What happens to the fat cells after a non-invasive body contouring treatment?
Date: October 15, 2018
Sculpsure®, Coolsculpting®, Zerona®, Modern Lipo, Laser Lipo®, Will your fat come back?
What happens to the fat cells after a non-invasive body contouring treatment?
The answer is, it depends.
Whether you need to worry about losing your new post-treatment body depends on what kind of treatment you had.
Some treatments cause the fat cells to shrink, but they remain in your problem area
Many non-invasive body contouring treatments, like Zerona® and Laser Lipo®, cause damage to the fat cell membrane, allowing the contents of the fat cell to escape. The fat cell membrane will heal in a short period of time and leave behind a smaller version of itself.
The fat released from the fat cell escapes into your body’s interstitial space. The interstitial space is the space immediately outside of the blood vessels where waste, fluids and toxins may accumulate. Your body may pick up this freed fat and eliminate it via your lymphatic system. Or your body may pick up this freed fat and store it in fat cells for future energy use.
You must diet and exercise if you want to ensure your body eliminates this fat. If you don’t, you stand the chance of your body storing the fat.
Fat can return to your problem areas after treatments like Zerona® and Laser Lipo®
Zerona®, Laser Lipo® and several other treatments make you slimmer by causing fat cell shrinkage, not fat cell destruction. Following treatment, all of your fat cells are present, just smaller.
The treatment addressed the size of your problem area now, but did nothing to prevent your problem area from being a problem again in the future.
Why? Genetics play a big role in determining where you store fat. With the fat cells remaining in your problem area, nothing prevents your body from doing what it is wired to do, store fat in its favorite place.
Destroyed Fat cannot return to your problem areas after treatments like SculpSure
Sculpsure® (and Coolsculpting®) make you slimmer by causing fat cell death. Sculpsure® eliminates up to 24% of the fat cells in the treated area with just one treatment. How? The Sculpsure® treatment triggers a process called apoptosis. Apoptosis is the medical term meaning a programmed fat cell death.
After treatment, your body picks up the waste from the fat cell destruction and eliminates it over time from your body via the natural lymphatic process. Lipids do not escape from the fat cells into your interstitial space (as with fat shrinking treatments). With Sculpsure®, fat cells are killed and eliminated.
Even if you gain weight after a Sculpsure® treatment, you can expect to experience less of a size increase in your problem area. There are simply fewer fat cells to enlarge.
What about treatments that don’t use medical-grade technology?
Answer: They don’t do either. There’s no proof they shrink or kill the fat cell
Non-medical body contouring treatments can be useful in enhancing the results of medical technology and in maintaining results.
Most of these treatments work by assisting your lymphatic system in detoxing, which encourages your body to eliminate excess fluids and waste from the body. They can serve a tremendous ‘supporting role’ in body shaping.
If you’re searching for a fat loss treatment, you should have questions when you see names such as Modern Lipo or other such names that don’t offer the actual device name.
You should be alerted when you read about instant results. Ask instead about lasting results.
These treatments have not been proven to destroy fat. They have not been proven to damage and shrink the fat cell.
Your body will not make new fat cells and will not ‘redistribute’ fat cells
The number of fat cells in our bodies is set by adolescence and stays constant in adulthood. Following puberty, our fat cells stop multiplying in number.
When a treatment causes fat cells to die and expels them from your body as waste, it’s impossible for your body to ‘redistribute’ those fat cells to other parts of your body.
One notable warning. The size of our fat cells can change throughout our lives. If we gain weight and our bodies store more fat, the size of the fat cells enlarge. Fat cells have a virtually unlimited capacity to enlarge. Your fat cells in your problem area are likely to enlarge if you gain weight after a treatment that causes fat cell shrinkage (like Zerona®).
After a treatment with a technology that destroys fat, like Sculpsure®, you’ll be left with fewer fat cells in your problem area that have the capacity to enlarge.
If you would like more information about fat reduction treatments or non-medical treatments to support and help maintain fat reduction, contact the body shaping experts at Sculpt Away in San Antonio at 210-227-3051 or visit www.SculptAway.com.
