From Havainas to Fit Flops, the latest and surely the dumbest craze to hit the fashion world, flip flops are as ubiquitous as the summer months these days. There is one problem with this picture – flip flops are the worst shoes you could ever put on your feet, you are better off barefoot. My podiatrist, Dr. Panepinto with Ochsner, said flip flops cause bunions, hammer toes and collapsed arches. Why? Wearing flip flops causes your toes to grab with each step, trying to keep the shoe on while it flops. There is virtually no arch support even though several brands do try to improvise like Reefs and Fit Flops. While your toes are grabbing each step, your arches are collapsing inward, and well, you end up with some pretty ugly and mangled feet in the end.
One of the signs of aging is that your tendons, muscles, and ligaments have all sort of lost their elasticity, add any repetitive stress and you end up with a pain here and a bunion there. But worse, as we age, we lose a lot of the fat at the bottoms of our feet and so with the cushion blown, and the ligaments and tendons and muscles stretched, walking becomes increasingly less enjoyable.
I went to graduate school at a university that is better known as the place where women where comfortable shoes – Mills College in Oakland, CA – its undergraduate is all women and adamantly so, even while the graduate school is co-ed (but you don’t see a lot of guys clamoring to sign up). Comfortable shoes have a stigma but the truth is, as Dr. Panepinto pointed out to me, a shoe with an arch and a back and a strap for keeping them on will keep those appendages that hold you up happy and healthy for years to come.
Say no to flip flops young ladies – or face prematurely aged feet (yikes!).