Flatten and Tone Those Abs Minus the Gym With Karyn Grossman

Giving birth to twins is the greatest accomplishment of my life… it however was not the greatest for my stomach! Yes, I am petite, and soaking wet I weigh under 110 pounds. Losing the baby weight wasn’t hard, but my abs/stomach have never been the same. And while I am not opposed to plastic surgery at all, I haven’t pulled the trigger on getting a tummy tuck to get rid of the excess skin, but I’d love to feel better about my mid-section. So I turned to my trusted Dermatologist and dear friend Dr. Karyn Grossman for some help.

She suggested a combination of two lasers to get rid of any stubborn fat pockets and tighten up the skin. CoolSculpting, to freeze fat cells away permanently without any surgery or downtime, and Thermage, which heats just underneath the surface of the skin to stimulate the production of collagen to jump-start your body’s natural healing system. The combination results in skin that is smoother and tighter.

But as she told me when you put two babies in my tiny tummy, that skin is going to stretch and there’s no way to completely get it back, but this is definitely helping. She says: “Having twins can present more difficulty in treating patients. You are very lucky that your belly looks more like a singlet. Some patients with twins have so much extra skin, that minimally invasive and/or non-invasive treatments just won’t do very much.

Again, that first laser is called CoolSculpting. After marking the areas to be treated, I am hooked up to a machine for about 30 minutes. I felt a cold crampy sensation that eventually got somewhat comfortable. Dr. Grossman’s Nurse then used another tool to cover the treated area, kinda like a mini jackhammer, to break up the fat.

As Dr. Grossman explained to me: “Coolsculpting works by freezing the fat cells, causing them to die and slowly resolve. Thus one sees a slow loss of fat over about 3-6 weeks. The downside to cool sculpting is that patients normally need several cycles, and maybe several treatment sessions, to see the best results. But, there is no downtime, no scar, and minimal discomfort after. So many patients are happy to go this route. The procedure actually kills the fat cells – so if you don’t gain weight, it will last.”

While some skin tightening occurs with Coolsculpting… Dr. Grossman says more improvement is seen when you add a skin tightening procedure like Thermage. Here energy, RF, is put onto the skin to build collagen and to tighten the skin as well. Combining both will typically give a better result than either one alone. If the patient has stretch marks, adding Fraxel or Fractora to the treatment will help with these as well. Luckily I didn’t get stretch marks, but we wanted to tighten the skin. So Thermage was the next step for me.

After Dr. Grossman’s Nurse transferred a grid to my stomach, she then worked the wand back and forth across the pattern, this one definitely hurts a bit. It can take a few weeks for the body to produce new collagen, visible improvements are often seen after just one treatment and can last for up to six months.

Dr. Karyn Grossman
2001 Santa Monica Blvd #1250W, Santa Monica, CA 90404
(310) 998-0040