STACE
PROCEDURE: LOWER BODY LIFT
Patient of: DR. HIMANSU SHAH, SIGNATURE INSTITUTE OF AESTHETIC SCULPTING
Earlier this summer, a study released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) confirmed what many plastic surgeons already knew: increasing numbers of weight loss surgeries have led to an increase in the demand for body contouring surgeries.
The ASPS reports nearly 45,000 patients with massive weight loss opted for body-contouring procedures from board certified plastic surgeons in 2014, seven percent more patients than in 2013. Individual procedures, such as breast, lower body and upper arm lifts and tummy tucks also increased.
The American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery reports a corresponding increase in weight loss surgeries performed in 2013.
Fifteen years ago, these procedures were hardly done. They’ve become much more popular as bariatric surgery has become more common.
After extreme weight loss, patients are often left with loose, sagging skin and excess fat. They frequently become depressed; hiding in their clothes even after losing what they hoped would be a transformative amount of weight. Fortunately, procedures like the lower body lift or upper arm lift can contour the body.
Stace had been heavy all her life. At five feet tall and 280 pounds, she opted for gastric band surgery, which truncates stomach space. The surgery helped Stace lose 120 pounds, but she felt unsatisfied.
“I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘If I don’t do something I’m going to gain all the weight back,’ ” she said. “I looked worse than before. I had all of these folds of skin, and they were pretty much everywhere. I looked like one of those Shar Pei dogs.”
“And clothes didn’t fit right,” she added. “My waist was smaller, but my hips were still big, they were disproportionate. I was so bottom-heavy that I still had to buy bigger clothes.”
Five years after her gastric band surgery, after consulting with friends and due-diligence research, Stace chose to move forward with a lower body lift.
A lower-body lift surgery removes loose skin and tightens and sculpts the buttocks, back, outer and inner thighs, hips and abdomen. Stace’s surgery required a circumferential incision in a bikini-bottom shape. After removing 11 and a half pounds of excess skin, adding a contour by removing sagging skin around the hips and thighs and lifting around the buttocks, her top and bottom halves were pulled back together. Stace dropped three pants sizes in a matter of hours.
Stace first saw her new body in the mirror a few days after surgery, when she was allowed to take her compression stock off long enough to shower.
“I couldn’t stop sobbing,” she said, recalling how reacted to her reflection in a mirror. “I couldn’t believe the difference in how I looked after the surgery compared with how I looked before. I was so amazed. It’s like Dr. Shah was a miracle worker.”
“He completely reshaped me,” Stace said. “I’m pretty articulate, but I have trouble finding the appropriate words to explain how I felt.”
Stace wasn’t the only one doing double takes. She and her husband, Dan, went to visit her parents in California. And her mother wasn’t sure who she was looking at when Stace got out of the car.
“She said to my father, ‘Who’s that with Dan?’ ” Stace said. “And my father said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Once mother recognized daughter, tears flowed anew.
“She couldn’t get over how different I looked,” Stace said of her mother.
Not every person who loses weight is a candidate for one of these procedures. A patient should be maintaining a stable weight and have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or lower, a measurement comparing height and weight, indicating that the patient is no longer obese.
These procedures are a lot of work, and very time-consuming in the operating room, but the moment after surgery when patients see themselves for the very first time is rewarding enough to make it all worth it.
Stace didn’t want to look like a swimsuit model, and she does not. She looks healthy. She looks “normal.” And she looks very happy.