The actress and feminist insists she has nothing to hide after initially agonising over her decision to go under the knife to look younger, and she hopes to be able to justify her actions in a new tome.

The Barbarella star tells U.S. news show Entertainment Tonight, “I recently had plastic surgery; it was a hard decision to make and I decided if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna tell the truth. I’m writing a book about aging; I can’t write that book and not say I’ve had plastic surgery.

“I just decided it was for me; I didn’t wanna have bags under my eyes that made me look tired.”

And she has her healthy lifestyle to thank for her general wellbeing: “I’m careful about what I eat, I stay active, walk a lot. I have good genes.”

A plastic surgeon has warned that patients who have had botched private cosmetic surgery operations, particularly abroad, are relying on the NHS to fix the problems.

Mr Adrian Richards, who runs the Aurora Clinics in Thame, Oxfordshire, says that it is costing the NHS in Oxfordshire alone, “thousands and thousands” each year to correct problems that have occurred when patients have travelled abroad for cut price ops.

NHS Oxfordshire claims it does not know how much it had spent fixing botched jobs’, but Mr Richards believes the trust must have shelled out thousands of taxpayers’ money: “We have surgeons here who take referrals from the NHS and we see either a surgery related infection or bad job at least every couple of months.

“The most popular types of surgery are tummy tucks’, abdominoplasty, and breast augmentation. The main things we do see are infections and these tend to be from places such as Poland, South Africa, and India, where sterility standards are not as high and surgery is not regulated.

“Much of the time people go abroad for surgery and perhaps don’t get the level of aftercare they need to make sure they recover fully. You can’t just jump on a plane afterwards because there is a high risk of blood clots.

“When someone picks up an infection and becomes very ill after their surgery they’ll go to the local AE and in some cases have to be admitted into intensive care.

“And when surgery goes very wrong, the sky is the limit.”

No amount of running or iron pumping was going to do anything about the genetically programmed dark circles under my eyes, so I got those things zapped with a nuclear-powered laser that made me twitch and fidget in the chair like a spider monkey coming off a meth bender.

Cosmetic surgery can, quite simply, do things that diet and exercise can’t. If you’ve got something that looks like that mutant from “Total Recall” hanging off your stomach telling you to “start the reactor,” and it bothers you more than the sizeable surgery scars will, then getting some work done on this area could be an option.

Also, we all know that no matter how good you are at bench press, it won’t make female breasts much larger. If that’s your goal, then stuff needs to be shoved into places; two places, to be precise.

Guys can get things inserted into their chest area too, in the form of pectoral (and even bicep and tricep) implants; a number of possible congenital defects affecting the chest area can be fixed only via surgery.

So when used properly, cosmetic surgery can make you look better. And, by making you look better, cosmetic surgery can make you feel better. But a concerted and long-term effort to kick your own butt with exercise and healthy eating can do some of the same things that surgery accomplishes.

And unless you’re hiring Lance Armstrong as your cycling trainer, paying the Governator to teach you old-school weightlifting or bringing Jamie Oliver on staff as your personal chef, the diet and exercise option is also less expensive.

The options

So let us consider making the diet-and-exercise choice.

Unless you’re rebuilding your body with cosmetic surgery on a McDonald’s drive-through attendant salary, diet and exercise is the tougher option, but it also comes with significantly more benefits. That’s the way life works most times; the more effort you put into it, the more you receive back, which is why I think that if you can achieve a visual goal with exercise instead of surgery, then you should.

Now before half of Beverly Hills reaches for their torches and pitchforks, let me explain some of the practical implications of diet and exercise versus cosmetic surgery:

A rippling abdomen carved via diet and exercise is going to look better than one obtained via surgery. Same goes for a weightlifting / Pilates / boot camp sculpted behind.

As already mentioned, diet and exercise will most likely cost less.

Pectoral implants will not help you open ketchup bottles or pickle jars.

But it doesn’t end there. There is some science too.

Invasive cosmetic procedures have risks associated with them, whereas the health benefits of eating a balanced diet and exercising are undeniable (unless you happen to be out for a run and some cellphone-yapping moron creams you with his hybrid Humvee).

