I bought my first waist trainer three glasses of wine into Tuesday evening at 11pm because I had just watched a promotional video of a woman claiming to have dropped two dress sizes in a month “just from wearing it round the house.” Please let me be that honest about when I bought it, because it’s important. You do not wake up and decide to make a rational, thoroughly considered purchase at 11pm. You do that because you looked at a flat stomach and a testimonial and your brain did the calculations it wanted to do, not the calculations that were actually being offered.
It arrived Thursday afternoon and came wrapped in something wooden and jagged enough to look like medical equipment. That was intentional. Part of the trick is how much it looks like medical equipment once it arrives.
Between the industrial black elastic and the rigid rows of hooks it’s surprisingly difficult to remember that this is something you’re supposed to wear against your skin and not a surgical tool.
That said, I slid it on and tightened it as far as I could reasonably manage without creating actual tears in my ribcage and stared hard at my thighs in the mirror proud of how full and committed I felt. Proud, genuinely. I hadn’t eaten less. I hadn’t exercised more than usual. I’d just made my body tighter, and my brain had registered that as “progress.”
Which is all of this, I think. Not a lie exactly. Just enough of a difference between what your eyes see and what your body feels for you to start believing in the possible when it’s not actually there.
Let’s start with what’s actually happening when you cinch a corset
Before anyone selling you this nonsense gets defensive, let’s get through the fundamental concept of corsets: A corset does not touch your fat. It cannot. There is no way, mechanically or otherwise, for it to get at fat. What it does do is compress your soft tissue and shift it around. Literally push all of the non-fat bits of you into a slightly different configuration (yes, this actually moves your ribs and internal organs with sustained tight-lacing, but that’s also kind of an entire conversation on its own), and temporarily squeeze water from your newly compact shape.
None of that is actual fat loss. It’s the equivalent of squeezing a stress ball. It feels like it should be something but it pops back into place when you’re finished. Another way to think of it: When I first tried my corset on I “lost” almost two pounds stepping on the scale while wearing it, and nearly a pound again when I stepped back on after taking it off and drinking zero calories. That second pound was all water I’d temporarily squeezed out of myself by sitting inside Spandex and latex for two hours. (And trust me, you sweat. A lot.) It’s the equivalent of what happens when you use a sauna. Not fat. Water. Which your body will joyfully replenish when you have your next drink of water, which you will because you’re not a raisin.
My friend Priya, who works in radiography so has technically seen more of the interiors of the human torso than is comfortable, explained it to me over lunch when I told her I was trying waist trainers for this story: “Your fat’s not actually going anywhere,” she told me. “You’re just squishing your ribs over to Chanel territory.”
She wasn’t trying to be mean. She was just being accurate, which hurts more, I think, when you’ve already spent £34.99 believing the internet was not going to let you down.
(I think the reason we let corsets come so close to weight loss is that they borrow from things that are similar but not actually the same. Sweating while working out has absolutely to do with your metabolism operating at an increased rate. Compression clothes have been shown to have effects on athletic recovery, reduction of swelling post workout, literal medical applications where someone has been prescribed a compression garment for blood flow or swelling after surgery. None of those very specific circumstances apply to “wear this while running errands and your metabolism will do damn.” It’s akin to thinking because marathon runners sweat in sauna suits that wearing one around Target will turn you into an athlete. Speaking things into existence because they’re close to something real is some of the most persuasive saleswork there is.)
The “if you wear it all day it changes your eating habits” argument, and why I’m not buying it either
The corset defender’s argument, when someone who has managed to keep their braincells intact attempts to explain why you spend your afternoon sucked into Shapewrap, goes something like this: While wearing a waist trainer full time restricts how much you can eat at one time because there’s a finite amount of space your stomach has to expand to before your corset actually hurts. Over time you’ll eat less, and small amounts of calories equal weight loss, therefore corsets work…sort of?
I want to spend time on this one because it’s the only theory that made any kind of lateral sense to me, as opposed to the “helps you sweat fat” myth which was instantly disprovable by my pelvic bone. Plus… hear me out here.
