From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
Even as more than 20,000 people applied for all-expenses-paid radical redos on the new season of ABC's Extreme Makeover, many Americans are revamping themselves on their own dime—despite potentially serious health consequences. When her plastic surgeon warned that the risks ranged from infection to death, Donna Timmons listened carefully. "They are literally cutting you apart and putting you back together," she says. So did the warning give her second thoughts? "I couldn't get there fast enough," she admits. Neither, it seems, could the other determined people whose stories follow.

Alicia Quiñones

The new Alicia Quinones made her official debut on Sept. 6 at 2:35 in the afternoon in the Gap store at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. "I've waited since I was 10 years old for this," she said as she checked out the fit of a pair of brown boot-cut cords. "I got into a size 8! Low cut! I can't believe it!" Given that she was a size 24 just 18 months ago, Quinones, 24, has reason to celebrate. But her 130-lb. weight loss, much of it achieved after gastric bypass surgery in April 2002, isn't the only thing contributing to her new confidence. After the 5'4" Quinones shrank to a size 12 within a year, she wanted more. "I wanted to be fabulous," she says. "I wanted to wear my sister's cool, skinny jeans."

In August Quinones, an office manager, checked into a Beverly Hills clinic for a tummy tuck and a thigh lift. A week later she was back for breast work that took her from a size 38B to 36C. Quinones then bleached her teeth, lightened her hair and began working out to hold her weight at 140 lbs. While she pays off her debt, she has moved in with mom Coco, 54, and sister Claudia, 25. "Alicia," says Coco, "looks beautiful now, like she is on the inside." Adds Claudia: "We're so proud of her—though every time I see her she's wearing my clothes."

•gastric bypass
•breast lift and augmentation
•tummy tuck
•thigh lift
•hair color and highlights
•tooth bleaching
•total cost: $35,000

Donna Timmons

Donna Timmons's wake-up call came five years ago, when she threw her back out lifting her daughter Kaelin, then 2. "I needed to do something," she says. Virtual starvation had failed her, so this time Timmons, 33, tried eating in moderation, coupled with cardio and weight training. In one year she lost 130 lbs.—and got a divorce from Kaelin's dad. "Losing weight," she says, "gave me the courage to deal with the situation I was in."

Still, Timmons, a Web master in Pittsburgh, was not comfortable in her own skin—there was too much of it left from the weight loss. "She had a saddlebag deformity. Her hips and thighs were way out of proportion," says Pittsburgh plastic surgeon Dennis Hurwitz, who last December performed seven hours of surgery to remove fat and skin. Around that time, Donna met auditor Bob Timmons, 31; they wed in May. "I am much happier," she says. "I feel I reaped the benefits of the change I made."

•tummy tuck
•lower-body lift
•inner-thigh lift
•breast lift/augmentation
•total cost: $22,000

David Bandas

While growing up on a farm in Temple, Texas, David Bandas and his five siblings all struggled with weight problems. "I was morbidly obese," says David, 51. "I was the funny, fat kid." Some of that excess weight was hereditary; some of it was the result of poor eating habits. "We ate a lot of down-home cooking," says his older brother Rick, 60. "We had lots of chicken-fried things." It wasn't until David took off for college that he began to feel acutely self-conscious about his girth. He shed 125 lbs. through diet and exercise and then, at age 26, had his first plastic surgery, a tummy tuck. After that, he recalls, "clothes fit better, things just worked better. It encourages you to do more things for yourself."

As his weight bobbed up and down, those "things" added up to 45 major and minor surgeries. Bandas has tucked and liposuctioned excess skin from his face and body; lifted his eye-lids, eyebrows, chest and breasts; removed moles and skin tags; and transplanted hair to his balding pate. "If I weren't financially successful," concedes the unattached Bandas, who owns a tax-consulting-services firm in Austin, Texas, "none of this would have been possible." Of his $126,000 tab, only the $14,000 gastric bypass surgery, which he underwent in 1998 after tipping the scale at 320 lbs., was covered by health insurance. Now a trim 190 lbs., the 6' Bandas says, at last, "I'm done. I'm happy with where I am."

•two tummy tucks
•four liposuctions
•brow lift
•removed bump on nose
•eye lift
•suction to chin and jowls
•fat removed from upper eyelids
•skin removal on arm and lip
•hair transplantation
•gastric bypass surgery
•fat injection from buttocks into left cheek
•abdominal scar removal
•breast lift
•chest lift
•laser of lower eyelids to smooth out wrinkles
•dermabrasion
•face-lift
•microsuction to cheeks
•total cost: $126,000

Risë West

Ten years ago, it seems safe to say, the magic had gone out of Alan and Rise West's 18-year marriage. When she awakened each day, Alan would look away. "My husband got nauseous looking at my face," says Rise, 56. Alan, 55, a real estate investor in Boca Raton, Fla., puts it a little more gently. "I felt my wife looked aged," he says. "She had a great body, but her face needed to look as good."

