Can CoolSculpting Be Used To Lose Weight?

By now, you’ve heard about Coolsculpting. It’s a treatment that gets rid of stubborn, unwanted fat by freezing it. That’s right, freezing it. When you go in for a Coolsculpting treatment, the device exposes your fat cells to temperatures that around 15 degrees. Those frigid temperatures destroy the fat and your body flushes it out naturally.

Since Coolsculpting gets rid of fat, it’s natural to wonder if it can help you effectively lose weight. The answer is, not really. You might drop a few pounds in the months after your treatment, as your body processes and eliminates the extra fat.

But Coolsculpting is no substitute for a weight loss program. If you’re overweight or obese, your surgeon will want you to lose the weight before you try Coolsculpting. The same rules apply for liposuction. Neither procedure will remove enough fat to cause dramatic weight loss. Additionally, the way Coolsculpting works and the way weight loss works are somewhat different.

What Happens When You Lose Weight

When you lose weight, whether by diet and exercise alone or with help from weight loss surgery, the size of your fat cells shrinks. The less you eat and the more energy you burn, the smaller your fat cells.

The cells are still there, though. Weight loss doesn’t eliminate fat from your body. In fact, the amount of fat you have is predetermined by your genes. The amount of fat people have as a teenagers is usually the amount of fat they have as adults, even if it looks like there’s more fat.

What changes is the size of those fat cells. If you diet and drop the weight, your fat cells become smaller. If you put the weight back on or never make an effort to lose weight, the cells grow larger. You’re gaining weight, but you’re not gaining additional fat cells.

Where Does That Fat Come From?

So if your body doesn’t make more fat cells, where does the extra fat come from when you gain weight? It comes from the food you eat.

Everytime you eat, the food moves through your digestive system. It then reaches the liver, the organ responsible for processing and detoxifying food and substances. The liver turns the fat from your food into energy for your body to use.

Some people’s bodies use a lot of energy, so the fat is put to good use pretty quickly. Other people are slower to use energy. Or, they might have eaten a lot more food than their body needs. That extra fat needs to go somewhere.

So it goes to already existing fat cells in the body, making them bigger.

What Happens During Coolsculpting

The Coolsculpting process isn’t the same as the weight loss process. You’re not shrinking your fat cells when you have a Coolsculpting treatment. You’re destroying them. Coolsculpting gets rid of anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of fat cells in the treated area.

Coolsculpting only affects the fat in the treated area. Fat from one, untreated area can’t travel over to the replace the fat from the treated area, either.

What does your body do with the destroyed fat cells? It processes them and eventually eliminates them. Once the fat cells are in the process of dying, they start to break down. That break down isn’t enough to get rid of the fat, though.

That’s where other cells in your body come in. Those cells rush in and consume the broken down, dead fat cells. Over the course of several weeks or months in some cases, the body is hard at work flushing out those former fat cells for good.

What to Do If You Want to Lose Weight

If you’re interested in Coolsculpting, but need to lose weight first, you have options. One option is diet and exercise. If  you are not significantly overweight, but could stand to lose 20 or so pound, exercise and diet can be your best option.

It’s a good idea to talk to your doctor or work with your doctor if you want to change your diet to lose weight. There are a lot of weight loss diets out there, and some are worse than others. You want a diet that will help you lose weight at a healthy rate, usually about a pound or two a week.

Your diet should also contain all the nutrients you need, such as fat, protein and carbohydrates. Juice diets aren’t a healthy or long-term way to lose weight for example.

If you have a considerable amount of weight to lose, weight loss surgery might be an option. The procedure can physically reduce the size of your stomach, so that you eat less at each meal. Many patients who have weight loss surgery are able to lose 50% or more of their body weight.

Often, Coolsculpting might not be appropriate for body contouring after a dramatic weight loss. You might find that you need liposuction and surgery to lift and tighten your skin after you’ve lost a considerable amount of weight.

Your surgeon can be a great resource for figuring out whether Coolsculpting, weight loss or another procedure is the best choice for you now.

Mirror Mirror Beauty Boutique in Houston, Texas has Coolsculpting available for patients who are looking to permanently eliminate stubborn fat from certain areas of their body. If you’re at your goal weight but still have a jiggle of fat here and there, find out if Coolsculpting is right for you. Call 281-810-9083 to schedule your consultation today.