Have you lost a lot of weight and are now struggling to lose those last few stubborn pounds? Losing weight isn’t easy, and the body doesn’t always respond in the way we want it to. Stubborn pockets of diet and exercise-resistant fat can be exceedingly difficult to deal with. CoolSculpting treatment at Dr. Renée Moran Medical Aesthetics in Newton Center, MA, can address this and provide you with the body contour you’re looking for.
How Can You Get Rid of Stubborn Fat? A Closer Look at CoolSculpting: What is It?
CoolSculpting, or cryolipolysis, is an FDA-approved body-contouring treatment that can successfully reduce the volume of fat cells in certain parts of your body. It does so by freezing fat cells, causing them to first crystallize and then die off.
Your body will naturally dispose of the dead fat cells through your urine, leaving the treated area with a more sculpted, sleeker appearance. Cryolipolysis is one of the few technologies that was discovered unintentionally. Researchers were performing an experiment involving children and popsicles when they realized that the popsicles were causing children to form dimples.
As the phenomenon was studied, scientists came to the conclusion that the cold was freezing the fat cells within the children’s cheeks – leading to the formation of dimples. Researchers eventually concluded that the phenomenon can effectively help people lose stubborn fat.
How is the Treatment Performed?
Unlike other body contouring procedures, Cryolipolysis is 100% non-invasive. There are no incisions or needles involved in the treatment. Treatment is performed at our office and generally takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to complete.
The duration of treatment depends on how many areas a client is looking to treat. CoolSculpting has been approved by the FDA for treatment in numerous locations around your body.
Treatment involves a paddle-shaped applicator which employs suction to align the underlying fat with the paddles. Then, the skin is cooled to a temperature that freezes fat cells but leaves the surrounding tissue unharmed.
How is Surrounding Tissue Protected?
The treatment is able to target fat but not the surrounding tissue due to the fact that fat freezes at higher temperatures than your skin does.
Because of this, applying a specific temperature to a targeted location on your body results in fat being affected and little else. You’ll feel a cool, but not uncomfortable, sensation during treatment.
What Type of Fat Does Cryolipolysis Target?
The two types of fat your body has in abundance are subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Visceral fat is firm to the touch and sits deep within the body where it serves as protection for your vital organs.
Subcutaneous fat, by name, means fat that sits beneath your skin. Diet and exercise typically target visceral fat – often resulting in pockets of exercise and diet-resistant subcutaneous fat in your abdomen, flanks, upper arms, thighs, back, etc.
Cryolipolysis targets subcutaneous fat as opposed to visceral fat and is highly effective at redefining your contours through destroying=
Is Cryolipolysis a Weight Loss Solution?
Unfortunately, the treatment was not designed to help people lose large amounts of weight. Instead, cryolipolysis is intended to be the “finishing touch” after you lose weight through diet and exercise.
CoolSculpting provides the best results when someone is at or near their ideal weight but is dissatisfied with how the results affect the contours of their body.
Is the Fat Removal Permanent?
Everyone has a certain amount of fat cells in their body. Just how many is determined by genetics, though most people stop developing new fat cells in their mid-20s. When someone gains weight, they don’t generate new fat cells – the cells they have inflated. When weight is lost, the opposite occurs.
When fat is destroyed via cryolipolysis, it does not come back. This fat loss is permanent. However, that doesn’t mean the leftover cells can’t inflate if you gain weight. When this inflation occurs, it can impact the treated area and leave you with a less satisfying shape. After treatment, it’s best to continue with a diet and exercise routine that keeps your weight from fluctuating more than a few pounds.
What are the Benefits of CoolSculpting?
Treatment is customized to your stated cosmetic goals.
Where, and how much, subcutaneous fat accumulates around your body is largely due to genetics, and not every patient has the same needs. One patient may want to treat their abdomen, while another chooses to treat their upper arms. Weight loss stemming from diet and exercise does not spot-target fat, no matter what you’ve heard. Instead, diet and exercise prompt fat loss from all over your body.
While diet and exercise cannot “spot target” fat, CoolSculpting can. As a matter of fact, the treatment was developed for this specific purpose.
It’s Far Less Expensive than Surgery
Non-invasive treatments like CoolSculpting lack the pain and recovery time associated with cosmetic surgery. Since the treatment is non-invasive, less work is required by your provider and, as a result, the treatment ends up costing less than surgical procedures normally would.
When you undergo surgery, you have to pay the surgeon’s fee, OR fee, anesthesia fee, etc. None of these extra services are necessary to achieve fat removal through cryolipolysis.
It’s Low Risk
One of the scariest things about surgery is the risk involved with invasive procedures. Clients with more comprehensive cosmetic goals frequently require surgical procedures. Even relatively minor surgeries can carry a certain amount of risk.
