Is a Tummy Tuck Permanent?

If you’re interested in tightening and smoothing the abdominal area, then a tummy tuck at DrYoungForever in San Antonio, TX offers a permanent fix. Dr. Robert N. Young, the founder of DrYoungForever, is uniquely qualified to give you results you’ll love.

Is a Tummy Tuck Permanent?

If you’re able to keep a stable weight, you can expect your new contours to stay smooth for a lifetime. How much your abdominal region changes as you gain weight will depend on your genetic body fat distribution pattern.

If you’re a person who typically puts on weight in the stomach first, you may notice a change in as little as 7 pounds of weight gain. If you don’t tend to put on fat in your abdominal area first, you may be able to gain more like 15 pounds before seeing any permanent changes.

As you can see, the key to a permanent tummy tuck is to maintain your weight!

Tips for Maintaining Your Weight After a Tummy Tuck

Many people lose weight successfully more than once during their lives but then struggle to keep the weight off. The key for most people is anaerobic exercise and a healthy diet that leaves room for some indulgence from time to time.

Anaerobic Exercise

It’s tough to fit exercise into a schedule, particularly if you’re a mother with lots of responsibilities. The good news is that you don’t need to spend hours at the gym. Muscle burns much more fat than other types of tissue, even when you’re at rest, so performing 20 minutes of resistance training with heavy weights, twice a week, will go a long time way to helping you build and keep muscle that will improve your body’s ability to use calories well throughout the day.

Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise is a great way to keep yourself fit and healthy in other ways. It doesn’t particularly help with weight loss, despite public misperceptions, because the old adage is really true: “you can’t outrun a bad diet.” Exercise generally makes you hungry out of proportion to the amount of exercise you’ve actually done, as your body tries to make up for extra calorie expenditure by impelling you to eat. But aerobic effort keeps you moving and is good for you in every way, from supporting your cardiovascular system to improving your mood. All you need to do is walk: there’s no need to take up a running regimen.

The key to overcoming this issue is to be aware of it and to plan for healthy eating after exercise. You should plan some indulgences into your life, but they should not be after exercise, when your body is tempting you to overeat already. Plan a healthy, high-protein meal to help your body recover, and organize your schedule so you have other things to do that can distract you from any desire to eat after your planned meal is over.

Exercising After Your Procedure

Immediately after your procedure, you should not exercise except as advised by Dr. Young. He will let you know when to begin gentle exercise, like walking, and when you can move on to more strenuous exercise. Additionally, if you lose too much weight quickly after your tummy tuck, you may experience sagging skin as your body struggles to keep up.

Diet

Diet always has more effect on your weight than exercise: you can only really maintain your weight through making good dietary choices. When it comes to weight
alone, you’ll never exercise away a bad diet, but a good diet can compensate for a lack of exercise. (Bear in mind that this interplay is only in the realm of weight loss or gain: lack of exercise harms you in many ways unrelated to your weight).

The key thing to avoid is processed food and drinks. Processed food is full of seed oils, sugar, refined grains, corn syrup, and other junk that fill you up but don’t give you any nutritional support. Starch and sugar make you crave more starch and sugar, and they give you nothing that you need. Prioritize healthy fats from grass-fed and pastured animal sources and vegetables and fruits that are naturally high in fat, like avocados, olives, and coconuts. Avoid seed oils and sunflower oils. Enjoy plenty of protein, again from pastured and grass-fed sources. Get lots of fresh, whole fruits and vegetables into your diet.

However, another key to maintaining a good diet is to allow for indulgence. Denying yourself endlessly will only do one of two things: either it will make you miserable, or it will cause you to suddenly give up and eat everything in sight when you can no longer stand the austerity. Deliberately plan moments when you’ll break your normal pattern of eating with things you really love, whether that’s Saturday pizza night, a once-a-month meal out with the girls, or a bi-weekly “baking night” with the kids, where you can all enjoy the production.

Good Candidate for a Tummy Tuck

Good candidates for this procedure are within about 20 pounds of their ideal weight, but they find themselves unable to trim up their stomachs. This is most often the result of weak abdominal muscles, which often come after childbirth but can also result from other issues. If your abdominal muscles are weak, you may also suffer from chronic pain in the lower back or from stress urinary incontinence.

It’s also important that you be in generally good health and able to refrain from alcohol and tobacco/nicotine for several weeks before and after your procedure. When you come to talk to us, we’ll go over your candidacy and goals and help you understand if this is the best procedure to meet them.

Upper Abs vs Lower Abs

Some people have no problem with their lower abs. If you just need a bit of extra fat removed from the area below the navel and some excess skin removed, you may be perfect for a partial abdominoplasty. A full abdominoplasty repositions the navel and tightens the muscles in the entire region. Again, the key here is to come to talk to Dr. Young about your needs and how they can best be met.

What Does a Full Abdominoplasty Do? 

Tummy tucks do more than just make you look better. They can also improve medical issues like stress urinary incontinence. This is common among women who have just given birth because a vaginal birth stresses the pelvic floor muscles. If they are stretched too far, it can be difficult for them to return to a state where you can easily avoid leaking when coughing, sneezing, running, etc.

Ventral hernias can also be corrected with this procedure, which is important for two reasons. Not only do you want to address your current ventral hernia, but you also don’t want to ever have another one. Once you’ve had one hernia, the chances of having another are very high. With a full abdominoplasty, the walls of the abdomen are tightened, which greatly mitigates your risk of ever having another ventral hernia.

The Secret of a Successful Permanent Procedure

The most important factor in ensuring a successful, and permanent, procedure is the skill of your surgeon. Dr. Young is a board-certified plastic surgeon, renowned in Texas for his skill. But that skill has been developed through years of intensive practice, not just in surgery but in life. Dr. Young graduated from West Point and became a US Army Ranger, serving as a platoon leader until 1971. He then shifted to a career in medical school, where he pursued plastic surgery and performed major reconstruction procedures for the military until 1990. After a long career serving his country, and learning about the human body and how to repair it along the way, Dr. Young opened his private practice in San Antonio.

Since then, Dr. Young has been on the cutting edge as an early adopter of minimally invasive surgical procedures and involved in nationwide studies to investigate how to improve procedures and enhance safety for every patient. You are in good hands with Dr. Young.

Consider a Tummy Tuck for Yourself 

A tummy tuck could be the way to enhance your contours, improve the strength of your abdominal muscles, and even resolve issues like hernias and stress urinary incontinence. Talk to us at DrYoungForever in San Antonio, TX today to set up a consultation. We’ll answer all your questions and help you decide if this is right for you!