When it comes to liposuction, we figure there may be a few questions floating around that some of our readers haven’t had the opportunity or the courage to ask.

Thanks to the kind folks at The HealthCare Channel, we have a “virtual office visit” with a real plastic surgeon to the stars: Peter Fodor, a Beverly Hills physician who’s been involved with liposuction since it got started in this country about three decades ago.

What is liposuction exactly? Fodor says lots of patients want to know, and he explains the variations. A good surgeon, he says, should be familiar with all the liposuction tools and pick the one that’s best for each part of the body.

Despite horror stories in the media, Fodor says, “there are more happy liposuction patients than for any other procedure.” Why? It’s minimally invasive, the recovery is fast and the results are durable, if patients keep their weight under control. “Fat cells do not regenerate,” Fodor explains. “Therefore if you remove the extra fat cells from localized fat deposits… the result is permanent.”

Liposuction has its limits, though. Only about 6 to 8 pounds of body fat can be removed at each sitting, Fodor explains. For obese patients then, multiple sessions spaced months apart may be necessary. Most of his patient aren’t obese, he says, and instead suffer from “figure faults,” deposits of fat that are out of proportion with the rest of the body.

Unfortunately, many patients get liposuction from doctors who aren’t as well qualified as they could be. As a result, about half of the patients who come to see Fodor these days have had lipo before and are looking to fix something they didn’t like the first time around.