A Bigger Butt from Lifting Weights

That's what the title should have been for my blog post last June about the benefits I'd seen from strength training. Being happily ignorant of the big butt craze, I went on about losing enough fat to need new pants and lowering my fasting insulin. Maybe I should have been clear that my waist size went down and butt got bigger. (Sorry, no before and after shots--I don't take pictures of my ass.)

Photo from Pixabay. The closest thing you'll get to a butt picture here.

I only heard about the big butt craze a few days ago when YouTube suddenly started putting a bunch of BBL (Brazilian butt lift) videos in my feed. I have no idea why those came up. But some of the plastic surgeons making the videos have said that it's the riskiest plastic surgery--so risky that some of them won't do it--and that implants you sit on all day are going to move around.

Brave AI lists the risks of BBLs as fat embolism (potentially fatal), high mortality rate (1 in 3,000), loss of fat cells (affecting the end result), blood clots, infection, asymmetry, scarring, and nerve damage. The Cleveland Clinic says BBLs are semi-permanent and "may even last for over a decade."

I've had plastic surgery--septoplasty and turbinate reduction for frequent sinus infections. It was painful, I was out for a week, it didn't heal for several years until I started a low-carb diet, and for all that, I still got frequent sinus infections. So I'm not a fan of plastic surgery: it doesn't always work as advertised.

Like my septoplasty, a BBL isn't going to make you healthier, but lifting weights will. It can even give you a bigger butt for a fraction of the risk and a fraction of the cost. It won't give you a butt of Kardashian proportions, but your ass isn't supposed to look like you stuffed a pair of balloons in your pants. (Speaking of which, some of the victims of this procedure said they couldn't fit into normal pants.) Working your glutes just a few days a week, though, can improve not just your butt, but your strength and metabolic health. And you'll have a butt in proportion to your build and your stage of life.

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