Ben Garves Podcast: Fitness, Nutrition, and Activism - What's a Brazilian butt lift and why's it so dangerous?

What's a Brazilian butt lift and why's it so dangerous?

10/21/21 • 2 min

Ben Garves Podcast: Fitness, Nutrition, and Activism

Your Brazilian butt lift may bite you in the butt. Sorry. That headline was just asking for a dad joke.

Spend ten minutes on social media nowadays and it's hard to ignore the emphasis society has been putting on the ol’, as Forest Gump would say, “buttocks.”

Brazilian butt lifts are more dangerous than other cosmetic surgeries

That emphasis shows as the number of Brazilian butt lifts being performed is growing rapidly, despite the procedure having the highest mortality rate of any cosmetic surgery. Yes, greater than liposuction, breast augmentation, nose jobs, and the other myriad of tucks and lifts.

We live at an interesting intersection of body positivity - being proud of who you are and having the ability to physically manifest who you are inside. Those two things can complement each other, or they can live at odds with one another.

What does a Brazilian butt lift cost?

People are flouting their naturally-born, hard-earned, or hard-paid-for hourglass figures, and it has many dashing to surgeons, waving cash, and booking gluteal enhancements. The Brazilian butt lift, often referred to as a “BBL” can run anywhere between nine and ten-thousand dollars. It takes fat from the sides, back, and stomach, and injects it into the booty.

How common are Brazilian butt lifts?

In 2020, it’s estimated by the Aesthetic Society that there were over forty-thousand butt augmentations. It’s a procedure which, according to a report by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation in 2017, results in death for two out of every 6,000 procedures. In fact, the number was so high that in 2018, surgeons in the United Kingdom received guidance from the British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery to stop performing the procedure outright. It’s not a mandate, but it is a strong condemnation.

Why are Brazilian butt lifts so dangerous?

Your butt seems like an innocent place to store a little badonk, but the buttocks actually have a vast network of blood vessels, some of which are very large and drain into the inferior vena cava, a vessel which is a highway directly to the heart. If the fat being injected gets into one of these main passageways, it can cause immediate death as it travels to the heart and lungs.

This may not be a deterrent for many, especially if you view yourself as living in a body you’re not comfortable with and one in which hard work can’t get you the body desire or feel at home in. But the least we can do is to do our research, be aware of the risks, and put ourselves in the best possible position to lead a happy, healthy life.

Your Brazilian butt lift may bite you in the butt. Sorry. That headline was just asking for a dad joke.

Spend ten minutes on social media nowadays and it's hard to ignore the emphasis society has been putting on the ol’, as Forest Gump would say, “buttocks.”

Brazilian butt lifts are more dangerous than other cosmetic surgeries

What does a Brazilian butt lift cost?

How common are Brazilian butt lifts?

Why are Brazilian butt lifts so dangerous?

Previous Episode

When should you get tested for diabetes?

Updated screening recommendations for Type 2 diabetes suggests your doctor start testing you at a younger age.

The USPSTF, which stands for the United States Preventive Services Task Force, released a recommendation this month which states the screening age for overweight and obese Americans should be lowered from 40 to 35.

The idea behind screening people five years earlier is that doctors can catch many people in a prediabetic state and help them make lifestyle changes (like nutrition and exercise) before they are diagnosed as full-on diabetics.

What is diabetes?

Diabetes is a simple disease to explain. It’s where your blood sugar levels are higher than your body can process. Foods and drinks you consume contain sugars and other materials (like fats and other carbohydrates), which your body processes into one particular type of sugar, called glucose.

Glucose is an important part of how your body functions - our cells burn it as a basic source of energy in the same way a car burns gasoline. An important tool our body uses in order to burn glucose is a hormone called insulin. A more-scientific way of describing diabetes is when your body doesn’t have enough insulin to process all of the sugar in your blood. This is where the distinction between type 1 and type 2 diabetes comes into play, because one is where your body doesn’t produce insulin, and the other is where your body doesn’t make or use insulin well enough to process all of the sugars your body has.

What is type 1 diabetes?

In type 1 diabetes, also known as “insulin-dependent diabetes” or “juvenile diabetes”, your pancreas doesn’t produce insulin. This most-often is found at a younger age, but can really happen at any time in your life. Your body can’t make insulin so it can’t process glucose, and therefore can’t process through the buildup of glucose in your blood. Type 1 diabetes is managed through the injection of insulin and the close management of blood sugar levels.

What is type 2 diabetes?

For type 2 diabetes, your pancreas does create insulin, but can’t produce enough of it or use it efficiently enough to process the glucose in your blood. One of the most common scenarios is hyperinsulinemia - a point where the level of insulin your body is much higher than normal because your body is trying to process the excess of glucose you’re feeding it. With these elevated levels of insulin, your body is no longer using it efficiently and is considered insulin resistant.

Insulin resistance can also be caused by natural factors, although insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, and type 2 diabetes, in the United States, are much more likely to be caused by poor health, bad nutrition, and a lack of exercise.

How common is diabetes?

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), it’s estimated about 34 million people in the United States, about 13% of the population, have diabetes. The changes to guidance for screening of obese and overweight individuals should have a significant impact on decreasing the number of people eventually developing diabetes, as about 35% of Americans are estimated to be prediabetic.

Next Episode

Affirmations: the hot new thing replacing New Year's goals

We’re not strangers to the concept of ‘goals’. There are so many gurus out there championing the idea of putting your goals down on paper to make them more clear, voicing them out into the universe to make them real, and using them to guide you through your decisions to make them impactful. One of the coolest mantras out there is that the difference between a dream and a goal is action.

Well, here’s a little twist. If you’ve been making goals for the past ten years but you’ve never really made significant progress toward them, I don’t think the creation of the goal is the step that you’re missing. If you want to eat healthier, it’s really easy to say, “in 2022, I’m setting a goal to eat healthier.” You can even be more specific, like, “in 2022, I’m going to make half of all my plates consist only of vegetables.”

Great! But where’s your accountability and emotional support when the universe tests you that first time when your friends want to meet up at a burger place? Or when you know you should get up early to go to the gym in the morning, but your spouse REALLY wants to watch the latest episode of the Sex in the City reboot?

That’s when your affirmations can bring more power to your goals. Saying you want to be a certain way is one thing, but better, deeply-consistent behavior changes don’t come from what you want to be, they come from how you identify the way you are.