"Goal Weight" Clothes are Pointless

I recently bought some spring clothes, as most of my clothes are either too small or meant for winter. I got some nice brightly colored tops, sandals, and a few dresses. New sunglasses were also necessary, since the pair I’d had for the last ten years finally broke. I bought them for $10 at a random highway stop stand when I was fifteen and they served me well.

I like having nice new clothes, but I don't love shopping, especially as a size 14. I've talked about the annoyance of vanity sizing, and it's still going strong. Yesterday I went to work in some of my new clothes: a dress, size XL, and a white cardigan, size medium. Both are fitted pieces and were flattering. I think they may have even been the same brand. This makes no sense.

Context. Thanks for the inspiration Kara 

While vanity sizing is an equal opportunity exasperation, fun for everyone from obese to petite, shopping while trying to lose weight has a unique challenge: the temptation to buy something that’s just a little too small. Why not? you say. I’ll fit into this dress when I weigh fifteen pounds less, it’s such a nice dress, such a good price, let me just buy it and wear it in a couple of months when I’m thinner.

I’m not the savviest of shoppers, but as a person who has fluctuated from 145-200 pounds since high school, there is one shopping rule I've learned to follow: Always, always, buy the size you are now. Always buy what fits and is comfortable today.

Sometimes when I see women buying clothing with the promise to lose some weight in order to actually wear it, it looks like a punishment. It's a hint that they don’t deserve to wear the item until they've lost weight. This attitude seems especially prevalent in bridal shops.

But I’m not going to punish myself for being fat by buying pretty clothes I can’t wear. There are already enough “negative” reasons for me to lose weight - I’m not comfortable in my body, I’m not healthy - I don’t need too tight clothing as another reminder of what I haven't accomplished.

So I buy what fits now. It just makes more sense.

• When (yes!) I do lose weight, I can have clothing taken in. So if I really love something that I bought a few months ago and is now too big, I probably don’t have to say goodbye to it completely
• It’s impossible to predict how my body will change as I lose - perhaps my waist will be thinner in proportion  to my hips than they are now. 
• This is also a reason against buying a goal style - like a bikini or skinny jeans
• A few years ago my sister lost about 25 pounds. She went down two sizes, but her larger-than-average chest stayed the same. If she had bought a cute but too small top at her heavier weight, it might not have ever fit
• Why not buy something I can wear tomorrow? Why fill my wardrobe with things I can't wear?
• It’s nice to wear something new. Besides, if I'm buying it now, that almost always means I need it now, not in five months.
• It's confusing and absurd to go through ones wardrobe and have to remember if any given thing fits

• Avoid unnecessary pressure to lose weight to fit into whatever it is. Why create that drama? I should be able to wear everything in my closet. 
• I've fluctuated a lot since high school, so I already have clothes that don’t quite fit right now. I have an amazing blue work dress that I looked damn good in, and right now it doesn't even zip. That can be my “lose weight and wear this” or goal pile, I don’t need any more.
• Nobody knows what size you are, so might as well buy the one that fits and looks good, and enjoy it

I hate "sizing up" as much as the next person even though I know how arbitrary it is. In the past, when I've bought something that fits and looks good, but is a size I don't like, I cut the tags out of it when I get home. Care instructions are usually on a separate tag, so there's no reason to keep the one that lists the size. I soon forget what size it was in the first place, but I have something nice that fits me well. 
Bonus: sizing up, when I need a larger size, will make me look smaller because properly fitting clothing always does.

No Lightbulb Moments, Final Part: How I Gained Most of it Back

Part one here, part two in the post just before this or here.

So, what happened?

I was this close to hitting the official fifty-pound mark when everything in my life changed over the course of a few months - I got married, moved into a new apartment, and started at my first post-grad, full-time job. They were wonderful, inevitable changes, but they still knocked me on my suddenly growing ass.

I should have seen it coming, having planned the wedding and applied for the jobs, but somehow I didn't realize that even the most wonderful changes take some adjusting. I didn't realize how much I had relied on having such a free schedule, so when I no longer had all the time in the world, I didn't bother to make the time to exercise or eat right. 

There was also the normal amount of stress that comes from setting up a new household and learning how to perform at a new job. I let those things take over my energy so much that focusing on losing weight seemed like a laughable goal on top of everything else. And because I have no middle ground when it comes to food, over those eight or so months, I gained about 35 of the 50 back. 

That is where I'm starting from now. 

I realize there are so many similarities between the two times I gained a large amount of weight - the first time I reached 200 pounds, and last year when I let normal but busy life take over. It was really the denial that got me there, the denial that I was slipping, letting old habits creep back and eating for no other reason than I was bored, stressed, or that the food was in front of me. I think that's the single biggest factor in my weight gain - I couldn't acknowledge that I was gaining weight again, let alone how much.

I'm just having a muffin. Wait, did I also have one this morning?

