The Dangers of 'Waist Training'
This newly trendy practice involves wearing a corset-like device for hours at a time to compress your core, which will supposedly decrease the size of your waist permanently over time. You don’t have to be an M.D. to realize that waist “training” to shrink sounds suspiciously iffy. In fact, experts generally agree that there’s no way it can really work—and it might do real bodily harm. “Medically, it doesn’t make sense that cinching your waist tightly will make it permanently smaller,” says Mary Jane Minkin, M.D., clinical professor of ob-gyn at Yale School of Medicine. "Once you take the garment off, your body will return to its usual shape . It’s also uncomfortable, restricts your movements, and if you wear it really tight, it can even make it difficult to breathe and theoretically could cause rib damage.” Believers say that the tightness of the garment makes you sweat a lot, but it’s really not possible to perspire so much that you shave inches off her midsection in an...