and make the entire process feel hopeless. For that reason, we offer the tummy tuck, an effective procedure that will transform your midsection.
Can Fat Return After a Tummy Tuck?
When you undergo a tummy tuck, liposuction is one of the primary techniques used to transform your midsection. Liposuction is a surgical technique that utilizes a suctioning device and a tool called a cannula to gently remove fat cells directly from the body. During abdominoplasty, our surgeon will use liposuction techniques to remove those stubborn fat cells detracting from your appearance and keeping you from reaching your goals.
The Benefit of Liposuction
One of the benefits of liposuction is that it removes fat cells directly from the body, and once they are gone, they cannot come back. Your body cannot re-grow fat cells. As an adult, you have all the fat cells you will have for life as genetically predetermined for your body. Any fat cells removed through liposuction will not and cannot ever grow back. However, liposuction does not remove every single fat cell from your midsection.
There will be some remaining fat cells, so if you do gain weight after your procedure is over, you may experience a negative change in your results due to the expansion of those fat cells. At the end of the day, your results are completely within your hands. You can maintain permanent results after your procedure is over simply by choosing to live a healthy lifestyle.
Factors That Cause Remaining Fat Cells To Expand
Some factors will negatively impact your results and could lead to the expansion of fat cells in your midsection, including an additional pregnancy after the procedure and weight gain. It’s important to know that there is a difference between weight gain that causes fat cells to expand and simply a change in the scale. Your weight can fluctuate daily due to water retention, sodium intake, hormonal changes, and other factors and conditions.
Just because your weight fluctuates does not mean you are gaining weight. Gaining weight happens when you eat more than your body needs and don’t expend those excess calories during exercise.
Maintaining Your Tummy Tuck Results
There are some easy techniques that you can employ to ensure that you do not gain weight after your procedure and cause those additional fat cells to expand.
Consider Your Diet
You don’t have to follow a trendy, restrictive diet to live a healthy lifestyle. The most maintainable diet is one that is defined by moderation. Avoiding processed foods, unhealthy fats, and simple, refined carbohydrates isn’t a diet; it’s a lifestyle choice that can help ensure you do not gain weight after your procedure is complete.
When you focus on eating the right amounts of healthy foods at the right times throughout the day, you can ensure that you maintain your flat, defined midsection long-term.
What To Eat
You should focus on eating plenty of leafy green vegetables, healthy fats like avocados, nuts, and olive oil, and avoiding processed foods and excess salt and sugar. You should also incorporate lean proteins into your weekly meal plan, including white fish, salmon, white meat chicken, and lean cuts of beef. Some people choose to eliminate most carbohydrates from their diet and instead eat lean proteins and healthy fats with plenty of vegetables.
Whatever works for you, keeps you satiated, and helps you avoid making the wrong food choices is a lifestyle you can maintain. People who feel constantly restricted end up falling off the wagon, going back to their former ways, and gaining weight. When you focus on following a diet plan that keeps you satiated and helps you avoid blood sugar rises and falls, you will set yourself up for dietary success.
Eliminate Sugar
Completely eliminating sugar can also help avoid weight gain because, at the end of the day, sugar is like a drug. It is addictive, and your body craves it when you eat it. When you cut it out of your diet altogether, your body will no longer crave sugar, so you will automatically change your mindset. You will no longer feel that you need a sweet treat or a dessert after a meal or mid-day.
Drink Enough Water
Another way to help maintain your results and promote a healthy body composition after your procedure is simply by increasing your water intake. Not only does water help flush your system and detoxify the body, but it is an important way to avoid overeating. By simply drinking some water before each meal, you will take up some excess room in your stomach and, therefore, will, by default, eat less.
Many people feel the urge to eat when they are just in need of adequate hydration. Whenever you are hungry, drinking water before reaching for food can help you avoid excess calories that you may not have even needed.