Sometimes it's hard not to get angry at myself for having gained so much weight back. It sucks in practical ways, like having to buy new, bigger clothing after I gleefully gave away everything that had gotten too big, certain that I would never need it again. I don't exactly love when I see old friends or acquaintances and realize how much healthier I was last time we met. But mostly it sucks because I let myself down, and all that hard work is now gone. I'm back to where I started. 

However, just like I won't feel guilty over the food I eat, there is really nothing good that can come of being angry at myself. Guilt is not a motivator. I just have to do what I'm doing, which is to keep going,  and lose the weight (again). 

No Lightbulb Moments, Part Two: How I Lost Fifty Pounds

Part one here, or go back a bit. 

After finally facing the fact that at 200 pounds, I had reached the highest weight of my life, I started watching my calories. I lost 20 pounds during the fall of my sophomore year. At 180 pounds, I had a long way to go, but I was happy just to have started to tackle this issue, and to have made some progress. I was also thrilled at how easily those first pounds had come off, and felt like fifty more was totally doable. 

Not surprisingly, it didn't quite work out that easily. For next few years, my overall weight had a downward trend, but it moved very slowly. I mostly maintained the loss during the rest of sophomore year, then slowly lost ten pounds or so during the fall abroad semester of my junior year, for a total of 30 pounds. But when I got back to the U.S. and realized that reverse culture shock wasn't just a weird fad, I didn't deal with it well and ended up gaining back some of the weight. That summer I was even less careful, and gained even more.

At the beginning of senior year, I was ready to try again. I joined Weight Watchers at 185 pounds and loved it. I counted points, measured portions, and worked out at the University gym across the street from my dorm. I also went to weekly Weight Watchers meetings, led by an enthusiastic, entertaining man who had lost 60 pounds, and attended by a group of loyal, fun participants.

 I graduated college at 160 pounds, my lowest weight since high school and forty pounds down total. I felt like I was finally on my way, for real.

College graduation, 2012

College, at least for me, was an ideal environment in which to lose weight. I was lucky: a very flexible part-time job, a reasonable class/exam schedule, and a kitchen in my suite (with three roommates who rarely cooked).

 I could leisurely grocery shop at two in the afternoon, I could spend an hour preparing lunch at noon after class, I could go to the gym that was right across the street after class ended at eleven a.m. There were no major stressors in my life and I could focus most of my time on "project lose weight." My schedule was my own with which to be selfish. 

There were a lot of naps.

After graduation, I lived at home for a few months while I tried to find a job. Though I spent extensive time sending my resume into the black hole where most applications go to die, there was still plenty of downtime. I was lucky that I did not have to work at a minimum wage job while trying to become gainfully employed, and could still focus on weight loss. I started personal training at the nearby gym where my parents were members, and learned a bit about lifting weights. 

 I was in control of the food, instead of the other way around. I could eat something, or choose not to, either one was okay. I wasn't perfect, but my good attitude allowed me to quickly move on from slip-ups and focus on the long term.

During this time after college and before I started my job - about six months - I only lost 5-10 pounds, but there was a huge difference in my body and I'm sure that I had gained some muscle in addition to losing fat. I felt stronger and leaner, and clothes were so much easier to find. 

I was almost at the fifty-pound-loss mark and so fucking confident. I felt so accomplished, I had done the impossible. I had done this thing that so many people struggle with. If I could do this, I could do anything! I wasn't holding myself back any longer.

I wondered if I could put weight loss on a resume - hey hiring manager, how's this for dedication!

Video resume?

This new confidence made me realize just how much I had allowed my weight to hinder me in the past, how little confidence or self-esteem I'd had. I let it stop me from joining things I would probably have loved in college, like the improv group or school paper. 

While the main reward of losing weight was how fantastic I felt, there were other perks. I wore sleeveless tops and felt comfortable with it for the first time in my life. I wore clothes that hadn't fit since high school, and got compliments from people who didn't even know I was trying to lose weight. I daydreamed about going to my high school reunion, as the only person to come back looking better than when they had left and sexily flipping off my former bullies (who would of course have potbellies and be wearing atrocious toupees). I got a thrill being hit on occasionally, a new experience.

I didn't tell anyone about my weight loss who didn't ask me about it first, but I walked around and lived life with this new faith in myself. 

Then, of course, I gained almost all of it back which I where I started from a few months ago.

I will post How I Gained it All Back: Food and Laziness, tonight or tomorrow as I'm still editing it. I know, the suspense is killing me too. 

Vanity Sizing: Just Making Everyone Feel Worse

Not too long ago, I found myself trying to find a purple dress for a friend's wedding. I unsuccessfully went through rack after rack at Macy's. Though purple is apparently "in" this season, everything was either several hundred dollars, or not the right size.

I found a dress that looked pretty nice, was in budget - but a size ten. Screw it, I thought, it looks kind of big, and I took it to the dressing room.

It fit. Perfectly. It even looked okay.

I guess she just couldn't ... address the situation.

