Latest way to get rid of fat is a lot cooler...
For decades plastic surgery, liposuction and the like has been popular with people desperate to change their appearance and get rid of ugly body parts.
But now it seems that less radical procedures for body sculpting are coming to the fore, expensive though they are.
One of them ( from £500 per shot) is “fat freezing”, known as cool sculpting, for disposing of your grabbable fat. Yes, love handles.
It works by freezing your fat cells. They die, then disappear by being broken down into waste. Is it safe? Is it effective? Well, first you have to clamp each area of fat one by one that you want to get rid of. If it’s your love handles, this may require one or two sections on each side depending on size while the rest of the skin is covered by a protective sheet. The clamped fat is then drawn up into a suction cup and cooled. Now as fat freezes at about 10C, a higher temperature than other tissues, you can freeze it without damaging the surrounding skin.
This process, which is called cryolipolysis, takes about an hour for each section and is, apparently, painless. After five minutes, the area of the body that’s been cooled just feels numb. To bring back feeling your skin is warmed up with a massage.
How does fat cooling work? Well, when fat cells are frozen they become injured and start to break up. The body recognises them as damaged goods, kills them off and gets rid of them as waste through the liver and kidneys.
The quicker the tissue is warmed up again, the quicker the body swings into action to get rid of the damaged cells.
It takes six weeks to start working but up to 12 weeks to see results.
The blurb says cool sculpting is designed for stubborn pockets of fat and is especially popular with men because unlike liposuction, after which compression garments must be worn, men can walk out of the clinic and within a couple of days be on a beach and no one would be any the wiser.
But it appeals to women too who are after a quick fix for those lumps and bumps that stubbornly resist dieting.
Apparently, quick-fix solutions appeal to both men and women.
In one cool-sculpting clinic, 52% are men and 48% are women, which is the opposite split of almost every other cosmetic treatment.
I’d like to see the long-term results before taking a view on it. Couldn’t cool-sculpting leave ugly lumps, bumps and dimples?