The Truth About Fat Cells

More, the magazine for “older” women who are now young enough to be the children of Boomers, gives us a bit of  interesting and alarming information that all of us should pay attention to.

According to More, “fat liposuctioned from the hips could reappear in as little as 12 months.  The body defends its fat, finding a new home on your belly.”  This statement is disturbing for two reasons:  First, doesn’t the hospital dispose of the fat?  Aren’t most items that are surgically removed from the human body supposed to stay outside of the body?  Isn’t that why trashcans were invented?

Or is fat capable of following one home from the hospital, like a white, blobby homing pigeon?  And, once it gets there, where does it hide for at least a year?  Those of us with teenage sons at home are most likely picturing their bedrooms at this very moment.  Since heavy farm equipment can get lost in the piles of dirty underwear and dirtier magazines,   you already have your answer.  Perhaps the rest of us should all start our 2012 spring cleaning a bit early.  Or, at the very least, check all ceiling fixtures.

For those of you who have come to the party late and have forgotten to bring a hostess gift, liposuction is the procedure in which fat is suctioned off one’s body by a state-of-the-art technological piece of wizardry that bears a striking resemblance to the 1972 Electrolux.  Once suctioned, girdled, and recovered, the now fat-free individual can once again wear, depending on which part of the body was suctioned, a bikini/skinny pants/sleeveless top/mini-skirt or can stop wearing turtlenecks throughout the summer.

Let’s return to doing all we can to ruin your day.  Another grave concern is the following:  It’s bad enough for the fat to return, but what if it doesn’t then attach itself to one’s belly, but goes instead to one’s feet, or worse, to one’s nose?  After all, most of us will probably agree that free-range fat, unlike free-range chicken, is nothing to be encouraged, let alone ingested.

Further research into this crisis reveals a more accurate, if no less acceptable answer.  It appears that human bodies have a relatively finite number of fat cells.  Remove some of them and the remaining ones will swell to epic proportions in order to fill up the original space, in remarkably the same manner as lizards can regrow new tails.  The difference is that the lizard actually wants to grow a new tail.

The question still remains why fat removed from one place will trigger a fat explosion in another, opening up the creepy but very real possibility that fat cells can communicate with each other and make decisions that override the intentions of the humans that feed them and give them life.  This would be sort of like what our children do to us, and that is the creepiest thought yet.