If you wore a corset all day, every day, would you learn to eat less over time? For a week or two I thought there was enough of a thread there to test. If restricting your stomach feels like it’s restricting your appetite, will that feeling carry over when you’re not wearing a waist trainer? Maybe your brain would trick itself into believing you were full.
Except no. I wore my moderately constrictive corset for a few hours a day for about ten days around the times I normally ate more than I should (i.e. afternoon and evening) and sure, when I took it off I felt fuller faster and ate less at dinner. True. Also true: I was also ravenous by 9pm the moment I slid it off and ended up eating more in the hour and a half after removing my waist trainer than I normally would have over the course of a night’s worth of snacks. Your body is not retraining itself to feel full with less food. It is not hungry all day because you told it to be not hungry. It simply remembers you used to let it eat and wants those salads back all at once the second you un-lace yourself, which is, if you’ve read anything about how appetite actually works, not surprising.
My coworker Odalys, who coincidentally started her own waist trainer trials after I mentioned mine to her, text me this analogy when we were both done: “I basically starved myself politely for six hours then ate like I survived on wild moss for a week.” Which, is really the best way I’ve heard anyone describe how eating while wearing a corset actually works. It’s not suppression. It’s delayed. And a delay isn’t the same thing as a deficit if you catch up on your lost calories, which you will because that’s how hunger works and no amount of boning and tightening is going to change your hormones.
(I should also note that restricting your stomach on a regular basis with anything but eating habits has been shown to affect your ability to gauge true hunger/fullness cues over time. Trusting the garment to tell you when to stop instead of listening to your body isn’t a small price to pay for your dress looking better in photos.)
Ultimately, where I ended up and why I think corsets can be useful
Look, unless something changes about how these garments are constructed and what they’re allowed to claim, they are not weight loss devices. They do not cause you to sweat fat. They do not—if you wear them all day—train you to eat less. I spent nine days attempting to prove a corset could make weight loss easier and all I proved was how easily I could be tricked by staring at my thigh gaps and not reading the news.
Except I don’t want to leave you with tired debunking because it isn’t actually how I feel about corsets in general and it wouldn’t be fair to pretend waist trainers have zero redeemable qualities just because the marketing is murkier than my tube of coconut lip balm. I now own three corsets. I wear one specifically under fitted dresses on the rare occasion I have to wear a wedding dress because it does, quite literally change how a structured dress fits on your body for several hours, the same way Spanx does, the same way a slimming garment does anything. It is what it claims to be: A styling tool. A method to help you look a certain way for a limited amount of time. It’s both only skin deep and also completely honest about being only skin deep. I take mine off at midnight and my body is the exact same shape as when I put it on because nothing about that experience made me lose anything real.
That’s not a trick. That’s using the thing for what it was designed to do.
What is a scam, though, is the brandishment of waist cinchers as fitness tools, the promise that there’s some magical calorie burning going on under that many pounds of nylon you can’t actually see. That an inanimate piece of clothing is, with enough effort, training your waist the way you train your muscles in the gym. You cannot spot reduce weight loss through compression. You cannot “firm up” an area by lacing yourself into submission. Want a slimmer waist? Eat less food. Move more often. Do both simultaneously and watch the scale climb.
Every single weight loss plan on the planet lands on those two things as non-negotiable truths. The corset doesn’t exempt you from that. Your dumb tea drink doesn’t exempt you from that. Your magic gold belt your aunt swears by from 2003 doesn’t actually do anything either, sitting in her drawer as we speak.
If you want to wear a corset as a fashion statement, for pictures, for the occasional evening where you’ll enjoy the feel of being more structured under clothes I am Cheerios-ing my fingers as we speak and sending good energy your way. You deserve to like what you wear. If you think it’ll melt the pounds away though, save your money and your sanity. Spend both on local eateries instead and let gravity do what it’s pretty damn excellent at: reminding you this is a tight shirt.
