How Much Weight Can I Lose With Liposuction?

Whether you are looking at liposuction to help you possibly lose weight, or are looking at it as a body contouring option to help correct the curves and proportions of parts of your body, you are probably curious how much weight you might be able to lose through the procedure.

And that is definitely understandable. Because this is somewhat of an involved topic, it is most helpful to back up slightly and explain a bit about liposuction and its purpose.

The goal and purpose of the liposuction procedure is to help a patient contour their body, particularly the disproportionate areas that have been hard to tackle through maintaining a decent diet and doing somewhat regular exercise.

Because we lose fat from different parts of the body at different rates, and because it is not actually possible to naturally spot-reduce fat only in certain areas of the body but not others, we are often left with areas of the body where we have a bit too much excess tissue for our liking in some areas but not others.

Liposuction and Body Contouring

The fictional patient we are describing is actually the ideal candidate for liposuction: He or she is in good overall health, has some definite problem spots on his or her body, but is within about 30 perfect of their ideal body weight.

For this patient, liposuction enters the picture and can help him or her get rid of between six and eight pounds of fat, or three to four liters of fat.

Since, unlike dieting and exercise, this fat removal is so hyper-focused on the one or two problem areas that haven’t budged through dieting and exercise, the look that good liposuction can produce is astonishing.

Liposuction and Fat Loss

While liposuction does remove fat and thus remove bodyweight, it isn’t actually a weight loss procedure. Patients who are hoping to have large volumes of fat removed through liposuction will be met with the fact that only a certain amount of fat can even be safely removed in any one surgical session.

Removing beyond 2,500 cubic centimeters of fat (or about 5 pounds) in a single liposuction session requires that the patient stay overnight in the hospital for fluids and monitoring. It can be done. Up to 10 pounds of fat or 5,000 ccs may even be removed. But that comes down to safety and your surgeon being absolutely certain that that is the best treatment option for you.

With that, we return to how much fat you can lose through liposuction and the short answer is:

• Most patients will lose between 2 and 5 pounds of fat
• The upper safe limit is usually between 6 and 8 pounds.

For more information on how liposuction can help you reach your aesthetic goals, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by calling or using our online contact form.