A 2008 study by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, assessed 970 men who lived to a minimum of 90 years of age. The conclusions: “Modifiable healthy behaviors during early elderly years, including smoking abstinence, weight management, blood pressure control, and regular exercise, are associated not only with enhanced life span in men but also with good health and function during older age.”

A 2008 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, published in PLoS Medicine, found that middle-aged and older people who didn’t smoke, who had a high fruit and vegetable intake and a moderate to low alcohol intake, and who exercised regularly had the equivalent of a chronological age that was 14 years younger than people who possessed none of these characteristics.

A 2007 e-book, “The Role of Physical Exercise in Preventing Disease and Improving the Quality of Life,” by researcher David Hood of York University in Canada, made the case that leading a healthy lifestyle dramatically decreases the likelihood of contracting myriad diseases and, as a result, extends life expectancy.

No amount of running or iron pumping was going to do anything about the genetically programmed dark circles under my eyes, so I got those things zapped with a nuclear-powered laser that made me twitch and fidget in the chair like a spider monkey coming off a meth bender.

Cosmetic surgery can, quite simply, do things that diet and exercise can’t. If you’ve got something that looks like that mutant from “Total Recall” hanging off your stomach telling you to “start the reactor,” and it bothers you more than the sizeable surgery scars will, then getting some work done on this area could be an option.

Also, we all know that no matter how good you are at bench press, it won’t make female breasts much larger. If that’s your goal, then stuff needs to be shoved into places; two places, to be precise.

Guys can get things inserted into their chest area too, in the form of pectoral (and even bicep and tricep) implants; a number of possible congenital defects affecting the chest area can be fixed only via surgery.

So when used properly, cosmetic surgery can make you look better. And, by making you look better, cosmetic surgery can make you feel better. But a concerted and long-term effort to kick your own butt with exercise and healthy eating can do some of the same things that surgery accomplishes.

And unless you’re hiring Lance Armstrong as your cycling trainer, paying the Governator to teach you old-school weightlifting or bringing Jamie Oliver on staff as your personal chef, the diet and exercise option is also less expensive.

The options

So let us consider making the diet-and-exercise choice.

Unless you’re rebuilding your body with cosmetic surgery on a McDonald’s drive-through attendant salary, diet and exercise is the tougher option, but it also comes with significantly more benefits. That’s the way life works most times; the more effort you put into it, the more you receive back, which is why I think that if you can achieve a visual goal with exercise instead of surgery, then you should.

Now before half of Beverly Hills reaches for their torches and pitchforks, let me explain some of the practical implications of diet and exercise versus cosmetic surgery:

A rippling abdomen carved via diet and exercise is going to look better than one obtained via surgery. Same goes for a weightlifting / Pilates / boot camp sculpted behind.

As already mentioned, diet and exercise will most likely cost less.

Pectoral implants will not help you open ketchup bottles or pickle jars.

But it doesn’t end there. There is some science too.

Invasive cosmetic procedures have risks associated with them, whereas the health benefits of eating a balanced diet and exercising are undeniable (unless you happen to be out for a run and some cellphone-yapping moron creams you with his hybrid Humvee).

A 2008 study by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, assessed 970 men who lived to a minimum of 90 years of age. The conclusions: “Modifiable healthy behaviors during early elderly years, including smoking abstinence, weight management, blood pressure control, and regular exercise, are associated not only with enhanced life span in men but also with good health and function during older age.”

A 2008 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, published in PLoS Medicine, found that middle-aged and older people who didn’t smoke, who had a high fruit and vegetable intake and a moderate to low alcohol intake, and who exercised regularly had the equivalent of a chronological age that was 14 years younger than people who possessed none of these characteristics.

A 2007 e-book, “The Role of Physical Exercise in Preventing Disease and Improving the Quality of Life,” by researcher David Hood of York University in Canada, made the case that leading a healthy lifestyle dramatically decreases the likelihood of contracting myriad diseases and, as a result, extends life expectancy.

TODAY: Patients share their experiences; ethicist weighs in.

By KEITH UPCHURCH

kupchurch@heraldsun.com; 419-6612

DURHAM — Plastic surgery blunders grab headlines, but successful procedures can transform people’s lives for the better.

