In my long experience of cosmetic procedures/surgery the results are never as good as I imagine they're going to be. I've found that either the procedure does work well but there's an unforeseen downside or that it doesn't make as much difference as I'd hoped. Coolsculpting falls into the latter category.
I've always been slim, skinny even. In my mid/late 40s I suddenly put on a lot of weight around my middle that no amount of exercise or dieting would shift. When it got to the point where my face was looking gaunt but the fat around my middle wasn't shifting, I had liposuction. Coolsculpting wasn't around then. Liposuction fell into the first category - it worked, it took out a lot of fat from my lower abdomen, but there was a downside in that it left some unevenness to the contour of my abdomen. I later had a second liposuction procedure to the midriff area which didn't work as well as the first.
Then Coolsculpting came along and I thought it might get rid of the fat in the midriff area that still bothered me. The doctor I consulted was Tracy Mountford at the Cosmetic Skin Clinic (who I mentioned on the SH thread the other day). She assessed me as a suitable case for treatment but said something like 'I warn you, it's addictive'. How right she was! Having had it for the midriff I then had it for the back and flanks (love handles). And then went round again, redoing the same areas (by that stage it had been discovered that you really needed more than one session for each area). I'm not sure how many sessions I had - around 20.
It does seem to work a bit. And because it works, you think - or I thought - that just another session would get the result I wanted.
I think I was in the end happy with the result but I'm not sure that it's been permanent, even though it's supposed to be and even though my weight hasn't changed. I also think - not sure if this is true - that if you remove fat cells from one area, fat gets laid down in fat cells elsewhere. I wonder whether removing fat from my abdomen meant that my back got fatter. I wonder whether I ended up chasing the fat around my body!
In retrospect I think I might have been better having more liposuction than embarking on such a lengthy (and expensive) course of Coolsculpting - but I didn't know it was going to be so lengthy when I started. I think liposuction is a surer way of removing fat and I'm sure techniques have improved hugely over the past 15 or so years since I had it.
Coolsculpting techniques have improved a lot too since I first had it. They can now treat a bigger area in one go and what used to be a 60 minute cycle is now down to 30 minutes (maybe less - I haven't enquired recently).
I found the procedure itself fine and was always very well looked after by the practitioners at the Cosmetic Skin Clinic.
www.ayoungerskin.com
).
I don’t know if that’s meant to have that impact but I think it’s a mixture of that and having really nailed my routine the past year. The pore size is a bit thing for me