In January 1994, after attending a seminar on plastic surgery, Risë (pronounced Reeza) approached Dr. Daniel Man, who practices in Boca Raton. She thought, she said, she might have her eyes done, nothing more. The doctor had other ideas. "Dr. Man suggested I have my entire face reworked," she says. "So I thought about it."

Then she went for it. Since 1994, Risë, a homemaker who, at 5' and 96 lbs., has had a dozen procedures, has reshaped everything from thighs to nose to cheekbones. "I look prettier than I did as a teenager," she says. "I am thrilled with the results—and I will continue to do whatever is needed to make me look good."

And what about Alan, who, after all, signed onto the $100,000 that Rise has spent so far on plastic surgery? "My wife looked better and better after each procedure," he says. "It's amazing! It was like living with a new woman. Rise is like an annuity; she has improved with age."

•two face-lifts
•rhinoplasty
•breast lift
•liposuction
•lip sculpture
•lip lift
•laser resurfacing on face
•fat insertions to fill out cheeks
•Botox treatments
•total cost: $100,000

Marie Tanner

Marie Tanner still remembers those horrible gym days when she had to change in the locker room at her junior high school in Richmond, Va. "Everyone else's breasts were growing," says Tanner, 39. "Mine weren't." Her first attempt at breast enhancement at age 30, which boosted her B-cup to size C, left her with sore nipples and a distressing lack of cleavage, owing to the wide spacing between her implants. Five years later Richmond plastic surgeon Tom De Wire Sr. stepped in and did a new job, upping the 5'3" Tanner to D-size proportions. For the first time, she noticed heads turning when she entered a room. "I looked confident, younger, sexier," she says.

Encouraged, Tanner perked up her smile by straightening and bleaching her teeth, smoothed her forehead with Botox, reshaped her nose with rhinoplasty and slimmed her thighs with liposuction. To date, her surgery tab totals nearly $24,000, and the bills keep coming: She is scheduled to fix a deflating implant. "Surgery gives you more confidence to do everything," says Tanner, vice president of a moving-and-storage company. "People notice you where you weren't noticed before."

What a makeover does not do, she stresses, is keep husbands from looking at younger women. Divorced from her first husband and separated from her second, Tanner cautions, "You should not get plastic surgery for your new job or to keep your husband, because it's not going to work." Bottom line: "Don't do it for someone else. Do it for you."

•two breast enhancements
•two nose jobs
•liposuction
•braces
•tooth bleaching
•Botox
•Total cost: $23,850

JILL SMOLOWE and MIKE NEILL Alicia Dennis in Austin, Maureen Harrington and Brenda Rodriguez in Los Angeles, Linda Marx in Boca Raton, Melody Simmons in Richmond and Michelle York in Pittsburgh

REMADE FOR TV

The draw of ABC's Extreme Makeover? Raw emotion and startling before-and-afters

Dan Restione

When Ann Wog met Dan Restione at work, she noticed that he rarely smiled. So on the day last summer Restione, 41, a Seattle radio producer, revealed his new looks and 20-lb. weight loss to friends and family, Wog was struck by his huge grin. "That's the biggest change I could have imagined," she says. Another close friend noticed something more: "The chest was up, the shoulders back, the chin up." Now, "instead of hiding inside my apartment," says Restione, "I want to meet people."

•chin and jowl implants
•extensive liposuction
•facial fat injections
•hair weave
•LASIK eye surgery
•gum reshaping
•porcelain veneers on teeth

Lori Floyd

For years Lori Floyd, 37, steered clear of her four kids' classrooms, determined, she says, not to "embarrass them." On unavoidable occasions like birthdays, "I would take cupcakes into the school," says the Tioga Center, N.Y., stay-at-home mom. "Then someone would say something like, 'Your mother is a witch.'" When two of her children leaped to her honor with their fists, they got suspended. Since Floyd's summer makeover, she has gained so much confidence that instead of hiding from field trips, she volunteers for them. "She seems more free," says her husband, Bruce, 32. "It's magical."

•nose job
•chin implant
•breast augmentation
•brow it
•lower eye lift
•hair color and highlights
•facial fat injections

Caroline Johnson and Catherine Bunnell

For years the identical twins looked truly identical. Then an accident left Johnson (left) with a crooked nose. Unable to afford orthodontics, the married mother of three also found her teeth falling apart. Bunnell (right), meanwhile, hated the stretch marks left from her daughter Ashlyn's birth. Together they decided to undergo rehauls. Since their summer surgery, the 33-year-olds again look so much alike that Ashlyn, 3, mistook her aunt for her mom. Bunnell, who is separated, says that now she won't be "so afraid to think I could have happiness in my life."

•nose job
•porcelain veneers
•liposuction on thighs
•chin and breast implants

•tummy tuck
•breast augmentation
•teeth whitening
•gum recontouring

  • Contributors:
  • Alicia Dennis,
  • Maureen Harrington,
  • Brenda Rodriguez,
  • Linda Marx,
  • Melody Simmons,
  • Michelle York.