There’s not much money in my bank account at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future. We can always hope.
I like to have at least a little bit of money stashed away, for a rainy day. (Yes, it’s been raining here in Pagosa Springs, thank heavens.) Which could be under my mattress, or in an actual bank.
Apparently, there’s a new type of banking that’s become popular in the U.S.
Fat banking.
Here’s how one plastic surgeon — Kristy Hamilton MD — explained the process.
Fat banking is the cryopreservation and storage of a patient’s live adipose tissue for use at a later date. This allows a patient to receive several rounds of fat grafting from a single harvest, allowing for higher volumes of fat to be transferred over time, with subsequent transfers happening without general anesthesia and the recovery of multiple rounds of liposuction.
The tissue is sent to a specialized lab, processed with minimal manipulation to remove waste and dead cells and cryopreserved using Tissue & Cell Technologies’ proprietary process. It is then stored in liquid nitrogen at -190 degrees Celsius. The surgeon then calls back volumes of the patient’s fat for subsequent fat grafting, which is ready to load into syringes and inject under local anesthesia in the comfort of the clinic.
The ‘harvest’ mentioned in Dr. Hamilton’s explanation happens in an operating room. Basically, the surgeon sticks a fancy vacuum clear under your skin and vacuums out some of the “adipose tissue” (fat) that you couldn’t manage to get rid of through diet and exercise.
Fat has gotten some negative press, over the past 100 years. Once upon a time, fat was a desirable thing, because it helped keep your body warm during the winter months when you didn’t want to chop more firewood. In fact, that’s why “adipose tissue” was invented in the first place.
The common description, back then, for a person possessing this valuable tissue, was: “fat and happy”.
Everyone understood, back then, that skinny people were more likely to be depressed, and angry.
But times change. And so does food.
And so do our opinions about body image.
In the case of food, nearly everything you can buy in a grocery store now contains either high-fructose corn syrup, or white sugar. Or both.
The processed-food industry has made a effort to remove the fat from their products, on the mistaken assumption that “fat” in food was causing unwanted “fat” in our bodies. But as the fat disappeared from the food, it magically appeared in the overall American population, which is now suffering from an obesity epidemic.
Much to the delight of the plastic surgeons who own vacuum cleaners.
But now we have some new drugs referred to as “GLP-1” that have made weight loss a piece of cake. People who never dreamed of once again fitting into the dress they wore at their high school prom are looking like skinny scarecrows.
Turns out, a “skinny scarecrow” is not really that attractive. A certain quantity of fat, injected under your skin in select locations (that will not be specifically mentioned in a family-friendly news website) can actually make you appear more suitable for a romantic relationship.
Enter fat banking. Before you start your instant slimming routine using GLP-1 drugs, your friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon can remove some of your precious adipose tissue and send it off to a company that specializes in freezing fat for later use. Just in case.
Because, once you actually get skinny, you will regret that you lost fat in certain areas where you didn’t want to lose it. So your surgeon calls up the bank and makes a withdrawal, and carefully inserts the fat back into your body in places where it belonged in the first place.
For a price, of course. None of this is cheap.
From PlasticSurgury.org:
ASPS: What can a patient expect from upfront costs or storage fees associated with fat banking?
Dr. Smith: It can cost $2,000 to $8,000, depending on the volume of fat being banked, and then it is probably $200 to $1,000 a year to keep that fat banked in a safe, compliant way.
Dr. Hamilton: There are several ways for a patient to pay for fat banking storage. The most popular option is to pay for an all-in-one package that includes transport, processing and storage of fat for one year, with up to three withdrawals included.
It’s much cheaper just to hold on to your own fat. Like we used to do.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.