If you’re waging an unsuccessful battle of the bulge in your belly, you look around for solutions that can help give you a leg-up. Of the many procedures available, a tummy tuck sounds like the one that can help you best reach your goals. Perhaps, but it’s important to note that a tummy tuck is designed to tackle a specific problem — excess skin.
At Breast Body Beauty Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, Dr. Aisha Baron and our team excel at helping people realize their aesthetic goals, from head to toe. Right in the middle lies your abdomen and we offer several different options for helping you to attain that tight, taut belly that you’d be proud to show off.
To help you narrow down which abdominal procedure is right for you, we thought we’d use this opportunity to take a closer look at what we can, and cannot, achieve with a tummy tuck. If a tummy tuck wouldn’t help you reach your goals, don’t fret — chances are, we offer a procedure that will.
The medical term for a tummy tuck is an abdominoplasty and our primary goal with this procedure is to tighten loose abdominal skin.
During the procedure, we make a small horizontal incision in your lower abdomen and then peel the skin back to reveal your muscles. In many cases, the muscles in this area have loosened or separated and we first bring them back together and tighten them, using sutures to hold them in place.
Once we’ve adjusted the layer of connective tissues below your skin, we pull your skin back down over the area, draw it taut, remove the excess tissue, and then suture the two ends together. In most cases, we create a new hole for your belly button. (If you’re struggling with a small bulge in your lower belly, we can perform a mini tummy tuck in which we tighten the skin below your belly button.)
Some of the best candidates for this type of surgery are those who have lost a considerable amount of weight, only to be left with loose skin that doesn’t bounce back over the slimmer profile. As well, women who go through pregnancy often struggle with loose skin and separated abdominal muscles afterward.
Another reason why people come to us for a tummy tuck is simple aging. As your skin loses elasticity and tone over time, it can droop and sag. With a tummy tuck, we can retighten this area, restoring that firmer, tighter belly you had when you were younger.
While the primary objective of a tummy tuck is to tighten loose abdominal skin, we can also remove fat through liposuction at the same time. In adding this step, a tummy tuck becomes more of an all-around procedure that can address bulging bellies.
While this may sound like a great weight-loss tool, we don’t want you to think of it as such. A tummy tuck is a great way to put the finishing touches on your weight loss efforts by eliminating loose skin and stubborn belly fat, but it’s really more of a final step than a substitute.
If you’re checking all the boxes so far, we want to add some final considerations as to your candidacy for a tummy tuck. This is a surgical procedure so you need to be in good overall health. If you’re a smoker or you have a pre-existing health condition that makes an elective procedure such as tummy tuck ill-advised, we can discuss your options.
We hope that this information gives you a clearer idea of what we can achieve through a tummy tuck. If you have more questions or you would like to explore other options for tightening and firming your belly (and we do have some), please don’t hesitate to contact our office in Marietta, Georgia, to schedule a consultation.
