When people lose a lot of weight, especially after weight loss surgery like bariatric surgery, they often end up with extra skin hanging around their body.
Body contouring is a method that doctors use to remove this extra skin. It makes people look better and feel more comfortable, and it can help with movement, too.
But there’s a question that some researchers wanted to answer: does body contouring help people to keep the weight off in the long run?
A New Study on Body Contouring
A new study was published in the June issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery to answer this question.
Dr. Teresa Benacquista, a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and a surgeon at the Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York, led the study.
The study involved more than 2,500 people who had weight loss surgery between 2009 and 2012.
In this group, 350 people had body contouring about two years after their weight loss surgery. Another 364 people talked to plastic surgeons about having body contouring but decided not to have the surgery.
The rest of the people, over 1,800, did not have body contouring or even talk to a surgeon about it.
The Results: Does Body Contouring Help with Weight Loss?
The results were interesting. The people who had body contouring did keep more weight off compared to the people who only had the weight loss surgery.
For example, one year after surgery, the people who had body contouring had, on average, a body mass index (or BMI, which is a measure of body fat) that was about 3 units lower than those who didn’t have body contouring.
After seven years, their BMI was, on average, 5 units lower.
But here’s the catch: even the people who talked to a surgeon about body contouring but didn’t have the surgery also had better weight loss.
They had a BMI that was 1.5 units lower after one year and 2.3 units lower after seven years compared to the people who didn’t consult about body contouring.
The researchers found that, among the people who were good candidates for body contouring, those who had the surgery had about the same BMI seven years later as those who only talked about the surgery.
The group that didn’t consider body contouring at all had higher BMIs.
Other Factors Affecting Weight Loss
The type of weight loss surgery and a person’s race or ethnicity also influenced how much weight was kept off.
For instance, patients who had a type of surgery called sleeve gastrectomy did not maintain weight loss as well as those who had gastric bypass. Also, black patients had less sustained weight loss compared to other racial or ethnic groups.
So, Does Body Contouring Help with Weight Loss?
Based on this study, the answer is probably not much. Dr. Benacquista and her team believe that body contouring doesn’t make a big difference in long-term weight loss.
The difference they saw was likely because of personal factors related to each patient.
However, body contouring does seem to have benefits, especially in making people feel better about themselves and in improving physical functioning.
So, while it might not help people keep the weight off, body contouring could still be a good choice for some people after weight loss surgery.
If you care about weight loss, please read studies that hop extract could reduce belly fat in overweight people, and early time-restricted eating could help lose weight.
For more information about weight loss, please see recent studies that Mediterranean diet can reduce belly fat much better, and Keto diet could help control body weight and blood sugar in diabetes.
The study was published in Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery.
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