With the rise of the Kardashian Empire,   the desire to look perfect has skyrocketed. All around us there are clones and counterfeit copies of people and images, while they, themselves, are far from the real thing.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be beautiful and well-groomed, or to desire to achieve or maintain a certain weight for the purpose of feeling confident and healthy every day. However, it is harmful to obsess over looking a certain way or let those desires take over our lives. “Just because a celebrity promotes it doesn’t mean that it’s safe or that it works or that it’s proven,” says spinal surgeon Dr. Paul Jeffords, in a story on usatoday.com.

 According to Neurofantastic.com, a neuroscience blog started in 2011 and written by Shelly Xuelai Fan, Ph.D., diet pills were first introduced in the 1950s. The pills gained popularity because of their energy-enhancing and appetite-suppressing effects. The pills came in brightly colored tablets and were therefore named “rainbow diet pills.” These pills were attractive to women because they were advertised to be a simple, quick fix to their problems. But these pills were, and still are, health hazards.

According to Futuresrecoveryhealthcare.com, a mental health treatment provider, diet pills’ negative side effects include, but are not limited to, increased heart rate, high blood pressure, diarrhea, kidney problems, sleeplessness and liver damage, just to name a few. These physical effects could easily become mental and begin a downward spiral toward life-threatening eating disorders. 

 In recent years, there has been a rise in waist trainers — once again, we can thank the Kardashians for this trend. Waist trainers were commonly worn in the 1950s by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe. These corsets give a flattering hourglass figure to those who wear them. But after habitually wearing the corset, bone structure and internal organs begin to shift and compromise to fit into the artificial waist form. 

“It just crams all of your organs together. So over a long period of time, wearing it too much and too frequently, it can cause damage too,” said health and wellness expert Dr. Tasneem Bhatia, an Atlanta physician, also on usatoday.com.

 Taking pride in our appearances and feeling confident and content with the way we look is amazing. But there’s no reason to feel so much pressure to look a certain way that you end up hurting yourself in the process. “The underlying issue here is why women feel such a strong need to obtain a certain body type that they would use these sorts of products,” says Diana Taylor, a Philosophy Professor at John Carroll University. “My response is that women in our society are sexually objectified and their value as persons is bound up with their physical appearance. As a result, women are judged more harshly than men if they fail to adhere to prevailing standards of beauty.” Many times we tell ourselves that if we look a certain way or weigh a certain amount we will be happier, or that our lives will be better and frankly, that is not true. We don’t really want to have that perfect body or be ultra slim, we really want what we think those things will bring us.