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  • I Still Look Pregnant But I'm Not -- Is a Mommy Makeover For Me?
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Any woman who's had a baby is going to have changes to her body. Even people who think that some women aren't having changes there are. And so essentially a mommy makeover is a constellation of procedures that address those changes. And those begin with breasts. Some breasts get bigger. Most get smaller. Some get droopier. Some get a combination of that. With the tummies in every woman who has a baby, there is stretching of the muscle. Sometimes more, sometimes less. If it's more, somebody can even look still pregnant when they're done after delivering. And there's always extra skin. A tummy tuck is basically an operation that takes care of that extra skin and tightens the muscle. When we deal with breasts, we're either talking about if they've gotten larger, making them smaller. More typically, they've gotten smaller and we're making them larger, more full and often lifting them at the same time. And then there are skin changes that can occur also with pregnancy.

A lot of women get dark patches on their face and those are things we address sometimes with certain types of skin care or chemical peels or even lasers. Then there are other areas in legs, thighs, with fat deposits that seem to appear during pregnancy when a lot of women will have significant weight gain. Even after they've lost their pregnancy weight, they still have areas of fat there. That's where liposuction comes in. Combining those things is what we call the mommy makeover. It's not really a specific procedure. It's a group that you can use, one, two, three, four, and sort of choose as you need. It's safe to do multiple procedures at the same time. I'm a conservative surgeon. I don't believe in extreme makeover but certain things make sense to do together. And there's a lot of similarities between the operating room and the aviation industry. In the aviation industry, the most dangerous part of a flight is when you take off and when you land. Whether a flight is one, two, three, or four hours the risk is the same. A surgery is the same way.

The most dangerous part of surgery is going to sleep and waking up and whether a procedure is one, two, three, or four hours, the risk is the same. So along those lines theoretically a flight from Miami to New York is safer than one that stops at Atlanta. I mean obviously [inaudible 00:02:14] Atlanta, people do this all the time, but from a purely statistical standpoint, safer. Well, the same thing with surgery. If a woman knows she's going to have her breasts done and she knows she's going to have her tummy done, it's safer to do them together than to have two separate going to sleep and waking up and two separate recoveries.

The most important thing is to be a non-smoker. That's number one. The second is prior to surgery, you want to be on a regular diet. You don't want to be taking massive amounts of any kind of vitamin. Thirdly, after surgery I always tell my patients there's a certain period of time where they're not going to exercise. The first two weeks typically they're up and around. We don't want anybody to have any kind of bed rest because that can lead to problems with blood clots in the leg and things like that. So I like people to be active but I don't like to start exercise for the first two weeks. And then when they do start exercising I want them to keep their heart rate down and not strain. Then one month post-surgery, then they can do anything. Boot camp spinning, weights, everything.

I Still Look Pregnant But I'm Not -- Is a Mommy Makeover For Me?

Dr. Robert Rothfield talks about the Mommy Makeover and how the combo procedure addresses several different issues about a woman's post-baby body in one surgical appointment and why doing more than one procedure at a time is actually safer.