On her mission for a tauter tummy, Imogen Edwards-Jones continues to get her fat cells frozen off
There is something rather sobering about freezing your fat into big hard ‘butter’ blocks and then having the frozen fat vigorously massaged by someone else. We all have a part of our bodies that we are not terribly fond, or indeed proud of, and my rather wobbly, ripply, rolly-polly middle-aged paunch has always been my bête noire. Something to be covered, hidden in a one-piece bathing suit, disguised by a baggy jumper, tamed by some rather thick pants elastic. So to have it frozen and then pummelled by the very polite woman at Medicetics was something of a moment. No one gets to see the gut, let alone touch it!
And I have to say for the next week following my two-hour marathon belly freezing session, I could barely touch the poor thing either. Cool Sculpting is not pain free. In fact, my stomach was really quite sore for the first week. There was cramping, bruising, there were shooting pains and my skin felt completely numb to the touch like I was suffering from a terrible bout of belly pins and needles. Post-freezing (so the lovely Vicky Dondos told me), the skin and tissue take a while to recover from what is clearly quite a traumatic process. It takes time to heal. Something that was not entirely helped by my three-old-son constantly hurling himself headlong at my middle like he’s a Rugby prop-forward trying to take me out.
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After the first week the bruising disappeared and the tenderness went away. But it took a good five to six weeks for all sensation to return to my skin. After a while I forgot I had dead patches below my belly button and couldn’t feel my stomach properly. And then suddenly one day I realised that I could.
The same could be said for the fat. Cool Sculpting freezes the fat cells thereby killing them. So as your cells slowly die, they are passed through the system in the urine and are fabulously flushed away. It is a slow process that takes about two to three months.
At first I didn’t really notice. I have been living on dust for the last three months anyway, being nagged and weighed by that extremely bossy nutritionist Amelia Freer . Not so much as a peanut, or a cheese and onion crisp, or nice warm croissant, or a buttery baked potato has passed my carb-starved lips for what feels like a decade, so I was being careful. Then one day I suddenly caught the profile view of my belly in the mirror and my muffin top had disappeared. It had vanished!
My belly was not pancake flat, because that is never going to happen. But the fat paunch that looked like I’d snacked on a vastly inflated football had gone. It was extraordinary. As had the other fat-ball I had under my boobs. Like some sort of weird lifejacket made up of excess vodka and biscuits, I have always had an odd pocket of fatty flesh across my ribs. But no more! It too has slowly seeped away and been flushed down the drains.
Cool Sculpting really does work. But it is not as totally pain free and easy as I had rather blithely thought. But for pockets of stubborn fat, for problem areas that you really hate and that you spend a lifetime trying to disguise/hide; it might be just about perfect - bruising, pins and needles and head butting three-year olds notwithstanding.
Dr Vicky Dondos and Cool Sculpting are at Medicetics , tel: 020 7402 2033