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Plastic Surgeon Who Performed 800+ Liposuctions: "I No Longer Recommend Surgery for Women in Menopause. Here's What I Tell My Patients Instead."

After pulling fifteen years of her own patient files, Dr. Susan Calloway stopped booking abdominal liposuction for women in menopause. What she found in her research changed what she tells every patient who walks into her office.

Tue, July 28th, 2026 · 9:14 a.m. EST · 214,806 views

Written by Dr. Susan Calloway, MD | Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon

AS SEEN ON

A few months ago, a woman sat down in my office and asked me to cut her stomach off.

 

Those were her exact words.

 

She was 54. Her periods stopped three years ago. 

 

She'd been dieting since Clinton was in office.

 

And she had a stomach she never had before.

 

She wanted the surgery, and she had the money for it.

 

I turned her down.

 

My name is Dr. Susan Calloway.

 

I'm a board-certified plastic surgeon, 23 years in private practice.

 

I've performed more than 800 abdominal liposuctions, and that procedure paid for my house.

 

But four years ago, I stopped recommending it on women over 40.

 

It started with a chart my own accountant showed me.

THE CHART

Four years ago, my accountant walked me through the practice's year-end numbers.

 

One chart made her smile.

 

My most reliable income wasn't new patients.

 

It was repeat abdominal work on women in menopause.

 

The same women, back within two years of their surgery, paying again.

 

She showed it to me as good news. Customers who keep coming back.

 

I went home that night and couldn't eat dinner.

 

I had built a successful practice on an operation with results that don't last.

 

And in 23 years, I had never once asked why they don't last.

 

Every surgeon has an answer ready for that question. 

 

Menopause. Hormones. Aging.

 

I'd said those words a thousand times.

 

That night, I admitted to myself that those words are not an answer. They're an excuse.

 

So I went looking for the real one.

 

It took me two years, because the research turned out to be only a few years old.

 

And the answer was a tissue I'd been cutting through my entire career.

THE TISSUE NOBODY TAUGHT ME

Every abdominal surgery starts the same way.

 

Before you reach fat, you cut through a thin white sheet of tissue called fascia.

 

You've actually seen it before.

 

It's the silvery skin you peel off a raw chicken breast.

 

Yours wraps around your muscles, your organs, and your fat.

 

And it sits between the fat and the blood vessels that feed it.

 

Medical school gave it one lecture and called it packaging.

 

In 23 years, I never heard it mentioned again. Not at a conference, not in a journal.

 

But cut through something 800 times and you notice things.

 

In a woman of 30, that tissue is thin and springy. 

 

In a woman past menopause, it can be thick and tough.

 

My scalpel felt the difference before my eyes did.

 

For 23 years I called it age. It isn't age.

 

2 years of research told me why.

WHY NOTHING WORKED. 
NOT EVEN MY SCALPEL.

You already know there's no such thing as spot reduction.

 

That's true, and it's exactly why crunches never touched your belly.

 

But nobody ever finishes the thought.

 

If you can't choose where fat burns, what does?

 

Blood flow does.

 

When your body needs energy, it takes fat from wherever it's easiest to reach.

 

And easiest means best supplied with blood, because blood is what carries fat out of a fat cell.

 

Fat can only burn where blood flows.

 

Now here's the part that explains your last ten years.

 

Fascia controls that blood flow.

 

It wraps your fat, and the small blood vessels run through it.

 

When fascia is soft, blood moves freely, and your body can take fat from that area.

 

When it tightens, it squeezes those vessels, and the fat behind them can't be reached.

 

And fascia tightens with age. Everywhere. In everyone.

YOU CAN FEEL YOUR FASCIA RIGHT NOW

That stiff neck in the morning. Fascia.

 

The tight shoulders you keep rolling. Fascia.

 

The knot between your shoulder blades. The hamstrings that won't stretch like they used to.

 

Even the foot pain so many women get after 40 has fascia in its name. Plantar fasciitis.

