The best candidates for liposuction are patients who are in overall good health and not more than twenty pounds overweight. Liposuction is the most successful with patients who have localized areas of fat in their belly, arms, and thighs or neck because these pockets of fat are not responsive to diet or exercise but can be easily targeted by a skilled plastic surgeon.
Your plastic surgeon will want to do a complete medical history with you to ensure you don’t have any of the health risks that could led to complications including heart or liver diseases or being diabetic even if you have your diabetes under control.
If you have a history of losing and gaining weight or your weight loss has not stabilized- either you’re still gaining or losing weight this procedure may not be an ideal fit for you until your weight does stabilize.
Obviously you don’t want to go through the time and expense and put yourself through a surgery if your liposuction success will only be short lived so you want to be able to demonstrate your weight has been stable for a year or more give or take minor fluctuations in order to be a successful candidate for this procedure.
You also want to make sure that you are viewing this surgical procedure for what it is and not as a weight loss tool to lose ten pounds without dieting or exercising. Liposuction surgery is relevantly safe but it should not be viewed as risk free and it is not recommended as a mode of weight control.
When it is done right this procedure can help get rid of those fatty pockets and help give your body the contour it lacks and help you have the body you want.
The downside to any surgery- even a cosmetic procedure are the risk factors and although your doctor will screen your medical history and you will make sure you only hire the best surgeon for your procedure- complications can occur occasionally.
The most common side effect from this procedure are infection, uncontrollable bleeding and nerve damage. Other side effects can be unsatisfactory results that are not the fault of a bad surgeon but rather just an expected result from losing weight. Sometimes the skin on the surface has been so stretched out by the fat that when the fat is removed it can leave the skin looking rippled. This is because your skin has lost its elasticity and doesn’t go back to the pre stretched out look it once had. If your liposuction is a success but the end results don’t look attractive you may need to have a follow up surgery to remove the extra skin and create a better look.
Make sure you understand the benefits and risk to this procedure and then talk to your doctor to find out if you are a good candidate for success using lipo before you plan to have the procedure done.