No Free Skinny

Of course it was too good to be true, like something from a futuristic Neverland.  The narrative went like this: You don’t like that pocket of pudge that won’t budge no matter how much you diet or work out?  Those saddlebags—just like Mom’s!—or that tummy, or the infamous batwings—paging Mrs. Sterling, your sixth grade math teacher…It’s astonishing the level of vitriol and loathing that has been directed towards these innocent targets.  So, zap them away, simply sculpt a new body, Pygmalion-like.  Presto, bags/pooch/wings disappear, courtesy of your friendly plastic surgeon and his/her cannula—a word that has made me shudder since I first heard it.  A cannula is a thin metal tube that liposuction surgeons insert under your skin and then move back and forth, breaking up fat tissue and sucking it out.  Liquid fat.  As Miss Clavel would say, “Something is not right!”

But liposuction has been insanely popular—despite the yuck factor, the painful recovery, the chance of “ripples,” and the small-but-present risk of death from complications.  Last year it was the second most common cosmetic—or “aesthetic,” as the docs like to call it—surgery, coming in at almost 300,000 procedures and nestled between boob jobs at #1 and eyelid lifts at #3.  Last week the other shoe dropped, thanks to researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  They conducted the first randomized, controlled trial of lipo in humans, and documented the tragic flaw that many doctors and patients have already observed first-hand: The fat comes back.


Just as the body “defends” its fat when you diet, cleverly—or evilly, depending on your point of view—slowing your metabolism when you cut calories and upping your hunger, cravings, insane desire for food, it also defends the fat when it is stolen by cannulas.  Within a year, the Colorado researchers found, the womens’ bodies had grown new fat cells.  It turns out that we replace our fat cells throughout life as they grow old and die, and some mechanism inside us is keeping count.  So, like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, or the formerly comatose crowd in Awakenings, the test subjects got to glimpse the promised land of effortless thinness before nature, or science, played its cruel joke.

Here’s the real beauty part, though: the fat didn’t return to the scene of the crime.  The hips, thighs, and belly are the most popular lipo spots, but when the baby fat cells sprouted they emerged in the upper abdomen, shoulders, and triceps.  So you get to go from Shakira (okay, maybe more like Queen Latifah) to Bronco Nagursky.  Personally, I’d rather still look like a girl.

Oh, there’s one more beauty part, psychology division: the women in the study were still happy with the results, despite the upper-body creep. “They had hated their hips and thighs and just wanted that fat gone,” the lead researcher told the New York Times.  And half of the control group, who had seen the other women lose the dread hip-fat and then regain it, opted to cash in on their prize anyway: they signed up for the surgery at a reduced price.  Yes, that is how heartily most of the test subjects, standing in for a cross-section of American women, detested the juicy bits of their lower-body pears.  I’m beginning to think it’s the Revenge of the Heinie: Love me or else.