Transcript

Let’s talk about Abdominoplasty, which is a fancy word for tummy tuck. Tummy tuck is different from liposuction and let’s explain a little bit why. In liposuction someone may have a tummy that’s a little bit full, and we remove the fat, but we don’t do anything to tighten the skin, nor do we do anything to tighten the muscles. For some people liposuction alone is fine and you get a great result, but in many women that’s not enough. The skin is loose, there are stretch marks, it’s overhanging, and the muscles have been stretched out from pregnancy and they’re pooching out, so that even tightening the skin alone or removing the fat isn’t going to create a flat tummy. So what do we do to get an optimal result? We need to address all three components of the problem. We tighten the skin, we remove the fat, and them we flatten and tighten the muscle. The skin is removed from a very lot place – from a very low lying incision, so that the patients can wear a bikini, a two-piece swimsuit, or jeans that cover it and allow you to display your new beautiful pretty abdomen and your pretty bellybutton. The second component is the removal of fat, which we do through traditional liposuction, and the third and actually the most important and the most technically challenging is addressing the muscles. People say well my trainer said if I do a hundred sit-ups a day or I do a thousand sit-ups a day I’m going to get a nice flat tummy and I’ll have a great result and I don’t have to do surgery. In fact that doesn’t work and I’d like to tell you why. When you do exercises muscles get stronger. Stronger muscles are bigger, but they’re not tighter. So if I do bicep curls my biceps are going to get larger, but if the muscle were to get tighter I couldn’t straighten my arm. So doing sit-ups is wonderful for creating strong abdominal muscles, the problem is they’re still loose, and in fact they’re thicker now and sometimes the tummy can look worse trying to fix it with exercise. So the most important and the most technically challenging part of a tummy tuck is addressing the muscles, and we tighten them with strong and permanent sutures that go from the ribcage down to the pubic bone and pull the stomach in so we’re actually pulling the waist in and creating a waistline and what we call expression in abdomen. That allows us to see a flat tummy, flat tight muscles, a smooth contour, and tight overlying skin. When those three components are combined you have a wonderful, long-lasting, sexy, and natural result. I’m Dr. Lawrence Koplin, and thank you for listening.