That’s been the case for a 21-year-old Durham man whose abnormal breast growth in his early teens made him self-conscious and “aggravated to be a boy but have a woman’s features.”

Courtland McKibbins, a senior at N.C. AT State University in Greensboro, said he tried to fix the problem by losing weight, but his breasts didn’t shrink, and he went through his middle school and high school years suffering.

At 18, at the urging of his mother, he turned to Durham plastic surgeon Laura Gunn, who did the reduction and gave McKibbins new confidence.

“I was nervous about doing it, but I wanted to get it done, and I’m glad I did,” he said. “Now, I’m not worried that my chest will bounce a certain way or how people will look at me.”

For another patient, Mary Winstead of Roxboro, a face lift, neck liposuction and eyelid surgery gave her “a new life.”

Winstead, 69, had the procedure two years ago, “because I would look in the mirror and see the sagging under my chin and neck. I’m amazed at what the difference is between before and after. It’s just unreal. People couldn’t believe the difference, and I have people say today there is no way I look 69.”

Her advice to others considering cosmetic surgery is to consult a qualified plastic surgeon and discuss your concerns.

Sandi Hammock, 59, of Halifax, Va., wasn’t happy with what depression had done to her face, so she had upper and lower eyelid surgery in Durham last year.

“I’d had some tragedy in my life, and my face was showing it,” she said. “I just looked so old and depressed, and it made me feel that way.”

Before the procedure, Hammock said, she looked older than 59 but now looks “as young as my daughter, who is 38. People say all the time we look like sisters. That really boosts your ego.”

Now, she rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with her husband, whereas before, she usually stayed indoors. “Now I go out all the time.”

Hammock said her husband “thinks it’s great. He’s glad to go with a woman who looks younger than he does — and I’m older than he is!”

“When people tell you that you look so much younger and so great, you begin to feel that way.”

She said she had no complications from the surgery, and advises anyone considering a cosmetic procedure to “research it and be sure it’s what you want and need.”

The desire for larger breasts is what motivated 21-year-old Michelle Grissom of Durham to have breast enlargement, which took her from a size A cup to “a full B.”

The UNC student said she knew she wanted the procedure since she was 16, but decided to wait until she was older to be certain she would need it. She was 20 when the surgery was done.

She’s pleased with the results, although one challenge has been “dealing with negative comments from certain people.”

“Sometimes, they say idiotic things like: ‘Are you going to have children?’ They thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed.” But she’s also gotten positive comments from friends.

Her fuller figure has given her more confidence at the pool and on the beach, “and that’s really good.”

Recovery time was about 10 days before she was up and moving, and Grissom was able to drive about two weeks after the surgery.

Grissom, who is studying political science and may become a paralegal, said it’s important to find a good doctor and have someone who can help with daily tasks for first few days after surgery.

It’s also important to have surgery for the right reason, she said. “Make sure you do it because you want to, not to please someone else.”

A plastic surgeon has warned that patients who have had botched private cosmetic surgery operations, particularly abroad, are relying on the NHS to fix the problems.

Mr Adrian Richards, who runs the Aurora Clinics in Thame, Oxfordshire, says that it is costing the NHS in Oxfordshire alone, “thousands and thousands” each year to correct problems that have occurred when patients have travelled abroad for cut price ops.

NHS Oxfordshire claims it does not know how much it had spent fixing botched jobs’, but Mr Richards believes the trust must have shelled out thousands of taxpayers’ money: “We have surgeons here who take referrals from the NHS and we see either a surgery related infection or bad job at least every couple of months.

“The most popular types of surgery are tummy tucks’, abdominoplasty, and breast augmentation. The main things we do see are infections and these tend to be from places such as Poland, South Africa, and India, where sterility standards are not as high and surgery is not regulated.

“Much of the time people go abroad for surgery and perhaps don’t get the level of aftercare they need to make sure they recover fully. You can’t just jump on a plane afterwards because there is a high risk of blood clots.

“When someone picks up an infection and becomes very ill after their surgery they’ll go to the local AE and in some cases have to be admitted into intensive care.

