DEEP FREEZE: New procedure takes bite out of beefy bits

An enormous vacuum cleaner is being attached to the bulges above and behind my hips. It's going to take a bite out of my beefy bits, my adipose portions.

It's going to suck me in and spit me out. Despite assurances, explanations and demonstrations, I'm nervous. The doctor switches on the machine and an intense suctioning catches me off-guard. She switches it off to release me.

''That was just to give you an idea of what to expect," says the slim, wrinkle-free Dr Natasha Begg-Spiro, aesthetic practitioner at Laserderm Med Spa, where I'm trying the new Zeltiq CoolSculpting procedure.

''When I switch it on again, I'm going to add the cold."

Never mind the perspiration all over my body on this winter day - I'm chatting incessantly, which is a dead give-away that I'm perturbed.

Begg-Spiro is refreshingly frank and doesn't gloss over the reality of the treatment.

''Look, it's not comfortable," she says, speaking from experience.

''But after 10 minutes the extreme cold has numbed that area of your body."

Dressed in a white suit covered with a doctor's coat, she spends 20 minutes using calipers to measure my waist.

I'm skinny, so it's not the fit-for-an-obese-American type of muffin top we're dealing with here. No, my love handles are more the doughy variety that have risen only marginally past the confines of the baking tray.

''They're perfect for the procedure," she says.

''You'll only have to go through this once."

I opted for this bizarre-sounding treatment because I was curious about how extreme cold could reduce fat cells without damaging muscle and skin cells.

It turns out the fat cells react to heat and cold at different temperatures, so the cold about to freeze my fat cells will not damage any other cells in my body. I want to keep those hard-earned muscles.

The body reacts to the invasion on its fat with an inflammatory response, and then it naturally disposes of the damaged fat cells. You don't have to do a thing.

After a few days, the frozen fat cells begin a process called apoptosis (or programmed cell death), begin to shrink and are eventually "digested' by the body and removed through the liver. This sounded like a fascinating biological experiment and, boasting a rather high pain threshold, I was game.

I am the only one in my office who grew up with a grandmother whose mantra was "beauty knows no pain".

On the way to the spa, with visions of frostbite blackening my resolve, I listened to a favourite Annie Lennox song.

''Keep young and beautiful. It's your duty to be beautiful. Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved."

Begg-Spiro is a good advert for the procedures at Laserderm, which include botox, fillers and non-surgical facelifts, to name a few.

She's reattached the machine to my body and is adding the cold, and it's not so bad. It feels like a stiffness in the area, the kind you get after exercising muscles you haven't used in a while.

She hands me a Shape magazine and a buzzer to call her if there's an emergency.

''Some people fall asleep," she says as she's leaving the room.

The treatment takes an hour per section and even though it is dead time, for me it's too weird to have your fat in a vacuum cleaner to fall asleep.

I make it through the first hour without incident (she's right, you do go numb after 10 minutes) and move onto my other side. After two hours (despite the numbness, I counted them down, minute per minute) my svelte new body is ejected by the machine. A very strange, bright red "blister" the size of a croissant remains for a few minutes.

It feels like it is not attached to me.

It takes a few minutes for the redness to subside, leaving a mottled bruise in the shape of the vacuum head that looks like a hickey from a huge robot.

The bruising lasts a few days.

Over the next few months I notice my clothes feeling looser around my hips, the area looks more toned and there's a reduction of dough overflow.

When I go back to Begg-Spiro two months later, she measures a 2.5cm loss over the treated area, even though it is winter and I've been trying to eat myself warm.

• For further information visit www.laserderm.co.za