I’ve been hearing an ad on the radio for a do-it-yourself-at-home bodywrap that is supposed to help you ‘lose dress sizes’(but they do not say l"ose weight"). Apparently these wraps have been done for a while at beauty clinics.
I have no desire to lose any more weight. But what does this do? I searched and foudn a few sites full of psuedo-science ‘body toxins’ crap (translation: You’ll sweat). But people do seem to get these things at clinics and some of the sites hinted at compression of the fatty tissues. So what’s the deal?
The body wrap does several things. First, it causes you to sweat, which can make you lose weight through dehydration. Of course, as soon as you re-hydrate you gain it all back.
Second, they compress the skin, thus making you slightly smaller. This is a temporary effect. The skin is actually quite compressible, which you can easily see the next time you remove a pair of tight pants or tight socks, leaving an impression in your skin. And sometimes that impression can last for hours or even a day.
Finally, they fudge the numbers. They all guarantee that you will ‘lose inches’, which most people would take to mean that they’d lose inches off their waistline or some other single measurement. In fact, what they do is take a whole series of measurements before and after, and subtract the difference. For instance, they might take 26 measurements, add them all up, and come up with a ‘body index’ number of say, 500. Then after the wrap, they measure you again, and now you’re 497! Hey, you lost three inches! But that’s 3 inches over 26 measurements, which means you might lose something like 1/8" off your waistline, due to temporary skin compression. Also, when you’re taking that many measurements, it’s very easy to apply just slightly more tension after the wrap, in order to fudge the measurement a little. Plus, before the wrap you can round up to the nearest tick mark, and afterwards round down. Repeat that enough times, and it’s pretty easy to come up with enough ‘inches’ to avoid having to give a refund.
To summarize: It’s a scam, and body wraps do nothing (except maybe kill you - there have been some documented wrap-related deaths, due to heat and water loss).
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