Love Heels? Buy Flats!

You might suffer some real damage if you don’t.

-Jane Farrell

There’s a lot of shoe obsession going on right now (personally, we blame Sex and the City), but you might want to think twice before strapping on your high-heeled beauties every day.

A study at Manchester Metropolitan University in England found that women who wore heels constantly had 13 percent more muscle-fiber loss than women who wore flats all the time. The really scary part: Women who wore reasonable two-inch heels suffered the damage as well. In other words, switching from your Louboutin skyscrapers to more sensible heels (as if you ever would!) is not going to do you any good.

So what’s the problem? Muscle-fiber loss that in the Achilles tend on, according to http://www.foxnews.com/. The delicate tendon stiffens and thickens, and that leads to calf pain when muscles have to stretch out to accommodate flats.

Read Would You Wear These Crazy Shoes?

If you wear high heels for two years or more, five times a week, muscle fibers will become shorter and tendons will thicken and stiffen,” said study leader Professor Marco Narici, according to FoxNews. “This has an immediate effect in restricting ankle movement and impacts your ability to walk fast and run — both in heels and flats.”

Narici said that ideally women should alternate between wearing heels and flats. And no matter what kind of shoe you wear, do some stretching exercises at the end of each day to help combat the pain.

But he seemed to have little hope that women would ever abandon heels entirely—most women who wear heels, Narici said, tend to wear them five days a week.

In a Sex and the City world, what else can you expect? (FoxNews)