“And when surgery goes very wrong, the sky is the limit.”

No amount of running or iron pumping was going to do anything about the genetically programmed dark circles under my eyes, so I got those things zapped with a nuclear-powered laser that made me twitch and fidget in the chair like a spider monkey coming off a meth bender.

Cosmetic surgery can, quite simply, do things that diet and exercise can’t. If you’ve got something that looks like that mutant from “Total Recall” hanging off your stomach telling you to “start the reactor,” and it bothers you more than the sizeable surgery scars will, then getting some work done on this area could be an option.

Also, we all know that no matter how good you are at bench press, it won’t make female breasts much larger. If that’s your goal, then stuff needs to be shoved into places; two places, to be precise.

Guys can get things inserted into their chest area too, in the form of pectoral (and even bicep and tricep) implants; a number of possible congenital defects affecting the chest area can be fixed only via surgery.

So when used properly, cosmetic surgery can make you look better. And, by making you look better, cosmetic surgery can make you feel better. But a concerted and long-term effort to kick your own butt with exercise and healthy eating can do some of the same things that surgery accomplishes.

And unless you’re hiring Lance Armstrong as your cycling trainer, paying the Governator to teach you old-school weightlifting or bringing Jamie Oliver on staff as your personal chef, the diet and exercise option is also less expensive.

The options

So let us consider making the diet-and-exercise choice.

Unless you’re rebuilding your body with cosmetic surgery on a McDonald’s drive-through attendant salary, diet and exercise is the tougher option, but it also comes with significantly more benefits. That’s the way life works most times; the more effort you put into it, the more you receive back, which is why I think that if you can achieve a visual goal with exercise instead of surgery, then you should.

Now before half of Beverly Hills reaches for their torches and pitchforks, let me explain some of the practical implications of diet and exercise versus cosmetic surgery:

A rippling abdomen carved via diet and exercise is going to look better than one obtained via surgery. Same goes for a weightlifting / Pilates / boot camp sculpted behind.

As already mentioned, diet and exercise will most likely cost less.

Pectoral implants will not help you open ketchup bottles or pickle jars.

But it doesn’t end there. There is some science too.

Invasive cosmetic procedures have risks associated with them, whereas the health benefits of eating a balanced diet and exercising are undeniable (unless you happen to be out for a run and some cellphone-yapping moron creams you with his hybrid Humvee).

A 2008 study by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, assessed 970 men who lived to a minimum of 90 years of age. The conclusions: “Modifiable healthy behaviors during early elderly years, including smoking abstinence, weight management, blood pressure control, and regular exercise, are associated not only with enhanced life span in men but also with good health and function during older age.”

A 2008 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, published in PLoS Medicine, found that middle-aged and older people who didn’t smoke, who had a high fruit and vegetable intake and a moderate to low alcohol intake, and who exercised regularly had the equivalent of a chronological age that was 14 years younger than people who possessed none of these characteristics.

A 2007 e-book, “The Role of Physical Exercise in Preventing Disease and Improving the Quality of Life,” by researcher David Hood of York University in Canada, made the case that leading a healthy lifestyle dramatically decreases the likelihood of contracting myriad diseases and, as a result, extends life expectancy.

Many women having cosmetic surgery believe it is other people having work done who are motivated by vanity and not themselves, it has been claimed.

Dr Debra Gimlin, a sociologist at the University of Aberdeen, spoke to 80 women aged from 20 to 70 for the study.

Forty were Britons in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol, and 40 were Americans.

Dr Gimlin said more than half the women had created the notion of a “surgical other” they distanced themselves from.

These were women they saw as going ahead with surgery with little consideration of its risks, had unreasonable expectations of its effects, and were obsessively concerned with their appearance.

More than 50 of the women said this was not them, instead saying they only wanted a natural look from cosmetic surgery.

Dr Gimlin said they defined the surgical other as “narcissistic and shallow”, and highlighted their own “greater concern with the more important things in life – jobs, family and health”.

She said they created the notion as they could then believe that it was only women in this category who deserved the negative views society had of those undergoing cosmetic surgery, and not them.

