Going South: Cool Sculpting

I hope you are sitting down because this is not for someone with a weak stomach. Or a small stomach. Or a flat stomach. Indeed this is strictly a fat gut procedure, or for those who can pinch more than a fistful around their bums, tums, saddle bags and bingos. And it is not for the faint hearted either.

Cool Sculpting is one of these new fangled treatments you think sounds like a whole load of hocus pocus beauty bunkum that shouldn’t actually work. In my travels, I have heard of two reasons as to its origin. Firstly that jockeys lost the fat off their inner thighs due to riding on freezing cold saddles during the winter months, or secondly that children who sucked endless ice-lollies wore away fat patches round their mouths.

Either way the principal is this: you freeze the hell out of your fat, freeze it solid enough to kill the fat cells.Then the murdered cells slowly disappear, gently dissipating through your system, coming out in your urine and do not return. Thereby ridding your average faffypuff of stubborn deposits of adipose. They are history, they don’t ever come back again. So far, so ludicrous.

Anyway, having dieted my tits off – literally, down from a D-cup to a size B – I still have on my stomach what is more commonly referred to as a muffin top. It is a rolly polly bit of fat that seeps out from under my T-shirt when I least expect it. The problem is to get rid of the rolly polly I would have to be SO thin that I’d be all pancakes with an empty-sack-arse. So in the advancement of all things Gloss, I decided to give this ridiculous idea a whirl.

MORE GLOSS: Make me flab-u-less

Fortunately, I was in the capable hands of Dr Vicky Dondos  at Medicetics  on Connaught Street, who I would, and have, trusted with my mouth, my cheeks, my forehead, barcode, tramlines etc. I know her well, which is fortunate as I stand there, posting escaping bush hair back into my pants, as she photographs the contours of my gut.

“So the upper stomach fat and the lower section?” she suggests, checking the shots on her camera. “Two lots.”

A double gut? I’ve got a double gut! I have eaten nothing but dust for months and she still thinks I have a double-gut. This friendship is so ovah! I think. “Whatever you say,” I mumble, forcing a smile through gritted teeth.

She talks me carefully through all the side effects; numbness, tingling, shooting pain, bruising, quite serious down time etc etc. I nod away, still seething about the double gut.

Finally she takes me into the treatment room, where there is a giant machine with a large sucking mouth. I’m told to lie down and choose from a section of magazines as one would in the hairdresser. This is a long, long treatment – one hour for each section. So being a double gut that means I am sitting here for two whole dull fat-freezing hours.

I lie back and think of Grazia while she attaches the sucker to my lower gut. It hoovers in and pulls up all the adipose, creating a vacuum, which it then proceeds to squeeze and freeze between giant cold metal bars. It is the oddest sensation. Not hideous, but not far off. It pinches the skin a bit and it makes it hard to move as you are terrified of releasing the vacuum. I spend the next 60 mins looking at ‘Kylie shopping in Balenciaga,’ and ‘Jennifer Aniston out to lunch in her engagement ring,’ wishing the hour would pass more quickly.

MORE GLOSS: Coconut oil, the totally tropical fat

Finally time’s up and Vicky’s assistant comes in to turn the machine off. After a few rocking moves to ease the mouth off my stomach, I am confronted with a frozen solid ‘butter bar’ of my own fat. Solid, square and a yellow pink, it sits hard on my stomach like a brick. It is singularly one of the most unpleasant things I have ever seen in my entire life. And I’ve been around a bit.

“That’s a good bar,” nods the assistant, impressed, as she begins vigorously to massage the blood back into the rigid yellow block. “Good,” she nods again. “It’s turning nice and pink.”

Christ, I think as I fight the desire to vomit all over myself. I’m a double gut. I’ve got to do THIS all over again….

Dr Vicky Dondos and Cool Sculpting are at Medicetics, tel: 020 7402 2033