OK! Helps Kourtney Shed Baby Weight With Photoshop, Phony Diet

Kourtney Kardashian has a secret to share about this week’s issue of OK! — and it has nothing to do with dieting! Kourtney never spoke to the mag for its “exclusive” and her post-pregnancy body was slimmed via Photoshop.

The Kardashians are closely tied to Life & Style, so much so that the magazine sponsored Kourtney’s baby shower, so it seemed odd to see her “Body After Baby” exclusive in the current issue of OK!. It turns out there is something fishy about the cover; Kourtney Tweeted: “One of those weeklies got it wrong again…they didn’t have an exclusive with me. And I gained 40 pounds while pregs, not 26…But thanks!”

In addition to concocting quotes from Kourtney, her friends, and her stepfather Bruce Jenner, Kourtney tells Women’s Wear Daily, “They doctored and Photoshopped my body to make it look like I have already lost all the weight, which I have not.” The cover photo was shot a week after Mason’s birth by Albert Michael of StarTracksPhoto.com for the January 11 issue of Life & Style (cover below), which featured a real exclusive with Kardashian. Since the original images were cropped at the belly, WWD speculates that the lower half of her body was drawn in for the OK! cover.

As we’ve demonstrated, tabloids print outright lies on their covers on a weekly basis, but what makes OK!‘s most recent blunder disturbing is that it focuses on how fast a new mom is losing weight. (Related! -Ed.) How much a woman weighs a month after giving birth (or any time) shouldn’t be an issue at all, but apparently the editors at OK! consider it important enough to risk getting caught with an obviously fake cover story. Why did the editors bother to claim the story is a Kardashian “exclusive” when they attribute most other cover stories to non-existent “sources”?

Kourtney being Photoshopped to make it appear that she’s lost her baby weight faster than is humanly possible is particularly low, considering OK!‘s target audience. While occasionally a major news outlets will run stories about major Photoshop scandals, like Newsweek‘s new gallery of the decade’s “most egregious retouching scandals” (which, uh, looks incredibly similar to our Photoshop of Horrors Hall of Shame 2000-2009), the average woman still does not pick up a magazine and think that the cover image bears no relation to reality. OK! editors clearly hoped that moms worried about their own “body after baby” would spot Kourtney’s unbelievably slim body while on the checkout line at the supermarket pick up the magazine to learn how she did it. But since women have already learned from other magazine covers to loathe their “bikini bodies” and that they should be wrinkle-free after 40, why not send the message that their bodies aren’t good enough mere days after they’ve brought forth life?

@KourtneyKardash [Twitter]
Fashion Titles See Ad Pages Rise… A Kardashian Reality… [WWD]
Unattainable Beauty [Newsweek]

Earlier: This Week In Tabloids: Angie’s Sexcapades On Rubber Sheets, Octomom’s Stretchmark-Free Bikini Body
Bogus: The Phoniest Tabloid Stories Of 2009
Photohop Of Horrors Hall Of Shame 2000-2009