‘Hollywood starlets’

Dr Gimlin said that British women tended to see the surgical other as living in America, and the Americans, who lived in Florida, saw her as living in Hollywood.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

Respondents from both countries characterised the surgical other as being motivated by vanity rather than need

End Quote
Dr Debra Gimlin
University of Aberdeen

One 27-year-old American nurse interviewed said: “I’d never want to look like one of those ageing Hollywood starlets who’s gone under the knife a few too many times.”

A 47-year-old British sales clerk who had liposuction the year before said: “Over here, we’re not like those American women who have loads of surgery without a second thought.”

A 35-year-old British office manager who had abdominoplasty said: “I’m not obsessed about the way I look like some women who have cosmetic surgery.

“I know that other things matter more – my job, my family, my health. These are much more important to me than my appearance”.

Dr Gimlin said: “Respondents from both countries characterised the surgical other as being motivated by vanity rather than need.

“In particular, they suggested that whatever she had altered did not really require changing: her breasts were not actually too small; her nose was not really too big; she was not sufficiently overweight to require liposuction.

“The surgical other is thus presented as being excessively, even obsessively, concerned with minute and inconsequential physical flaws.”

‘Not seedy’

Dr Gimlin also said that the women she interviewed saw the surgeons that the surgical other used as being inferior to their own.

A 34-year-old American salesperson who had rhinoplasty said: “I just knew I didn’t want one of these seedy guys who advertise themselves on billboards. You know, boob jobs, only $999.”

Dr Gimlin was presenting her findings to the British Sociological Association’s medical sociology conference in Durham on Thursday.

When you become pregnant, your breasts go through changes due to the hormonal fluxes in your bodythey enlarge, and sometimes change shape. In some rare cases, these changes are permanent, and pregnancy can actually leave you with fuller breasts. Generally, however, these changes are temporary, and last only until you have stopped breast-feeding your baby, after which point your breasts will go back to a smaller size. When this occursespecially if your breasts changed size significantly during your pregnancyyou may develop stretch marks or lose breast tissue and experience sagging when your breasts return to their former size.

While such changes are obviously not very appealing, breast implants do not really have any bearing on the extent to which sagging or stretch marks will occur. Such side effects can manifest whether or not you have had breast surgeryacross the board, plastic surgeons agree that implants do not tend to cause complications or exacerbate the aftereffects of pregnancy upon your breasts. Stretchmarks, for instance, are genetically linked, so implants will not increase your chances of getting them unless you are already prone to developing them. Furthermore, breast implants should not impair your ability to breast-feed: augmentation surgery can be done without affecting how your milk ducts or nipples function.

The effect that pregnancy has upon the breasts varies from woman to woman, making it difficult to predict exactly how your breasts will look afterward. A number of factorsincluding your age, your inherent skin quality, whether or not you’re a smoker, and the extent of your breast tissue enlargementplay a part in determining the end results of pregnancy in an individual; you won’t really know what’s going to happen until you are no longer lactating. Keep in mind, however, that what kind of implants you have makes a difference. Subpectoral implantsimplants that are underneath the muscle in your chestare supported and buffered by the muscles surrounding them, so the changes to your breast tissue do not affect them. Subglandular implants, howeverimplants placed above the muscle in the breastsrely on the breast tissue itself for support, and so are more likely to fall after pregnancy. On a more positive note, if you are someone who has a particularly tight skin envelope before your pregnancy, the stretching that you’ll experience when your breast size increases may actually be beneficialit can actually make your breasts look more natural afterward.

If you haven’t gotten your breast implants yet and plan to have a baby soon, your doctor may advise you to wait until after your pregnancy to have surgery done, since it’s impossible to know exactly how your breasts will respond to pregnancy until you’re going through it. Also, if you experience extreme changes in breast size during pregnancy and while breast-feeding, you may want to consider getting some work done post-pregnancy if your breasts don’t return to a size and shape you’re happy with. If this occurs, consult with your doctor three to six months after you stop lactating to find out if this is a step you should take.

Tags: Cosmetic Surgery Bay Area, Plastic Surgery Bay Area, Plastic Surgery San Francisco, Cosmetic Surgery San Francisco