 

If your body has been getting stiffer every year, your fascia has been getting tighter every year.

 

And the same thing is happening around your fat.

 

After 40, hormone changes speed the whole thing up.

 

And nowhere does fascia grow thicker than over your stomach.

 

Your belly fat also gets less blood flow than almost any other fat to begin with.

 

That's why it's the first place weight goes on and the last place it comes off.

 

Thick fascia on top of weak flow. That area shuts down.

So listen, because I say this to a woman in my office almost every week.

 

Every diet you ran worked.

 

You ate less, so your body burned fat.

 

But it can only take fat from where blood still moves well.

 

And every year, there are fewer of those places, because the fascia is tightening everywhere.

 

That's why what worked at 34 barely works at 52.

 

And why the belly, thickest fascia and weakest flow, always comes last.

 

For a lot of women, its turn never comes at all.

 

Nothing is broken in you. The effort just can't get in.

 

Now run everything you've tried through that one law.

 

Crunches built real muscle under the fat, but there was no blood flow to carry the fat out.

 

The low-calorie diets made your body burn fat too.

 

But the tighter your fascia got, the fewer places that fat could come from.

 

That's why the same diet gives you less every year, and gives your belly the least of all.

 

The injections are the strangest proof of all.

 

My patients on semaglutide lose 30, 40 pounds, and almost all of them tell me the same thing.

 

The stomach went last, and least.

 

The shot makes you eat much less, but blood flow still decides where the fat comes off.

 

If you're on the shots and your middle won't move, you're not imagining it.

 

And then there's my own scalpel.

 

Liposuction pulls the fat out by force, but it does nothing about the tissue that shut the area down.

 

So the body slowly fills that spot back up.

 

It's still the one place it can't burn from.

WHY YOUR DOCTOR NEVER TOLD YOU

Most likely, nobody told your doctor either.

 

And menopause is an easy answer. Once it's on your chart, nobody looks any further.

 

There's no conspiracy here. My own story proves that.

 

Nobody hid that chart from me. Nobody had to.

 

You can't patent a tissue, and you can't prescribe it or bill insurance for it.

 

So nobody funds it, and nobody teaches it.

 

Meanwhile, the injections cost about a thousand dollars a month for as long as you take them.

 

My old procedure costs five figures a round.

 

And the women who come back show up on somebody's chart as good news.

 

An industry doesn't have to lie to keep you stuck.

 

It just has to have no reason to look.

WHAT I STARTED TELLING MY PATIENTS

Once I understood what was happening, the advice was obvious.

 

The problem was never that you didn't try hard enough.

 

The problem is the hardened tissue sitting between your blood supply and that fat.

 

So soften it. Work it loose. Get blood moving through that area again.

 

Then the fat becomes reachable by your walks and your meals.

 

But there were two catches, and they mattered.

 

Fascia needs repeated mechanical work, and hands are the wrong tool for it.

 

They tire in minutes, and most women can't stand touching that part of their body anyway.

 

And released fascia doesn't stay released. Left alone, it stiffens back within days.

 

So the work has to happen daily, at home, without me.

 

I needed a machine my patients could use on their own couch.

THE DEVICE I RECOMMEND

After testing what was out there, I chose one called the Selova Define.

 

It's a belt you strap around your middle.

 

Inside is a motor that vibrates at high speed and kneads the fascia for you.

 

You sit on the couch and watch Netflix for 20 minutes. That's it.

 

No gel, nothing to drag across your skin, no bruises.

 

The strap fits up to a 55-inch waist, and there are six intensity settings.

 

It's quiet enough to use in bed.

 

I don't make this device and I don't own any part of the company.

 

I recommend it because it does the one job that matters, at home, every day.

WHAT HAPPENED IN MY PRACTICE

I started carefully, with six patients who were already waiting on surgery dates.

 

I asked them to try it nightly for eight weeks first, and to keep measuring.

 

Four of the six canceled their procedures.

