Top 3 Procedures To Deal With Excess Skin After Massive Weight Loss

You’re proud of yourself – and justifiably so! – for losing a tremendous amount of weight. You’re undoubtedly feeling much healthier and peppier. But whether you lost weight via dieting or bariatric surgery, there’s now a new problem – excess skin. At Image Surgical Arts, we offer multiple ways to help eliminate loose, sagging skin to cap off your weight loss effort with smooth, firm, pleasing contours.

It’s more than a matter of pride in your new body. Skin that hangs in folds is not only uncomfortable, it affects the fit of your clothes and, for some people, everyday hygiene. Trapped moisture and rubbing skin can invite yeast and other skin infections. So, removing excess skin can improve your health as well as your self-confidence.

What Are Your Options?

Because significant weight loss affects every part of your body (though differently in each person) and factors such as age and genetics can also affect your skin, we offer procedures that will be highly effective and safe for your specific concerns and skin. In general, we can:

1. Surgically remove excess skin. This option is the gold standard, as Dr. Brady Harris likes to say. Surgery is the most invasive option, but it is also the most comprehensive and will ultimately give you maximum results to lift and firm and re-contour virtually any part of your body, especially if you have considerable excess skin.
2. Use a non-surgical technique that uses heat to contract the skin and underlying connective tissues. Renuvion, for example, uses radiofrequency-heated helium plasma (a type of gas) to booth contract skin and stimulate production of new collagen, for ongoing skin improvement.
3. Add volume to re-plump the breasts or buttocks or facial features, for example, rather than removing excess skin. For this we might use implants, fat transfer, and/or injectable fillers.

Dr. Harris works hand-in-hand with each patient to develop a treatment plan that is designed to achieve your desired goals. To do that, he frequently combines procedures – perhaps two or three of the procedure types noted above, and of course procedures that aim to improve contouring in specific areas.

Tummy tuck, or abdominoplasty, is one of the most common. If you have extensive excess abdominal skin. Dr. Harris may perform a “fleur-de-lis” procedure, in which he makes a vertical incision up the middle as well as the usual horizontal hip-to-hip incision just above the pubic bone, to remove more skin.

Other options include:

• Breast lift, with or without addition of implants or fat for re-shaping
• Face and/or neck lift, if dermal fillers won’t be adequate to produce optimal results
• Full or upper arm lift
• Thigh lift
• Buttock lift

One plus to consider is that Dr. Harris often has to remove residual unwanted fat when he performs a tummy tuck. In this case, he may be able to use that fat (prepared for re-injection) to accomplish desired “lift” elsewhere.

He may also choose to add non-surgical options such as Renuvion mentioned above, to further enhance skin tightening and resurfacing results.

Ready to Lose that Excess Skin?

Excited as you are to put the finishing touches on your impressive weight loss, it is vital that you remain at your new weight for several months before undergoing surgery. This ensures your body is ready for further “work,” and it avoids potential problems in the future if you were to lose more weight. Removing excess skin is not something you want to do again.

The best way to know which procedures will work best for you is to schedule a consultation with Dr. Harris. We encourage you to do that, so you can get on with your lift in the best shape of your life. You can give us a call at 615-499-4224, and of course you can find lots more information here about different procedures here on our website.