The result that the number of fat cells is set in adolescence and remains constant through adulthood, by the bodies fixed fat cell replacement rate boggles my mind.

I have questions about pushing the limits of this.

The summary talks about people who were overweight in adolescence. What about a person who was lean in adolescence? How much weight would they have to gain in later adulthood to change the number of fat cells? Or would they change at all? Could you balloon up by over a hundred pounds and the number would remain fixed? Astonishing!

Also, what about methods that physically remove actual fat cells rather than deflating them, like liposuction. If the cell replacement rate stays fixed at 1-for-1 does that mean you've fixed the problem forever because you have less existing fat cells and they only replace themselves? Or does it mean that your body has some sort of baseline fat cell count, and after time, your fat cell number will be back at what it was before liposuction?

I'd love to see more information on this!!

According to many articles about plastic surgery that I have read (in fashion magazines, so take this with a grain of salt) removing or adding fat cells to any area of the body is permanent. If you have a big butt and you get the fat sucked out and then gain weight, you will probably gain it somewhere other than your butt because those fat cells are gone forever. This has been used as a cautionary tale for people who want to get fat removed from, say, their butt and get it injected into wrinkles to smooth them out because if you gain weight after having that done then some of it might go to the new fat cells in your face and give you weird little lumps where wrinkles once were. Which begs the question, within one person's body are some fat cells more prone to storing fat than others? If a person carries extra weight in their belly, is it because they have a large concentration of fat cells there or because those particular cells get all the fat?

Bodies are such strange things...