It is my understanding that when you gain weight your fat cells get bigger and when you lose weight your fat cells shrink, but the overall number of them always remains the same. Now, when you get liposuction you actually have the fat cells removed permanently from the body. At least it says so from a brief google glance.
So I’m curious about what would happen if you had extensive liposuction, a really really thorough fat cell removal surgery. Would your body start generating new fat cells? What if you ate a lot of fat afterward, is it possible that you wouldn’t have enough fat cells to store it? Would it then be eliminated à la Olestra? Is there a limit to a single fat cell’s size? What if you only had your stomach liposuctioned, would all the fat then be stored in your thighs or other parts of your body?
I have heard that if you get liposuctioned on your tummy and continue eating all the fat cells in the rest of your body take up the excess, so you get fat shoulders etc. Dont know if this is true though
You get lipo on your tummy. You had a million fat cells in that area, now you are sucked down to 250,000.
Your tummy area has 1/4 of the fat storage capacity. You shrunk your tummy area and directly affected its ability to store fat (limiting it size/proportion to the rest of your body).
You then over eat and remain too sedintary vs the calories you ingest. Fat needs to be stored. Your tummy area is out of storage space. Fat gets deposited elsewhere at a greater rate vs what it got stored at before. It is STILL getting deposited in the tummy area, but all over your body as well.
You affected your **PROPORTIONS ** with liposuction, but you can be ‘fat’. By ingesting more calories than you burn, all other parts of your body will grow (tummy too).
You have simply altered your proportions, so that should body fat increase over time, you will develop a different ‘shape’. You know, you might have been a pear shape, and now with lip and fat gain afterwars you are more of an apple shape.
I think it is a falsehood to think that liposucked fat cells will never be replaced. If you keep flooding your bloodstream with fat that needs to be stored, it will go into the old, existing fat cells, yes, but also in newly created ones that form in the lipoed body parts. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.
I am fairly certain that new fat cells can always be created but they usually don’t get destroyed. Liposuction can remove some of the excess ones but new ones could take their place.
“At one time, experts believed that once the fat cells had been laid down (around the age of two), they simply swelled and shrank in response to the food supply. Now many researchers in the field believe that new fat cells can be created in the presence of continual overfeeding. This makes sense when you consider that some morbidly obese people tip the scales at 800 or 1,000 pounds.”
http://www.liposuction.com/faqs/realistic_expectations.php
3. Will the fat cells grow back after liposuction?
Liposuction removes fat cells permanently. The fat cells that are removed by liposuction can never come back, however, if the patient gains a significant amount of weight, then new fat cell can develop. With a small weight gain, existing fat cells simply get bigger by accumulating more fat within the existing cell. However, with an increase of more than 10% of body weight, one can expect new fat cell development in all areas of the body, including areas previously treated by liposuction. As an adult gains larger amounts of weight, increasing numbers of fat cells (lipocytes) are formed from existing pleuripotential connective tissue cells by a process of differentiation. Existing connective tissue cells first change into immature fat cells (lipoblasts), and then develop into mature fat cells with progressive obesity.
Don’t forget the fat cells in the “tummy” (abdominal wall) are only the outer layer. The fat cells around the viscera are copious and numerous in fat people, and these are the ones that are associated with the deleterious consequences of morbid obesity such as hypertension, diabetes, the metabolic syndrome, etc. We use the tummy fat as a stand-in to guess at the dimensions of the visceral fat, but if you liposuck the tummy, you no longer know how many calories you are packing into your omentum and mesentery and around your kidneys.
When I open up hefty people they may have a 3" thick abdominal fat layer, but that is nothing to the seas of fat within. I’ve had more than one police officer glance over and announce he was going on a diet and back to the gym. It’s - how shall I say this. It’s a tremendously motivating sight.
What the other posters said, is correct. It was thought the number of fat cells in your body was limited. They simply got bigger or shrank. Research into the matter confirms your body will grow new fat cells, though not at the same rate that they were originally created.