About the treatment
What the ultrasound is doing, and what it is not
It does not melt fat. It does not suck fat out. It does not burn anything off. Those three descriptions turn up constantly in advertising and none of them is what happens, so it is worth starting with the mechanism rather than the marketing.
Low-frequency sound sent into the fat layer creates rapid swings of pressure. Those swings form microscopic bubbles which then collapse, and the collapse happens hard enough against a fat cell wall to destabilise it. The frequency is chosen so that only fat responds; skin, blood vessels and muscle sit outside the range that affects them. A laser running at the same time helps draw further material out of whichever cells have already given way.
After that it is your body’s job. What was inside those cells has to be transported and processed over the following days, which is why appointments at our West Broadway clinic in Kitsilano sit about a week apart and why the result arrives quietly rather than on the table.
Before you pay anybody
Four questions worth asking any clinic
Body contouring attracts more overselling than anything else in this industry. These four questions separate a clinic that will do you good from one that will sell you a package.
How many sessions, and why that number?
There should be a reason attached to the answer — the size of the area, how much is there, how your first two respond. A round number quoted before anybody has looked at you is a price list, not a plan.
What happens between appointments?
If nobody mentions hydration, movement or the week-long clearing process, they either do not know how the treatment works or are not going to tell you. That gap is where most of the result is decided.
How will we measure it?
A tape at a marked point and photographs in fixed lighting. Anyone measuring this on a bathroom scale is setting you up to be disappointed by a result you actually achieved.
What will you not promise me?
The most revealing question of the four. Every honest clinic has a list. If somebody cannot name a single limitation of the treatment they are selling, walk out.
Why here
Holding a weekly rhythm through a Vancouver year
The appointments are easy. Keeping eight to twelve of them on schedule is the part that decides whether this works.
The rainy months are the practical window
From October the calendar loosens, the treated area stays covered and the sun rule takes care of itself. A course begun in the autumn is usually the one that runs without a single gap in it.
We are open Tuesday to Sunday
Which makes a weekly appointment considerably easier to hold than a weekday-only clinic would. Note we are closed Mondays and Saturdays, so pick your day and keep it.
People here book for a date and book late
Count backwards properly: eight to twelve weekly sessions, then a month for the clearing to finish. Asking for a result in six weeks is asking for something the biology will not give.
Summer needs actual attention
The treated skin should not burn. In a city where half the population is outside on the water by June, that is a real instruction rather than a formality, particularly on a stomach.
Indications
What is it good for?
A pocket with an edge to it — stomach, waistline, upper back or leg — on a body that is no longer changing size.
A pocket you can pinch and lift may do better with cryo fat freezing and far fewer appointments, and under the chin has its own page. The full list for Kitsilano is on our Vancouver clinic page.
Being straight with you
Our own list of what we will not promise
Since we suggested you ask it of everybody, here is ours.
A number on the scale
Fat occupies a lot of space for very little mass. A waist can measurably narrow while your weight barely moves, and people who track this the wrong way convince themselves nothing happened.
Tighter skin
Volume comes out; the skin over it does what its own elasticity allows. Where that elasticity is already reduced, taking away what is underneath can make the slack slightly more visible. That belongs in the first conversation, not the fourth.
Anything comparable to surgery
A surgeon takes out a measured volume in a single procedure, and you pay for that with an anaesthetic, a recovery and a genuine risk profile. We take out a small share of it, slowly, and you pay for that with patience instead. Both are defensible. They are not substitutes.
A faster schedule for more money
The week between appointments is how long your body needs. Stacking sessions puts energy into tissue that has not finished processing the last one, and we will decline to do it.
Getting ready
Pre & post treatment
Every line here exists to support the clearing stage, which is the half of the treatment that happens without us.
Ahead of each session
- Increase your water two days out. The disposal of everything released depends on it.
- Something small to eat first — not a full meal, and not nothing at all.
- The zone needs to be clean and untreated — nothing moisturising, nothing oily, nothing bronzing.
- Leave the acids and retinoids off that patch of skin for three days, and never arrive with it burnt.
- Tell us at booking if you are pregnant, carry any implanted device, or have been treated for a liver or kidney condition.
Through the week after
- A mild heat and a slight hum in the area, gone long before you get home.
- Do not let the fluids slide mid-week. The whole seven days count, not just treatment day.
- Move: a walk the same evening, something active the following day. Lymph has no pump of its own.
- Skip anything hot enough to make you sweat for 48 hours, and keep the drinks light.
- Protect the area from sun for the length of the course.
Results
Laser lipo cavitation before and after
One of our clients, photographed at the start of a course and again when it finished. Follow the line of the waist. Nothing about overall size is being claimed here.
Which part of the body, how much of the course was finished, how well hydrated you kept yourself and what the scale did afterwards all shift the outcome. What was destroyed is gone permanently; the cells beside it are not, and they can grow, which is why a steady weight is what keeps the shape.
Also on West Broadway
Treatments that work well around this one
- Cryo Fat Freezing in Vancouver — the alternative for a pocket that lifts away cleanly
- Double Chin Removal in Vancouver — the same technology under the jaw
- RF Facial in Vancouver — firming, where elasticity is part of the picture
- Microneedling in Vancouver — for stretch marks and texture over a treated area
- Laser lipo cavitation brand-wide — how the treatment works across all our clinics
