Gynecomastia Surgery on the Overweight Man
A frequent defense for gynecomastia is to gain a lot of weight — often, as much as 100 pounds – in order to disguise the shame of having womanly breasts.
The thinking seems to be a flabby chest will seem normal if the rest of the body is heavy, too.
Teen boys with large breasts often do exactly that, gaining as much weight as possible.
It’s not a good idea.
For one, it’s hard on your body and your health. Keeping that excess weight into and through the 20s, creates a higher risk of developing type II diabetes, high blood pressure and perhaps sleep apnea.
Keeping that weight into your 30s and 40s, increases the risk of atherosclerosis, or arterial disease, which additionally puts you at risk of heart trouble.
Gaining weight also makes the job of the plastic surgeon job harder and the results of gynecomastia surgery less pleasing.
Here’s why:
Picking up a lot of weight stretches your skin and contributes to skin drooping and sagging if and when you get around to losing the excess weight. The skin loses its elasticity.
If you then opt for male breast reduction surgery, you’ll have more scars because more tissue and the lax, excessive skin must be removed from the chest.
So, if a patient has been heavy, the gynecomastia surgery to get a smooth, flat and contoured chest may require more than minimal scars.
Of course, in the best possible scenario, all patients would arrive on the day of surgery at their optimum weight.
But that doesn’t always happen. Time after time, patients tell me they are too embarrassed to exercise at the gym due to their so-called “man boobs”. (Gyms are especially rife with the cruel moniker, “bitch tits”.) And if they can’t exercise, they can’t lose the weight.
If an overweight patient requests gynecomastia surgery, I may go ahead — particularly for moderately overweight men — with the understanding I can only reduce the thickness of the chest to match the thickness of the surrounding tissues.
If I took too much tissue away from the chest, it would look concave in relation to the rest of the patient’s body.
The outcome? The patient is still overweight but with smaller and less conspicuous breasts.
Alas, the patient will look like a normally overweight man, with a small fold under his breasts…..instead of an overweight man with enlarged, female-like breasts.