Waist trainers are all over the place. Celebrities such Amber Rose, Blac Chyna, and Kim Kardashian have posted photos of themselves waist training and swear by it to keep their hourglass figures. So, what is a waist trainer?
A waist trainer is basically a corset, similar to the kind women wore during the Victorian era. They were used for aesthetic purposes back then, but now they’re being advertised as a weight loss miracle. According to waist trainer companies and the celebrities that promote them, wearing a waist trainer will help lose inches off your waist. Boom. Instant weight lost. Sounds easy, right?
Wrong. It doesn’t work like that.
I’ve seen many articles where authors wear a waist trainer for a period of time and post their (non) results at the end of the article. I’m not WAISTING (Get it? Heh.) my money on it. I’m just gonna cut straight to the point: they don’t work.
I’ll give you a play by play. You put on your waist trainer, your organs are condensed like a can of biscuits, and you get the desired hourglass figure you’ve been wanting…until you take your waist trainer off, and then your body reverts to its original shape. To sum it up, the waist trainer just pushes your fat around.
Many people swear they lost inches from wearing a waist trainer, but where does the weight loss come from? There’s a couple reasons for that. Eating is extremely uncomfortable when you have on a waist trainer, probably because your stomach’s about to pop out of your esophagus. This also causes acid reflux. With that in mind, you probably won’t want to eat much while waist training. Another reason for possible weight loss is the fact that you sweat more than you normally would when you have on a waist trainer (sometimes to the point of dehydration), so you may lose some “water weight”. Waist trainers can also cause lung infections, constipation, and bruising in the mid-section.
Trust me, I wish losing weight could be as easy as slapping on a waist trainer and eating whatever I felt like with no guilt. Who would ever need a gym? What is a diet? Unfortunately, spot reduction isn’t a real thing. You can’t lose weight from only certain parts of your body (naturally, anyway). If you click the links on Instagram that take you to the websites of these waist trainer companies, they usually suggest (in very small print, somewhere in the depths of their website) that waist trainers be used for very limited amounts of time and in combination with healthy eating and exercise. Ah, that small print.
Women come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s okay if you aren’t shaped like an hourglass.