Waist training: Body shaping method with side effects?

Victorian era practice sees new popularity after celebrities share pictures, messages of benefits and results on social media

The hour glass look has been a fashion convention for centuries and now, the pulling and stretching is putting the squeeze on a whole, new generation of image conscious consumers with the 21st Century trend know as waist training.
As soon as social media stars like Kim and Khloe Khardashian showed off the latest waist training devices on Instagram about a year ago, the rush was on.
"It does get crazy in here on the weekend," said Eva Garcia, marketing manager for Top Image, a women's clothing retailer located in the metro Phoenix area. She says stores like hers are barely keeping up with demand.
"Now that the celebrities have made it more trendy, girls don't see it as a faja, or a full body cincher or a girdle," Garcia says. "This is something fun, this is something we can just wear under our clothes."
Between W-2's and Form 10-40's, tax preparer, Martha Valenzuela caught the waist training bug. It wasn't easy, she says and squeezing onto the bandwagon took a little extra help.
"My fiancee helped me put it on the very first time," she said. "I thought it was gonna be impossible to put it on, but we got it on."
Cynthia Jones had been in the market for a waist trainer and said that it felt good but kind of snug when she tried it on for the first time.
The tighter the better seems to be the preferred fitting guide, but when is tight, too tight? Pablo Prichard, MD, Chief of Plastic Surgery at John C Lincoln Hospital, in Phoenix, shared the inside story for what's happening under a very snug fitting, waist trainer or corset.
"They are doing a small amount of tension to the actual rib cage and the waist muscles; and overtime can actually modify the skeletal system--to the rib cage," Prichard said.
Proponents of moderate waist training or corset wearing recommend only a half inch, to an inch of reduction per month as a healthy benchmark.
"Going past that is certainly causing your body undo stress to your abdomen," Prichard said. "If you get any bruising, if you get any sort of pain associated with the corset wearing--you're doing it wrong."
He went on to warn, "You should definitely stop doing what you're doing, because you're causing yourself damage. If you're having pain, that is your body telling you to stop."
So far, for those who've seen positive results, a healthy lifestyle and patience--a lot of patience, seems to be the key to molding a new body image.
"You put it on and you wear it and it's just gonna be this magical thing that's going to transform your body," Martha Valenzuela said. "I don't think it works that way. Obviously it helps, but eating and exercising is the key, really."