Waist train, lose gains

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who told me she has bought a ‘waist trainer’. To those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s essentially a corset which is supposed to serve the purpose of giving you a smaller waist. If you remember Keira Knightly in Pirates of the Caribbean (I believe it was the first one) fainting due to her excessively tightly laced top, you have the right idea. Khloe Kardashian recently uploaded an Instagram of herself wearing her waist trainer, an idea she apparently got from the seriously bizarre Blac Chyna (Tyga’s baby momma aka the only woman with a faker ass than Nicki Minaj).

 

 

It is becoming increasingly unavoidable to check your social media site of choice whether that be Pintrest, Twitter or Instagram without multiple accounts or photos coming up of girls who look like they are straight up from a Drake video. Everyone is obsessed with asses and getting a curvy, hourglass figure, with butts bigger than planets and waists tinier than my little sisters wrists. The situation is fuelled further by image obsessed celebrities, particularly creepy rappers who appear to be solely motivated by women’s bottoms. (Jason Derulo is great, but ‘you know what to do with that BIG FAT BUTT? REALLY JASON?)  The world has gone curve crazy.

 

So when a friend of mine – who already has a body that makes Kim Ks look bad – told me that she had bought a ‘waist trainer’ corset, I was SO BAFFLED. ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ I asked.

 

 ‘Kind of, I had to take it off the other night because it was so uncomfortable’, she replied. ‘It kind of feels like you can’t breathe’.

 

After she confirmed my suspicions, I decided to check out the hype further.

 

I literally cannot get my head around why anyone would do this to their body, if they had any idea of what it does to you. Corsets went out of fashion for a reason – they can literally kill you!

 

A waist trainer works something like this: crushing your ribcage and stomach slowly and rather uncomfortably so that your appetite and actual bones shrink down a few sizes. It’s so unnatural and wrong! If you were meant to have a tiny waist, you would have been born with a tiny waist. We have got to stop aspiring to be like these women who have bodies that are totally different to ours! Know your own body type and own it! And celebrities who know they have a huge influence on younger girls and their body image should be fucking ashamed to promote something which is so bad for you all in the name of vanity. They could be promoting healthy eating and working out, which would be a much more sensible message to put out there for young women and girls. But they’d much rather get their ten percent and instead show off a totally unhealthy and damaging piece of equipment all over the web, which effectively promotes laziness and not much else.

 

  – THIS IS SO BIZARRE 

What is the problem with going to the gym and putting in some work to reach your goals, please explain to me!! Shame on you, Khloe Kardashian! First it was workout rants and squat photos, which is all very well and good, but now this? Whyyyyyy!!

 

Much of me thinks this is part of a much wider issue which many people (particularly escorts on Instagram….bitch you ain’t no model….we know you’re selling pussy stop lying) seem to be affected by, which is basically laziness, aka paying for multiple surgery operations to make it look like they workout a fuckload but really don’t. It’s sad! Because if you do that, you’ll never actually get any of the benefits that you should from exercising, such as a stronger body, a happier and healthier mind, stress relief…the list goes on.

 

Also let’s be honest, does anyone want to look like Blac Chyna (or whatever she is called) when they’re 80? Unless you’re going to go into a weird kind of porn industry, I would vote no.

 There are plenty of examples of women who (literally) work their asses off to have small waists and amazing butts. These are the women to aspire to for this kind of training! My favourite people to follow on Instagram for these tips are:

@lyzabethlopez (she created @hourglassworkout and honestly her bod is just the best thing ever

@alexandrabring

@michellelewin

Also, if you get a chance, check out Brett Contreras, who has a page on Facebook, and a whole book on how to build your body and butt up, which I bought, and my ass is thankful!

 If waist trainers and corsets were beneficial to work out with, don’t you think you might have seen them in the gym or at sweaty betty? I think there’s kind of a reason they’re only sold on dodgy internet sites halfway across the world…

I think curves are amazing…I just don’t think they’re worth crushing your body to gain.

 

 

 

 

 

Women’s magazines: THE FUCK?

 

 I came across this amazingness earlier this week on @thefatjewish  ‘s instagram and it prompted me to think about magazines. Like most girls, I am usually pretty happy to flick through a few glossy pages. Vogue is usually my magazine of choice (I was given a monthly subscription as a Christmas gift) but if I’m waiting to see my dentist or WHATEVER, Tater or Elle will also do – I’m not fussy and this is probably because there is not a lot of difference between the ‘monthlies’. All contain fashion, makeup, and some kind of inspiring celebrity story. Every time I go on holiday, I also develop a weird obsession with the weekly magazines (if you’re a boy, think ‘heat’) which last for about two weeks and involves lots of lying to my parents at the end of the trip about who signed for lots of highly taxed goods on our bill at the hotel shop. However, I’ve come to start questioning the material I am reading. 

 THE FUCK?

It has often occurred to me that the reason I don’t really stick to a particular magazine is due to lack of inspiration. A conversation with my cousin confirmed I’m not alone: as she quite rightly put it: “Women’s magazines are boring – I know how to do my hair and makeup and I don’t need to read through hundreds of pages of adverts to figure that out”. She also agreed that men’s magazines – for us at least – are far more interesting.

 

I realise this is a big statement to make – I don’t ‘hate’ women’s magazines, I just wish there was more to them. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there seems to be something really backwards about them, and I often feel really fucking patronized, and it’s annoying! In November, I was in the bath, and I just wanted some downtime with some interesting articles (hopefully) and a few pairs of shoes. I started reading an article. It was a 3 page spread on a woman who has a hobby which is – wait for it – MAKING JAM! SOO INSPIRATIONAL! THIS IS THE STUFF GREAT ARTICLES ARE MADE OF. The highlighted quote from the article read: ‘How could I have known that the politics of jam making had its own set of rules and regulations?’

OMG, this is almost too dramatic to handle. How could she have known? How on earth did she manage to get through that stressful period in her life?

The content of women’s magazines is misleading, the sex advice in particular. Who walks past the magazine stand and reads the cosmo headline: ‘How to orgasm EVERY time you have sex!!!’ and actually thinks it will work? If it was the case that all you have to do to understand how you can orgasm is read an informative magazine article, they would be selling a lot more copies. 

 

On the other hand, when I buy GQ (don’t judge me), although there is still the usual mix of fashion and grooming advice, the articles contain much more DEPTH. I can read about sports, film, TV, food – there’s even a jokes section, people. This makes much more sense to me and seems a much more solid investment. I may not be dying of excitement at every article (I will never be able to pretend I care about football) but I will finish my bathtime read with satisfaction and humour. And there’s only so many models one can look at in a women’s magazine without feeling kind of fat, so looking at the James Franco’s of the world makes me waaaaay more happy.

 

I don’t want to change the world. Just women’s magazines.