 

Word travels fast between women who have tried everything.

 

Two years later, more than 200 women in my practice have used it, and over 7,000 women use it nationwide.

 

I don't do this surgery on women in menopause anymore.

 

My accountant hates the new chart, but I've never slept better.

THE RESEARCH BEHIND IT

I know how an article like this sounds.

 

So don't take my word for it, or my patients' word either.

 

The research supports every step of this, and you can look up every study I'm about to name.

 

A 2020 review in Frontiers in Physiology showed that fascia stiffens and gets denser with age.

 

A 2019 study in PLOS ONE found the cells that build fascia are full of estrogen receptors.

 

When estrogen drops, those cells start making stiffer collagen, the kind in scar tissue.

 

That's why this hits women in their forties and fifties the hardest.

 

A 2025 case-control study, done by dermatology researchers with imaging, showed thick fascia pressing directly on the blood vessels that feed fat cells.

 

Release the fascia, and blood flow to that spot comes back.

 

And the vibration side has its own evidence.

 

A 2008 study in Medical Science Monitor measured a significant rise in local blood flow after just minutes of vibration.

 

A review published this July in Cureus found the effect solid enough that doctors now study it for wound healing.

 

But the strongest one is a six-month clinical trial published in Obesity Facts.

 

It compared vibration training to dieting, and measured belly fat with CT scans, not surveys.

 

The vibration group lost almost twice as much deep belly fat as the diet group.

 

And a year later, it was the only group still holding the loss.

 

Dieting lost the fat and gave it back. Vibration kept it off.

 

That trial had been out there for sixteen years while I was booking surgeries.

THE FIRST 20 MINUTES

The first five minutes, you mostly feel warmth spreading across your lower stomach.

 

That's blood vessels widening, and it happens every session.

 

Through the middle of the session, the massage is working the fascia itself.

 

In the first few uses, your stomach may start to itch. Sometimes a lot.

 

Runners know this feeling.

 

Start running after years away, and a few minutes in, your thighs itch like mad.

 

That's blood pushing back into small vessels that went quiet.

 

The itch on your stomach is the same thing, except this tissue hardened for decades.

It fades after the first few sessions.

 

I tell my patients to smile when it shows up, because it means blood is getting through again.

 

The last five minutes, the whole area just feels warm and worked.

 

The next morning it can feel a little sore, like you trained it. In a way, you did.

WHAT TO EXPECT

This fascia took decades to harden, and it won't soften in a weekend.

 

Anyone promising that is lying to you.

 

The real change comes in two stages. One fast, one slow.

 

In the first days, the puffy, swollen feeling eases as blood flow returns.

 

The waistband sits a little easier by evening, and mornings look a little flatter.

 

Between weeks three and eight, the fascia itself softens.

 

That's when women start talking about their jeans.

 

The scale usually moves last. The tape measure and the wardrobe come first.

 

So test it like one of my patients would.

 

Do your first session the night it arrives.

 

On the morning of day 3, put a tape measure around your waist and write down the number.

 

Then measure once a week, same spot, same time of day.

 

That number will tell you if this works, better than any feeling can.

Pamela R., 55 — "I went through menopause at 51 and my usual tricks just stopped working. I walked five miles a day and lost the same 12 pounds three different times, and my stomach never changed. I started using this 20 minutes a day with the recommendation of Dr. Calloway. Week one was mostly the bloating calming down. By week 3 I had 2 inches off my waist and my good jeans closed without me lying on the bed. I'm at 3 and a half inches now at week 5. My husband noticed before I said a word."

 

Dawn K., 46 — "I'm 46 and in perimenopause. Nothing in my life changed and my waist changed anyway. That's the part that made me feel crazy. I wanted to see Dr. Calloway but she didn't want to do surgery and suggested this. And ten weeks later my waist is down 5 inches and I'm back in my size 12s."

