Chelsea Lee
Medical Research Editor
WhereismyDoctor.com

Body fat is enemy number one for thousands of Americans trying to reach their own weight and fitness goals.

But before you head out for a liposuction or a body contouring appointment, you might want to consider the fact that your extra body fat could come in handy one day.

Though plastic surgery is usually associated with removing body fat, surgeons in the UK recently used body fat from a man’s belly to help reshape that man’s head.

King’s College Hospital in London is now home of the first ever procedure of its kind in the UK.

The patient who received a fat grafting from his stomach to his skull was Tim Barter. Tim fell 25 ft. in 2009 breaking his leg and shattering both his cheekbone and eye socket, and then spent the next ten days in a coma.

Part of Tim’s skull was removed to reduce swelling in his brain, which he describes by saying "My head felt really strange. I only had skin over where the skull had been removed so it was very soft to touch, particularly when the hair had started to grow back."

Tim experienced severe headaches and double vision until a metal plate modeled after the remaining half of Tim’s skull was placed.

But even with the plate fitted in his skull, Tim was still not entirely fixed.

Tim was essentially left with a hole inside his temple region after the muscle inside became inactive and collapsed.

Luckily, the body fat from Tim’s stomach was the perfect replacement for the lost muscle.

This unusual technique used in restoring Tim’s face after his accident was developed by Dr. Rob Bentley, a craniofacial surgeon at King’s.

And fat grafting to reconstruct might not always be so unusual.

Body fat transfers could end up being the next big cosmetic craze, or maybe an exciting trending technique for reconstructive surgery.

Either way, you just might want to hold on to at least a bit of that extra fat you can’t stand.

Find out more about body fat transfers when you contact a plastic surgeon near you.

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