Abdominoplasty

Tummy tucks or abdominoplasty surgeries are extremely popular because so many women have pregnancies. As you may or may not know, pregnancy can dramatically change your body in ways that you can't fix on your own. Yes, if you gain a little bit of extra baby fat, you can lose that in a gym or with dieting. However, there are a couple of things that pregnancy does to your body that you yourself can't change. For one, if you have extra skin redundancy at the lower part of the abdomen, you can't fix that. Also, pregnancy causes a process called rectus diastasis, where the abdominal muscles actually split, which makes the belly protrude out more, and that also cannot be fixed no matter how many crunches or how many times you go to the gym. For those reasons, abdominoplasty or tummy tucks are extremely popular because surgery can fix those things, and it can take your abdomen or turn it back to the way it was before you had your first pregnancy. When you're doing a tummy tuck, you are basically resurfacing the skin of the abdomen, and you want the thickness of that to be uniform. It's very common for women to hold fat centrally in the abdomen. It is a very normal and common thing that when you're doing a tummy tuck, you'll do a little bit of liposuction in that upper abdomen just to make everything nice and even so that when it's pulled tight, you get the smoothest, tightest, best-looking result. The recovery time for a tummy tuck is actually a little bit involved. I would say of all the plastic surgeries I do, tummy tuck probably carries the most recovery. And not to say that it's a bad recovery, because it's not. Everyone who has a tummy tuck does it as a day's surgery. They go home the same day. No one's calling my office in the middle of the night because they're in so much pain. But with a tummy tuck, when you tighten those abdominal wall muscles, it does make you sorer than for other types of surgery like stand-alone liposuction or breast surgery. Now, the technology has gotten better. We now inject long-lasting local anesthetics into that abdominal wall, so people are not near as sore today as they were 10 years ago. But if you're thinking about having a tummy tuck, it's best if you can take a couple of weeks off work. That doesn't mean that you'll be in so much pain for those two weeks that you're in bed all the time, but you want to make sure that you have enough time to recover appropriately because that will give you a better outcome. I like to say about two weeks is the standard time that people need to take off if they're thinking about having a tummy tuck.