Robert Whitfield MD discusses combining a tummy tuck with fat grafting to the buttocks, harvesting tissue from the waist and love handles to reshape and augment the rear while narrowing the waist. The procedure requires expertise and many patients don't know these options exist together.
We do abdominoplasties combined with fat grafting all the time. It's a routine thing. It's a great way to use that material that you would normally discard and go ahead and augment other areas. So you take from the lower portion of the waist what would be lower back, love handle area, and then recontour the hip area with it. Patient comes in for a tummy tuck. A person unfamiliar with body contouring is going to say, oh, yeah, sure, you can have a tummy tuck. We're going to incise the lower abdominal tissue and discard it, close it, reposition the belly button. But in reality, maybe that patient needs contouring where you do liposuction to create a more narrow waist and then gluteal reshaping so that you can improve the contour not only of the upper buttock, middle buttock, and lower third. It requires a bit of expertise and experience to understand what the option will be, because the patient may have no idea. They may not understand what's available, what can be done because their provider is not experienced or qualified in that manner. The addition of body contouring to a tummy tuck procedure gives you much more power to reshape the buttock and narrow the waist all at the same time to really give powerful results to the procedure.
