Maintaining Liposuction Results: Reduce this ONE Thing in Your Diet

The first question many liposuction patients ask us is this:

After my liposuction procedure to remove unwanted fat, will the fat be gone permanently?

The answer is YES – liposuction, whether stand-alone or combined with skin tightening like BodyTite or Renuvion – removes fat permanently. You can quite literally see it leaving your body, if you’re so inclined. The fat that your plastic surgeon removes from your body cannot return.

Liposuction is Permanent. But What About New Fat?

However, you can still build up new fat reserves. A healthy diet and regular exercise are key to maintaining your liposuction results. Or any other results for that matter – even a tummy tuck. For your fat removal to be truly permanent, you need to be smart about maintaining your weight.

The good news is that it’s not that hard. It’s much harder to lose a substantial amount of weight. (If you are obese or borderline-obese with a BMI of over 30 or even 40, check out other options like a gastric balloon). But if you just had liposuction, you are probably close to your target weight. Simply maintaining this weight is much easier than losing it, and you can do it without starving yourself. It requires a little bit of discipline, and an understanding of nutrition.

Pop-Quiz: Maintaining your weight requires a low-fat diet – True/False?

Did you pick true? Most people do. But the correct answer is “not really.”

It’s not that a low-fat diet is bad, or that it doesn’t work. It certainly is healthy to limit fatty foods and instead eat plenty of fresh vegetables and fiber. All of these things are true. But if you focus on a low-fat diet as your sole weapon to battle against weight gain, you’re not using the best tool in your arsenal.

The best way to keep off the fat, ladies and gentlemen, is to limit your intake of sugar. Sugar is the bigger culprit, because it is so addictive. It fills you with empty calories and leaves you craving for more. If you find a way to limit sugar, you will get a much bigger return on your investment.

Sure, you could limit fat and sugar. More is better, right? But the thing is, you want this to work. Cutting out the one thing that enhances flavors (fat), when you’re already giving up one of the most tempting things to eat (sugar) might doom you right off the bat.

The trick to a successful diet is giving your body some of what it craves, just not all of it. And between the two, you should target sugar. I promise you, limiting sugar is going to give a bigger return on investment than limiting fat.

A Foolproof Way to Limit Your Sugar Intake

So how do you limit your sugar intake? Simply telling yourself that you’ll “do better” and “eat less sweets” isn’t going to cut it. If you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution and given up halfway into January, you know how hard that is.

The problem with such a vague goal is that it’s not measurable. You won’t see much in terms of results, and that’ll make you give up prematurely.

Here is what I did this January: I challenged myself to eat no sugar the entire month, with the exception of Sundays. Sunday was my escape day. It was a little tough at the beginning – I love toast and jam for breakfast. I eventually settled on toast with aged cheddar cheese instead of jam. Just as easy to make, and delicious. Once I got used to that, my craving disappeared.

As a bonus, I found myself looking forward to Sunday all week – imagining all the sweets I could be having. In reality, foregoing sugar most of the time considerably lessened my sweet tooth, and Sundays would pass without any wild candy bar orgies on my part. Just a cookie or piece of cake here and there, and I was good. If something really delicious crossed my path during the week, I’d simply wrap it and stick it in the freezer for Sunday. I’d tell myself that I wasn’t really giving it up, I was just going to wait a little bit longer for it.

After one month, the results are noticeable – Some pants had gotten too tight, and now they fit me again.

Set Yourself a One-Month No Sugar Challenge

If you recently had liposuction and are worried about maintaining your results, we’d like to encourage you to try a similar challenge. What you need to do is set measurable and realistic goals. Set up a timeframe that you feel is challenging for you, but not overwhelming, and set up a reward system for every time you stick to it.

The reward doesn’t have to be food, on the contrary. Maybe your guilty pleasure is watching Tik-Tok videos. Or taking super long showers. Whatever it is, link the reward to the goal you’ve set. You’ll be surprised how well it works, and you’ll be encouraged once you see the results.

Simply eating no sugar for a set time is the best way to avoid it and to escape its addictive qualities. But if you’re not ready to give it up entirely, go for the biggest offenders first:

Cereals
Fruit drinks and soda
Fruit yoghurts
Jam
Alcohol
Sweets – obviously

Many processed foods contain sugar, and while it may be impractical to scrutinize every label of everything you buy, it’s good to know where to look: ketchup, peanut butter, many dressings, and even some bread tend to have sugar added to them.

We hope you’ve learned something new about maintaining your liposuction and skin tightening results. We are confident that these tips will help you enjoy your cosmetic surgery results for years to come!

If you are looking for liposuction in Nashville, please contact our Nashville Cosmetic Surgery Practice for a consultation. To schedule a consultation for liposuction in Memphis, please contact our Memphis Cosmetic Surgery Practice.