The latest Hollywood fad has been tying an extremely tight corset around your waist while working to shed some inches of body fat. This is known as waist training, and has made appearances on the social media websites of many known celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and her sister Khloe Kardashian. While the Hollywood celebs swear by this, I decided to look into some expert opinions and see how well this method really work for shedding some lbs off your mid section.

According to medical expert Mary Jane Minkin, who was a clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine, “Medically, it doesn’t make sense that that clinching your waist tightly will make it permanently smaller. 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.” This is a general consensus among experts. While it is thought that wearing the waister trainer makes you sweat more, the general rule is that 3,500 calories=1lb. With that being said, the amount you sweat from it will not cause your to lose so much weight you really see a difference.

So if waist training isn’t the answer, what is?

Want to lose weight and see results? The best way to do that is, you guessed it, eating healthy and working out.  While we all want a quick fad diet/form of exercise to help us lose weight quickly and keep it off, it just isn’t possible with changing your lifestyle. A well balanced diet with the right amount of complex carbs like bread, rice, and whole grain pasta, dairy/milk, lots of fruits and veggies, and protein are what is necessary to live a healthy life and see the results you want to see. Balance is essential in a healthy diet. It is important to eat the right amount of nutritious food in order to maintain a healthy body weight. The ideal plate is shown on the right, produced by Harvard’s Health Publications. In America, it is no secret that obesity is a problem. According to a national tally on http://www.niddk.nih.gov, “More than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of adults are considered to be overweight or obese. More than one-third (35.7 percent) of adults are considered to be obese.” To me, this is alarming. It is not only in the United States either. According to  www.nhs.uk, majority of adults are overweight/obese in England as well. It is bad enough that adults aren’t focused on living a healthy life, but children aren’t either. According to the same site, 33% of children from 6-19 are overweight and 17% of children are obese. That means 1 out of 3 children are overweight and 1 out of 6 children are obese.

Now you may be asking, what’s the big deal?

Being overweight can cause many healthy problems including the following:

• Diabetes
• heart disease
• high blood pressure
• liver disease 
• osteoarthritis
• cancer
• stroke

In a study done at the University of Pittsburgh, 94 people that were 70+ years old were observed. Researchers wanted to see how the brains of people weight normal weights varied from those who were over weight. A healthy weight is determined from a BMI (Body Mass Index) Calculation. For example, if you are 5’6″ and 135 pounds, that is considered a healthy weight. If you are 5’10” and 190 lbs, you are considered overweight/unhealthy. This method is generally pretty accurate, with the exception of those with a large amount of muscle mass. The results of this study are startling. Those who were obese were said to have 8% less brain tissue than the healthy weight participants. Those who were overweight had 4% less brain tissue. “This represents ‘severe’ brain degeneration, that’s a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at a much greater risk of Alzheimer’s and other diseases that attack the brain… But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s, if you can eat healthy and keep your weight under control,” says Dr. Paul Thompson, UCLA professor of neurology. These weren’t the only findings either. Many other areas of the brain such as the frontal and temporal lopes, anterior cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, and basal ganglia were effected. This means that those who were overweight had poorer memory, attention and focus, long-term memory, and coordination than those who weren’t. Not only that, but those who were of a healthy weight actually looked about 8 years younger than those who were overweight and 16 years younger than those who were obese. While there could be third variables such as smoking and sun exposure of their lifetime, there is certainly a correlation between brain function and appearance based those who are of a normal weight and those who are overweight/obese.

Changing your diet change be a tough thing to do. According to exploringthemind.com, only about 5% of people actually succeed in changing their habits. In a study called the cookie study, it proved just how hard it is to avoid foods completely. People were brought into a room a given puzzles to solve. In another group, they were asked to do the same thing with a plate of cookies in front of them that they could not eat. The results showed that the group with cookies in front of them did much worse than the other group, because people can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. While this could be due to third variables such as how hunger the participants were, it is likely that the cookies were a distraction and very hard for some people to resist. With that being said, trying to completely avoid unhealthy foods is just not possible, making it hard to change your eating habits.

IT IS POSSIBLE 

While it may be difficult, it is very possible to live a healthier life. By joining the gym and eliminating as many unhealthy options from your life as possible, such as the bag of chips in your pantry or chocolate cake sitting on your kitchen counter, you can avoid the temptation and live a healthier lifestyle! The more you do to live a healthier, more positive life, the better results you will see.