Enhancing Water Flavor
If you’re not a fan of drinking plain water, there are many methods that you can use to make your water taste better. Liquid Stevia, lemon, cucumbers, and sliced fruit can all be added to water to make it more enjoyable so that you can consume the necessary amount on a daily basis.
Water will also improve your skin and help promote skin elasticity which is another important aspect of helping you not only keep your skin hydrated but keeping it tight and healthy, especially after your procedure.
Get Enough Exercise
Exercise is another important factor in the equation when trying to avoid weight gain after your procedure. Exercise combined with a healthy diet will help you avoid weight gain, leading to the expansion of those additional fat cells in your treatment area. Many people perform either not enough or too much exercise in an attempt to live a healthy lifestyle.
You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to maintain your post-procedure results, but you do need to put in the work. Cardiovascular exercises combined with strength training will help your body burn fat throughout the day. When you have more muscle than you do body fat, your body will naturally burn more calories each day, even when at rest.
Add Fat-Burning Exercises Into Your Workouts
Some exercises that can help promote fat burning include high-intensity interval training, cardiovascular exercises, and circuit training with resistance. If you have the means to do so, hiring a personal trainer at least for a few months will help you learn valuable lessons about how to exercise in a way that optimizes your time at the gym and promotes fat burning throughout the day.
If you cannot hire a trainer, there are plenty of resources both online and in apps that can help you get a challenging workout in daily and watch your form so that you are performing the right exercises the right way.
Find Opportunities To Move
Exercise doesn’t just happen at the gym. You can incorporate movement into your day without even breaking a sweat but still increase your calorie expenditure. Taking the stairs, parking farther away from the store, and getting up to move around if you sit at a desk all day will all help you maintain a healthy weight and even reach some new goals.
The Importance of Pairing Exercise With a Balanced Diet
Exercise is an important component of maintaining your tummy tuck results, but it’s important to note that you can’t out-exercise a poor diet. Moderation is always key, so you will set yourself up for success when you exercise daily and avoid overeating. Learning this early on can help you avoid weight gain and the frustration that often comes when you feel as though you are exercising daily but aren’t reaching your goals or are gaining weight.
Reduce Your Stress Levels
Another way to ensure that you don’t gain weight after your procedure is to focus on self-care. When your body is overstressed, it produces excess amounts of cortisol, the stress hormone, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. When the body produces too much of this stress hormone, it can begin to wreak havoc on not only your body but also your weight loss goals.
Long-term, excess cortisol levels can affect hunger hormones and cause you to overeat, leading to weight gain. Reading, napping, yoga, walking, and even a pedicure appointment can all help you destress and re-center. It’s important that you schedule time during your week for self-care activities that will help ensure that you don’t live with chronic stress and therefore end up gaining weight as a result. Plus, you’ll improve the quality of your life when you live with less stress.
Am I a Candidate for a Tummy Tuck?
If your midsection is defined by excess skin, fat, and other imperfections that are affecting your confidence, you may be a good candidate for a tummy tuck. This procedure can completely transform your midsection and change how you feel about your body. It’s important to note that this procedure is not a weight-loss procedure, and it doesn’t negate the need to eat healthily or exercise.
The Best Candidates
The best candidates for this procedure are healthy men and women who have been trying to improve the appearance of their midsection through traditional diet, exercise, and weight loss techniques but have not reached their goals. The best way to determine if this procedure is right for you is to schedule a consultation at our office.
During this consultation, one of our experts will evaluate your midsection and review your health history to ensure that a tummy tuck is right for you. Once we confirm that you are eligible for this procedure and understand the importance of maintaining your procedure results with a healthy diet and consistent exercise routine, we can schedule your procedure and move forward with the process.
Love Your Midsection
You no longer have to live with a midsection you don’t love. If you’ve been working out and eating a healthy diet in an attempt to transform your midsection but are not seeing results, the tummy tuck is a procedure that will change everything. Contact us today at Aesthetic Surgical Arts in Overland Park, KS, to learn more about this procedure and to schedule your consultation with an expert who can begin the process with you.
