This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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Dr. David Shafer has been a practicing plastic surgeon for 15 years, but since 2020, the Shafer Clinic, where he practices, has also operated Advitam, a metabolic aesthetics clinic. Through Dr. Shafer’s work with both, he sees patients who are striving to lose weight or gain energy, and he’s also had a front-row seat to the rise of GLP-1s. In the plastic surgery clinic, patients may come in for skin removal surgery, having lost a lot of weight taking a GLP-1. At Advitam, they may be supervised while taking one. If you’ve seen headlines in the past year about Ozempic face (or breasts, or butt), then you already understand how the two practices can work hand-in-hand. On this week’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Dr. Shafer discusses them.
Below are highlights from the episode, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
The multi-expert approach at the Advitam Clinic
“We have plastic surgery, what I do. We have dermatology with Dr. Engelman. We have laser and skin specialists and facial specialists, but then we also have a metabolic specialist, and that’s where we’re looking at your body from the inside out. We do a whole body composition analysis, we do blood analysis, and then we take all of those markers and figure out a plan for you — whether you should go right to surgery, or whether we should metabolically optimize you and then [go to] surgery. Or maybe you don’t even need surgery, and [we] can just metabolically optimize you. So really, we have a whole kind of umbrella of things that we can do for patients, and we try to figure out what’s the best thing to help them meet their goals. Instead of saying, ‘If you have a hammer, everything is a nail,’ we have a whole toolbox of things that we can use to help people achieve what they looking for.”
On the popularity of purpose of NAD
“Some good advice for life — not just [with regards to NAD], but anything — is if it sounds too good to be true, then it’s probably not true. And so, to set the record straight, it’s not this magic wand that can make all your problems go away, but it does help fuel the cells for the body. So, imagine your car is running out of gas. It can only go so far. You have to drive real slow because, otherwise, you’re going to run out of gas. This is filling that tank up and giving the building blocks and the energy that the cells need to do their metabolic processes to move faster, to get that energy back that you’re looking for. So it’s not going to solve everything, but it is going to give you that fuel, to help it go a little bit faster and help everything work a little bit better. It is expensive. It depends on how much you need and how often you’re doing it. And it’s not a one-off. You want to build up your supply of NAD within the body, and then you’re continuing to use it, so then you need to continue to replace it. So, it’s kind of like you buy a boat and you have to keep filling it up with gas.”
On plastic surgery vs. metabolic optimization
“It all starts with the consultation because we want to talk to the patient, understand their motivation, listen to their story and listen to their goals, but then we also take a look at them and see if their anatomy is good for surgery and whether they’re healthy. And then we talk about their options. Sometimes, there are options, where you could do this or you could do that and kind of get similar effects. If somebody comes in and they’re very overweight and they think liposuction is their weight loss treatment, then that’s the wrong patient to do liposuction on, because they’re not making those lifestyle changes that are going to help maintain their results, and they may have unrealistic expectations about what liposuction can do. It’s more of a contouring procedure, it’s not a weight loss procedure. So those are the kind of patients that I send down to our Advitam clinic. They’ll get evaluated, and it’s amazing. They come back three to six months later, and they look like a different person. They may still want liposuction for some fine-tuning, but now they’re the perfect candidate for liposuction because they’ve maximized what they can do metabolically and with exercise and diet, but they have these trouble areas. [It’s] what we call genetic fat, like the like the same fat pocket that mom has or grandma has, or the same neck that Grandpa has. That’s where the surgery comes in.”
