Just follow these few simple pieces of advice. Rachel Grumman Bender is an award-winning health, beauty, and parenting writer and editor.
She has held Health Editor positions at YouBeauty. Rachel earned her Read more. Topics shapewear Style. Sign up for our SELF Daily Wellness newsletter All the best health and wellness advice, tips, tricks, and intel, delivered to your inbox every day. Enter your e-mail address. You know when you eat a big ol' meal and suddenly your jeans feel a bit more snug?
Wearing control undies has a similar effect on your poor tum tum. When it gets all squished in, your digestion doesn't work as well as normal, with gas or bloating being common side effects. Sure, they're temporary, but unpleasant nonetheless. If you struggle with IBS or any condition that can make your need to relieve yourself more pronounced, shapewear might not be your friend.
As Dr Kuemmerle noted, all that pressure on your digestive tract can make those feelings even more urgent, and it can exacerbate stress incontinence or leaks in people who suffer from bladder issues. You know when your mum used to warn you about tying loads of hair bands around your wrist for fear they'd cut off your circulation? Well, there's a similar principle at work here.
Dr Karen Erickson warned about a condition called 'meralgia paresthetica', which causes tingling, pain and numbness in your legs, thanks to a key nerve in your thighs being compressed.
A more serious continuation of having so much pressure on your limbs for a prolonged amount of time could be blood clots or varicose veins - pretty scary stuff. Dr Erickson did note that this was most common in people genetically prone to varicose veins, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Richard Bricknell, a director at the Bristol Physiotherapy Clinic told the Daily Mail that all that pressure can affect your breathing as well as your veins and stomach. The tightness stops your diaphragm fully dilating when you breathe, which can lead to shortness of breath and hyperventilation. Clean freaks, look away now. When you're wearing something so figure-hugging, you're going to sweat more, and that sweat and moisture nice doesn't really have anywhere to go hence your pants can kind of become a breeding ground for bacteria.
If it is control pants you're wearing, you could even bring on conditions like thrush, or cause pesky spots on your back or tummy as the skin can't breathe. Unlike the poorly-constructed, too restrictive garments of the past, Spanx offered smoothing and shaping that didn't make you completely miserable. Or at least, that was the promise—if you've ever sweated through a pair of Spanx at an outdoor wedding, you know that these claims are not exactly scientific.
But you shrug and carry on, because you can't imagine life another way. Spanx continued to be a regular part of my life well into my 20s, when I would wiggle into a pair before throwing on slacks for work, or use them to blur the "visible belly outline" on anything remotely form-fitting.
If you are going to be fat in this society, I thought to myself, it's important that you erase the most glaring reminders of your fatness—exposed fat skin, visible rolls of flesh—in order to avoid the most virulent hate.
Strangers on the street have no problem telling you that you're fat, and they're certainly more likely to do it when you're being visibly, unrepentantly fat. At some point, the chafing and gastric distress of wearing these restrictive garments all sort of came to a head. There really is no watershed moment for deciding that you no longer want to struggle into one of those pairs of flesh-toned shorts and "Power Panties"—it's more of a cumulative thing, a barrage of moments like picking the nylon out of your buttcrack in the middle of five-star restaurant, or sneaking off to a bathroom to readjust the shaper that's settled onto the wrong part of your thigh and rubbed a wicked blister.
Since that day, I haven't forced myself back into Spanx once, and surprisingly, my wardrobe has gotten so much better. The first time I left the house in a dress with no Spanx, no shaper, no Lycra on my thighs at all, was equally liberating and terrifying. As a girl who didn't wear many dresses growing up, not unless forced, I was convinced that I would be showing my entire ass literally to someone when the wrong gust of wind came.
Even knee-length skirts felt like they could become scandalous at any second. Once discarded by teen-me as too feminine and fussy, I didn't realize just how much a comfortable maxi or skater dress felt just like pajamas when you haven't crammed your belly and thighs into a piece of fabric that is too small to contain them underneath.
I hadn't owned a dress since my mother was buying them for me, and now I have a closet full of them.
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