Crafting A Better Butt With Your Own Fat

Everyone has heard the phrase, “My butt is too big!”, whether the person was being serious or joking. There are, however, real people who have the opposite problem: a serious lack of volume in the behind! Dr. Bruce Van Natta, a board certified plastic surgeon from Indianapolis, has a unique solution for patients looking to fill out their hind quarters… Doctors can now put some of their own fat from elsewhere into the buttocks!

By: Bruce Van Natta, MD
and Adam McMillon
ThePlasticSurgeryChannel.com

Contouring the Body with Liposuction

Liposuction remains the go-to procedure when a patient desires a more evenly contoured midsection. Plastic surgeons use lipo techniques to both remove fat permanently and contour different areas by smoothing the fat. “A lot of people come in and maybe they’re having a tummy tuck or they’re just bothered by their genetics,” says Dr. Van Natta. “When you’re too big around the butt and too thick through the waist… patients are bothered by that. They don’t want to look like a bowling pin! Traditionally in that situation, we would use liposuction. We would carve out the love handle area to create more of a waist. If they had extra fat in the saddle bag, or in the area beneath the buttock, we would take fat out there, too.”

Taking fat from here and putting it back in there!

One of the hottest procedures in cosmetic surgery is fat grafting, or the removal of fat from one area of the body and reinserting it into another area that is lacking volume. While most fat grafting procedures involve refilling lost volume in the face, shoring up breast augmentation, and even putting some fat back into the hands. Dr. Van Natta has found another area of the body that could use some fat: the buttocks. “What I’m noticing more and more is that some ladies have a deficiency in the buttocks,” says Van Natta. “You know, a lot of people complain, ‘My butt is too big’, but that’s not everybody! There are women who have deficiencies there. After I’ve taken fat out from the waist or love handles, we can do use that fat for volume. I can take some of that extra fat and put it in, completely reshaping the buttock.”

The fat grafting timeline

The benefits of fat grafting are many, but one thing that really sells the procedure to patients is that the fat is their own. It’s not a foreign material or chemical, it’s just fat from elsewhere on their body moved to a new location! “With fat grafting, we first carve out the waist with liposuction,” says Van Natta. “If we need to take some extra from the saddle bag and posterior thigh regions, we do that, too. Instead of throwing the removed fat away, we insert it into the areas of deficiency in the buttock, and create these really cute butts!”

“It’s exciting because we’re getting better outcomes for patients than we could just with liposuction.”