We went silent in our group chat for approximately four minutes. Internet silence feels like someone clearing their throat right before they say something stupid, and after our designated time out someone’s mate, the bloke sat two desks over from me at work, sent us a picture wearing what I suspect is porn underwear styled as a disappointing advent calendar. “Six weeks of this and the abs write themselves.” Eleven replies in ninety seconds. I said no and was sent a voice note calling me a hater for my troubles, which yeah, fair. Been called worse by people who were also wrong.
I’ll state my bona fides on the subject up front because plain statements of fact are also skipped past too much in this debate: waist trainers will not make your waist smaller. They compress it temporarily, which is literally the same thing as sucking your stomach in, and when you take them off your body goes back to how it was before because bodies aren’t modelling clay. If anything appears to have kept from wearing one, it’s water weight or sweat loss or temporarily-tightened skin that will loosen back up within hours.
That’s not an opinion, that is literally just what those garments do.
Always have done, on any body, in any decade they’ve been sold under some other marketing phrase.
What it actually does to your waistline
The most complicated thing that wearing a waist trainer does to your body is squeeze it. Squeezing improves two outcomes you might want. How you look while wearing it, which is happening right now so yeah, it works for that. And your sweating potential, because you’ve essentially wrapped your midsection in a layer of insulation that retains heat, which people interpret as fat loss because they might see the scale go down a couple pounds that afternoon. It hasn’t. You’ve lost water weight. You’ll have it back by dinner, maybe lunch if you’ve drunk a normal amount, and no company selling this stuff lists that on their packaging because “temporary water displacement” doesn’t sell nearly as many units as “slim your waistline in six weeks.”
What concerns me more than how ineffective they are is what compression does while you’re wearing it for prolonged periods of time, which is really what a lot of these six week challenge videos are subtly recommending. Core strength has an actual function all day long – keeping you stable, holding your posture up, carrying out microscopic efforts throughout the day you don’t notice – and restricting that with a tight band around your middle is asking that piece of clothing to take some of those duties off your muscles. Wear that enough every day for enough weeks and you’re not strengthening anything, you’re teaching your core to do less, which is pretty much the opposite of what I think anyone looking into buying one believes they’re investing in.
You also have the less fancy effects. It restricts breathing if you wear it tight enough, there are actual medical complaints of acid reflux caused by the pressure against your stomach, and if you’re training while wearing one instead of just sitting at a desk, you’re reducing your torso’s range of motion which for most lifts and cardio is not a slight adjustment, it’s wearing a tool that trains you to perform the exercise worse.
I bought one because I’m worried enough about clickbait headlines to have a genuine curiosity about them, wore it on and off for a fortnight and the most successful way I can describe an experience is removing it came to feeling like it was helping my posture rather than just an inhuman level of tape forcing me not to slouch, which are two very different things despite appearing to identical onlookers. After six hours at a desk it stopped feeling supportive and started feeling like my shirt was constantly reminding me I was being bad at something, and by that point in the day I was actually getting tired from it. No thanks. I did not wake up two weeks later with a new waistline. I woke up two weeks later with a newfound awareness of my own ribs.
Why people keep claiming they work though
The before feeling of “success” those instantly provide is doing about ninety percent of the selling for you and I don’t think it’s honest to discount that as nothing, because wanting your body to look like the version of itself you see in the mirror ten seconds ago desperately is a powerful feeling of immediate evidence, delusive as it might be. Put it on, see a flatter stomach in the mirror, your brain takes that as confirmation it works and it requires a small act of will every time you put it on to remember that whatever changes you see disappear instantly once you take it off. Add to that one trustworthy-looking “before and after” shot, with the after taken holding your breath, standing in different lighting, straighter than normal because you know you’re about to take a picture, looks greater than the sum of its parts on camera but wouldn’t win with a single secondary question asked.
Also just people feeling like they’re doing something where maybe they’re not doing nothing. There’s an actual placebo effect at work that deserves to be mocked far less than it is because if you believe wearing a waist trainer is going to make you exercise more or eat healthier, damnites, you probably will. Holds exactly as true for anything as feeling like you’re taking action on a problem. Combine those two into someone who covers their stomach for several hours a day and decides to hit the gym more often because of it and you’ve got the perfect recipe for very vocal happy customers that outweigh any who actually hate their experience.
Everyone convinced themselves it was the trainer doinging when in reality it was healthy eating and exercise making the waist trainer look good sitting beside it.
That guy from work? Started going to the gym three times a week that same month too. Nobody @’d him about that.
So yeah. Want to actually change your waist? Diet and exercise, both far less sexy and far slower than any product wants you to believe and will never be available in one size “that fits most.” Wear it out to a fancy dinner if you like how it looks and feel in it. Actual use case that works, stop judging me how I drink my tea. Trying to wear one for multiple weeks with any expectation past that is where I throw my hands up and say no. Plainly now, instead of watching someone learn that tougher lesson in six weeks’ time only to assume they failed instead of the product.
