Fashion

Lily James' 'Cinderella' Diet Sounds A Bit Extreme

by Emily Kirkpatrick

Lily James has been getting serious flack as of late for how minuscule her waist appears to be in the ads and trailers for Disney's Cinderella. The filmmakers have even been accused of digitally shrinking her waistline to achieve the princess' fairy tale proportions. Granted, Disney isn't known for their particularly healthy portrayals of the female body, preferring hyper petite proportions when it comes to their cartoon royalty, but even so, James claims that silhouette is all her own. Well, all her own with the help of a seriously restrictive corset, that is. Oh, and a very specific diet. It turns out that Lily James went on a liquid diet to help her shrink down to Cinderella proportions.

In an interview with Nightline, James sought to clear up the rumors surrounding her body, announcing, “I have naturally a quite small waist ... And on top of that I have a corset that was pulled me [within an] inch of my life ... And then the skirt is so big that the perspective and the proportions make it look smaller than it is."

While all of that sounds reasonable enough, wearing something that squeezes you within an "inch of [your] life" sounds a little scary, and the diet she had to go on to stay in it sounds even more extreme. James told E! News in an exclusive interview, "When [the corset] was on we would be on continuous days so we wouldn't stop for lunch or a lovely tea like this — you'd be sort of eating on the move. In that case, I couldn't untie the corset. So if you ate food it didn't really digest properly and I'd be burping all afternoon in [Richard Madden]'s face, and it was just really sort of unpleasant. I'd have soup so that I could still eat but it wouldn't get stuck."

A liquid diet combined with a beyond tight corset sounds like a nightmare combination, but also, unfortunately, not the craziest celeb diet I've ever heard of. While I'm sure James approached her diet and her corset with all of the appropriate health concerns and considerations in place, is a waistline this small really necessary? And more over, is this the message a fairy tale idolized by so many young children should really be sending?

Images: Lily James/Instagram