 

Renee T., 49 — "I'm 49, deep in perimenopause, a 2X, and I was in the gym four mornings a week counting every calorie with nothing to show for it on my stomach. I was about to get a lipo then Dr. Calloway recommended this device and I started using it and it itched like crazy the first two nights. Eight weeks in, the tape says 5 inches off my waist, and my jeans are 3 size down."

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WHAT IT COSTS

I'll use my own price list.

 

Liposuction runs $8,000 to $12,000, plus weeks in compression garments.

 

And you've seen my chart. You know how often women end up paying twice.

 

Fat freezing is a few thousand a round, with the same blind spot.

 

The injections are about a thousand dollars a month, for as long as you take them.

 

The menopause supplements are fifty dollars a bottle. You've bought more than one.

 

The Define costs about one percent of the surgery.

 

Less than a single month of the injections. Once.

 

The current price is on the official Selova page, and that's the only place I'd buy it.

 

The copies you'll see on other websites don't have the same strong oscillation, and they come with no guarantee.

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THE DEAL I MADE WITH SELOVA

I don't make this device, and I don't earn a cent from it.

 

So when Selova asked to use my article, I said yes on one condition.

 

My readers get the same price my patients get.

 

They agreed.

 

That's 53% off the regular price, with free shipping.

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ONE WARNING BEFORE YOU DECIDE

Selova makes this device in small production runs.

 

As I'm writing this, the current run has about 1,900 units left.

 

When a run sells out, the next batch takes weeks to arrive.

 

I've watched readers wait a month because they thought about it over a weekend.

 

If you're going to test it, test it while the units and the discount are both here.

THE 30-DAY TAPE MEASURE GUARANTEE

I know you've been burned before.

 

Every woman in my office has a drawer full of things that didn't work.

 

That's why this guarantee is built the way it is.

 

Selova backs it for 30 days.

 

Use it nightly, measure on day 3, then weekly.

 

If the tape hasn't moved in a month, email support and say it didn't work.

 

They send a prepaid return label, and you get your money back.

 

No forms, no store credit, no arguing with anyone.

 

I checked the return process myself before putting my name on this page.

YOU HAVE TWO OPTIONS

Option 1 is to close this page and change nothing.

 

Keep dieting the way you have been.

 

Keep hiding your stomach in photos.

 

Keep thinking about the surgery or the shots, and what they cost.

 

You've been on that path for years, and you know exactly where it goes.

 

Option 2 is to test this for 30 days.

 

20 minutes a night, on your couch, watching TV.

 

Measure your waist on day 3, then once a week.

 

If the number doesn't go down, email support and get your money back.

 

That's the whole decision.

 

Option 1 changes nothing.

 

Option 2 shows you how well it works in 30 days.

Check Availability Now

WHAT TO DO NEXT 

Tap the button below.

 

Your order ships within 24 hours.

 

Do your first session the night it arrives.

 

On the morning of day 3, measure your waist and write the number down.

 

Then measure once a week, and let the tape answer the question.

 

And please don't close this page thinking you'll order later.

 

Later is another summer of covering up.

 

Later is another photo you delete.

 

You've waited long enough.

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You can take advantage of this unique offer for 3 days only

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INTERNET ONLY OFFER!
Selova Define box and device
FOR A LIMITED TIME:
53% OFF + THEY PAY FOR SHIPPING
LIMITED TIME READER-ONLY SPECIAL: Ordering now makes you eligible for up to 53% OFF Selova Define. Only available through this page. Limited to the first 500 customers.

Order today, do your first session the night it arrives, and measure on day 3.

 

With respect,

 

Dr. Susan Calloway, MD Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon 23 years in practice · 800+ abdominal procedures

 

P.S. The patient I mentioned at the beginning of the article never booked the surgery.

 

11 weeks after that appointment, she sent my office a photo of a green dress she bought for her son's rehearsal dinner.

 

One line under it: "You cost yourself ten thousand dollars."

 

P.P.S. If you keep one sentence from this page, keep this one.

