R64 But it's not "five pounds gone."
If a lipo surgeon sucks out five pounds, the patient will come out of the surgery probably 10 pounds heavier than they went in because liposuction involves pumping saline fluids into the body to flush out fatty tissue.
Then, over several days, the body begins to swell up as an inflammatory response to the trauma of the violent surgery. (The surgical process is kind of shockingly aggressive and very traumatic to the tissue.) The water weight from the saline that was injected leaves through urine, but the inflammation retains fluid and makes the person heavier than they were before surgery in addition to making them look misshapen. This swelling persists for weeks and sometimes for many months (6-12) afterward.
Gradually over about six weeks, a lot of the swelling goes down and the patient returns to their original weight or perhaps slightly lower weight than the day they went in.
But in the long term, the surgery is not a weight-loss surgery at all. This is not because the weight loss from taking out pounds of fat is marginal but because the body recalibrates and it still has to store excess calories. In most cases, if a person has excess fat, it's because they consume more calories than they use and the excess is stored as fat. If a person continues the dietary habits that 'earned' them the extra fat before liposuction, then all the excess calories will be stored in the body still, just in different areas of the body.
So if you had a spare tire with jiggly fat ringing your lower torso and you had most of that fat surgically removed, then that area *should* stay thinner than it was before the surgery because there is less fatty tissue to store your excess calories.
But if you continue to eat or drink a lot of excess calories, you'll gain weight at the same pace as before the surgery; your body will just create a lot more fat in different areas.
You had a spare tire before. Now you'll have a narrower waist but you will have a bigger butt, bigger thighs, a big double chin and fatty arms. OR your body may not distribute the weight evenly and you may get a freakishly fat face or something.
However the weight is distributed, if four pounds were removed from your abdomen and flanks in January and you resume eating as you ate that caused those pounds of fat, new pounds of fat will materialize in different areas.
Some people's bodies distribute fat in more aesthetically desirable ways than others' do. Some people naturally have a smaller waist even when they gain weight, and so the weight gain can actually be flattering and create a coveted figure. If Jennifer Lopez's body distributed weight differently, she'd have been a dumpy person with a big belly. Instead, the weight goes straight to her butt. For people whose weight goes straight to their bellies, lipo can reshape the body to be more like JLo's or Kim Kardashian's than Leonardo DiCaprio's.
Liposuction can be used therapeutically. It's used in gynecomastia surgery, as I had done, and it's useful for some people who had lymphedema that causes lipedema. Some people's lymphatic systems don't work as they should. It usually happens to women who have lymph nodes removed as cancer treatment but it can happen to people for unknown reasons and there's no cure for it now. When lymph fluid can't get out of the body through lymph vessels, it pools under the skin and causes swelling. This is why some people have an enormous arm or leg or other hugely swollen body part. And it gets way worse: somehow, lymph that pools like that can actually seed the areas where the lymph is pooled with a regular supply of new fat cells, and this causes more swelling in isolated areas and it can grow to grotesque sizes (the elephant man). Liposuction is the only way to limit the growth by physically removing fat and lymph fluid collected in these areas and it is an effective treatment. So it's not a 100% cosmetic procedure.
