AIN’T LIFE grand? Not only can I get a brand spanking new artificial hip installed after totally destroying the one God gave me, I can now eat whatever I want without getting fat, thanks to an amazing procedure called CoolSculpting with Zeltiq. Devised by Harvard scientists, you know it’s got to be good.
I never heard of it until I read the ad in our local paper about a non-surgical, non-invasive and 100% natural way to lose those annoying bumps and bulges of stubborn fat. (It supposedly targets stubborn fat, and really, isn’t that the worst kind?) The ad says if your jeans are too tight and exercise isn’t helping and you hate dieting, this is just the ticket; that all you have to do is lay back and let the doctors at Skin Solutions work their magic. How cool is it that? Of course I called right away—I’m no dummy—and asked to learn more.
The lady on the phone helpfully explained that they “suck the fat into a vacuum.”
“A vacuum? Exactly how do they create this vacuum?”
“It’s sort of like a vacuum cleaner,” she explained.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean liposuction?”
“No, this is completely different! With liposuction the tube goes into your body, but this one stays on the surface for like half an hour to two hours, depending on how much fat you need to get rid of.”
“Well, then what happens?”
“It, like, freezes the fat and then, like, sucks it in,” she said.
It sounded so simple, I was amazed I hadn’t thought of it myself. I was all set to make an appointment until, a moment later, I found an ad for losing inches “quickly and painlessly, with no recovery time” using Zerona, a laser treatment that opens the pores in your fat cells, letting the liquefied fat pour out into the space around the cell. The fat is then flushed out through the lymphatic system. That sounded so sensible, I wondered if Zerona might be even better than Zeltiq, so I called them. A recording said the office was closed and in a medical emergency to please call 911, and if it was an emergency that required talking with either of the two doctors, a husband and wife team, to just leave a message and one of them would call back very soon. And even if it wasn’t an emergency, one of them would still call back very soon.
Seems easier to just buy bigger jeans.
—Andrea Rouda
Andrea Rouda blogs at The Daily Droid.