Cryolipolysis is far less risky than other, traditional options because it’s non-invasive. You won’t need to be anesthetized because of the pain, nor will you need to worry about infections. The surface of your skin is not punctured during treatment – it’s cooled.
It’s Known to Achieve Excellent Results
When a client makes a conscious choice to undergo treatment, it’s important that they are aware of its limitations. As mentioned, treatment isn’t an alternative to diet and exercise, nor will it remove large amounts of fat from your body.
However, the treatment has produced excellent results when used to “spot target” specific areas of your body. Provided you understand what treatment can and cannot do, you should be more than satisfied with your results.
Treatment is Quick
Other “spot targeting” options, such as liposuction, require a certain amount of time commitment from patients. Preparation alone can take a couple hours, and then you have the procedure itself and the recovery period it requires. You could find yourself unable to perform your normal daily tasks for a few weeks after your liposuction.
Cryolipolysis is a much faster way to target stubborn pockets of fat. Each treatment area takes about 30 minutes to complete, though larger areas may take a little longer. With such a short treatment period, many clients choose to come in on their lunch breaks or in between errands. Some clients even work while being treated! Treatment is so mild you can make phone calls, send emails, or read while being treated. Once treatment is complete, you can continue with the rest of your day.
Additional Treatment Areas are Being Approved by the FDA
CoolSculpting is so effective at “spot treating” unwanted, diet and exercise-resistant fat that additional treatment areas seemingly achieve FDA approval all the time. Since 2010, when the treatment was first cleared by the FDA, additional treatment areas have subsequently gained approval as well. Today, you can treat your thighs, abdomen, submental fat (double chin), flanks (love handles), back, bra bulge, under the buttocks, and upper arms.
Many of these areas are notorious for accumulating exercise and diet-resistant fat cells. As time goes on, additional areas will undoubtedly be cleared as well.
Treatment Doesn’t Hurt
The non-invasive nature of the treatment, as well as the relatively mild temperatures applied to your body, leaves the majority of your cells unharmed (the exception being subcutaneous fat cells). Treatment is pain-free, though you may experience some mild redness post-treatment. This redness tends to dissipate shortly after treatment.
Is it Possible to Maximize your Results?
When a person chooses to undergo cosmetic treatments to improve their appearance, it pretty much goes without saying that they’ll want the best results possible. As mentioned, treatment is not an alternative to diet and exercise if you’re looking to shed significant pounds. But, the fat that is removed via treatment is gone forever. You will lose weight after treatment as fat cells are destroyed and removed. The weight, though, will be limited to a few pounds.
Clients who are happiest with their results generally maintain a healthy lifestyle before and after treatment. If you’ve just lost a significant amount of weight, it can benefit you to hold off on treatment for a few months while you work on stabilizing your weight. The last thing you want to do is undergo treatment without the discipline to continue living a healthy lifestyle. Below are a few practices you can employ to help maximize your results and improve their longevity.
Continue Exercising and Eating Healthy
Achieving your weight loss goal, or at least being within reach, through diet and exercise isn’t easy, and you should feel good about yourself for doing so. Just because you’ve reached your weight loss goal doesn’t mean you no longer need to continue with your current exercise and diet regimen.
To maximize your results, make sure to continue exercising and eating a healthy diet. You may not need to diet and exercise as intensely as you did while losing weight, but continuing to exercise and watch what you eat will help keep your figure.
Get Enough Sleep
Losing out on sleep is a major contributor to premature aging, and it can crater your metabolism. Experts recommend getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night, and you should strive to do just that. Granted, life doesn’t always allow us as much time to sleep as we like and missing a few hours here and there is unavoidable.
Sleep deprivation can also seriously affect your mood. People who don’t regularly get enough sleep tend to be moody, emotional, and quick-tempered. A lack of sleep can also be detrimental to your diet and exercise regimen as it gnaws away at your willpower.
Are You a Candidate for Treatment?
The treatment’s non-invasive nature makes it widely available and popular among those looking to improve their physique. Clients who are near their target weight, are tired of looking at stubborn pockets of fat around their body and are generally healthy make excellent candidates for treatment.
CoolSculpting helps get rid of stubborn exercise and diet-resistant fat by cooling fat cells to a point where they die off and are eliminated by the body. The surrounding tissues remain unharmed and unaffected due to the fact that they freeze at higher temperatures than the fat cells underneath.
If you’re sick and tired of being unsatisfied with your appearance, and you think cryolipolysis may be the answer, contact us to schedule a consultation with Dr. Renée Moran Medical Aesthetics in Newton Center, MA.