 

Fat can only burn where blood flows.

 

Show it to your doctor. There's a fair chance you'll be the one telling them.

 

P.P.P.S. Your 30 days start when the device arrives, not when you order.

 

Trust the tape, not the mirror.

Check Availability Now

A hands-free belt that works the fascia loose so blood flow returns and the fat can finally burn. 20 minutes a night, on the couch. Used by 7,000+ women in menopause.

Hear from the women Dr. Calloway has helped without a surgery:

Pamela R., 55 — "I went through menopause at 51 and my usual tricks just stopped working. I walked five miles a day and lost the same 12 pounds three different times, and my stomach never changed. I started using this 20 minutes a day with the recommendation of Dr. Calloway. Week one was mostly the bloating calming down. By week 3 I had 2 inches off my waist and my good jeans closed without me lying on the bed. I'm at 3 and a half inches now at week 5. My husband noticed before I said a word."

Dawn K., 46 — "I dieted through my whole thirties and forties, but barely an inch came off my middle. I wanted to see Dr. Calloway but she didn't want to do a surgery and suggested this. And ten weeks later my waist is down 5 inches and I'm back in my size 12s."

Renee T., 49 — "I'm 49, deep in perimenopause, a 2X, and I was in the gym four mornings a week counting every calorie with nothing to show for it on my stomach. I was about to get a lipo then Dr. Calloway recommended this device and I started using it and it itched like crazy the first two nights. Eight weeks in, the tape says 5 inches off my waist, and my jeans are 3 size down."

Check Availability
Comments Most relevant ▾
Y
  • MB
    Marcia Boyd Has anyone here actually tried this? Every doctor I see just says eat less and move more and I want to scream.
    Like · Reply · 6d 👍4
    TN
    Terri Nowak 7 weeks in. The bloated heavy feeling calmed down the first week, the jeans thing happened around week 5. Whatever you do don't quit at week 2, that's too early, the article explains why.
    Like · Reply · 6d 👍11
  • GH
    Gail Hutchins I'm on HRT, anyone know if you can use it with that?
    Like · Reply · 5d 👍2
    BF
    Bonnie Falk I'm on HRT and use it every night, no problems for me, but ask your own doctor obviously.
    Like · Reply · 5d 👍3
  • DM
    Denise Marsh I'm on Wegovy, down 26 pounds, and my stomach has barely moved. Reading this article felt like someone had been reading my diary.
    Like · Reply · 5d 👍9
    CW
    Carla Whitt Same exact situation. I added it in March. My middle is finally catching up with the rest of me. Wish I'd known this a year ago.
    Like · Reply · 4d 👍6
  • YP
    Yolanda Pierce I'm plus size and burned out on ordering things that don't fit. Does it actually close on a bigger body?
    Like · Reply · 4d 👍5
    RT
    Renee T. 55 inch strap. I'm a 2X and it closed first try. That's half the reason I kept it.
    Like · Reply · 4d 👍8
  • KD
    Kathy Drummond How long did shipping take for you guys?
    Like · Reply · 3d 👍1
    TN
    Terri Nowak About a week and a half to Ohio for me.
    Like · Reply · 3d 👍2
  • FD
    Fran DeLuca Mine itched like CRAZY the first two nights and I was ready to send it back, then I reread the runner's itch part and felt dumb lol. It stopped by night four.
    Like · Reply · 3d 👍7
  • JK
    Janice Kowalski Just ordered. 30 days with a tape measure feels like a fair test. Worst case I mail it back. I'll report back here.
    Like · Reply · 2d 👍3
  • BA
    Barb Aldrich Waiting on payday Friday, please don't sell out.
    Like · Reply · 1d 👍2
  • LS
    Lorrie Simmons I hid my stomach in every photo at my own daughter's wedding. I've read this article three times. Ordered tonight. Not ready to talk about how much the willpower part got to me.
    Like · Reply · 5h 👍12
View 2 more comments Check Availability Now →

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