Welcome to vanity sizing, one of many mindfucks of clothing stores, ruled by Anne Taylor, Old Navy, and the maker of my dress, Donna Ricco. (Others include: why does this bag cost over $2,300?)

Sizes are shrinking so quickly that in a few years, they'll just get rid of them and we will substitute random colors, or Italian words for fancy stores sizes.

Am I a size baciare or ipoteca? Or should I look in the Potansanto section?

At first, the smallest female size was an eight - now it's a double zero. If you currently wear a size eight, you would have been buying a size fourteen or sixteen in 1958. A size 4-6 in 1995 was equivalent to a two in 2011. And in 2014, I walked my 37-inch waist into a department store and bought a size ten.

Why vanity size? Money, of course. Women buy more clothing when they're feeling good about themselves, and a way to make them feel good is to convince them they've just fit into a smaller size. The average women will choose the size eight dress in brand A instead of the identically sized but marked smaller dress in brand B, even if it's more expensive. Profits go to Brand A.

Since female sizing barely had any actual meaning in the first place, it's easy for those evil, money-grubbing executives to continue shrinking them.

Typical quarterly meeting.

An unintended affect of this kind of sizing is that legitimately slim women have trouble finding clothes. They're too small for the XS sizing, even though they look and are perfectly healthy. It's easy to forget that when the larger sizes continuously shrink, the actually small sizes become laughably small, hence the double-zero sizing.

A person can walk into a store, look around, look at sizes, and still have no idea what will fit.

I would truly rather be a size twenty, in every store, than a size 10 here and 16 there.

No Lightbulb Moments: How I Gained, Lost, and Gained Almost 50 pounds

My high school weight pattern was pretty straightforward.  I'd maintain or slowly creep up for a while, then start some diet or health plan (usually the latest fad) with tremendous motivation and lose 10-15 pounds. Within a couple of months, I would get sick of dieting and slowly regress back to old habits. I'd start gaining slowly again, sometimes as little as a pound a month. During high school I tried Atkins, South Beach, and calorie counting, all with some degree of success.

 Because of this gain-lose-gain cycle, I usually stayed somewhere around 160, so about 30 pounds overweight. What's funny looking back is that I hated my figure so much as a teenager and was always trying to lose weight, but 30 extra pounds doesn't seem like too much right now. I guess it's all about perspective.

I never got to a healthy weight, but I also never got to an extremely unhealthy weight. I just wandered somewhere in the middle, too large to even consider feeling good in a bikini or buying single-digit sizes, but not big enough for any plus-sized clothing or major interventions.

After high school graduation, my unintentional pattern stopped - so I just started gaining and gaining. I took a gap year abroad before starting college, and while I had an amazing experience, I struggled to eat well and didn’t really exercise. I was also having too much fun to realize that I was gaining weight.

However, it was freshman year of college that took me to my highest weight ever. During this time, I was trying to figure out how to manage a schedule, and generally stressing out at the progression of life. My university was not one to stray from societal demands, so we students had easy access to lots of (often free) junk food all over campus.

I made some good friends and spent time with them, went to class, and studied, but there was still way too much time left for ... nothing. I treated my boredom with food, as well as my desire to have something to do with my hands while I watched every episode of Friends. There were no binges or secret donut boxes under my bed; I gained weight by eating "normal" but oversized (for my height and gender) portions at meals, and 400-calorie muffins or the endless supply of free college candy as desserts.

xkcd.com

By the beginning of sophomore year, I had hit my highest ever weight of 200 pounds. But that wasn't a wake-up call. When I saw that number flashing up at me from the scale, my thoughts went something like, Hmm, that is a new number. Okay. Better not gain any more weight now, I think 200 is as high as I should go.

It’s obvious now, but I managed to be blissfully unaware. In some vague part of my mind, I knew that this was bad, I knew that my size 16s were getting snug and in reality I could probably fit into 18s, but I just didn’t want to face dealing with it. I was passively avoiding it and delicately skirting around things that might make me face it, like shopping or trying an athletic class. It's the easiest trap to fall into. My parents weren't saying anything, my friends weren't expressing their concerns about my size, I didn't get comments from passing cars - it was pretty easy to live in my little world where there was no need to consider my growing size.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care at all about the extra weight, I just had no idea where to start and was in denial of how unhealthy I’d become. I got pains in my calves from walking around too much, and somehow never connected that to the extra weight. Thirty pounds was one thing, I was used to it, but I could not expect to be seventy pounds overweight without consequences.

Giant hipster glasses or Minnie Mouse lingerie?

Finally, my parents sat me down one weekend during sophomore year when I was home for a holiday, and told me that they were scared for my health and for my life. That they had waited, hoping I would take some action to lose weight, but after six months it was clear that I was not dealing with this problem. So now they were talking to me because they were terrified. They, very kindly, told me that they would not let me go abroad for a semester if I didn't lose some weight. 

So I started, just like that. Maybe I was waiting for someone to call me out on my bullshit, or a threat I could understand, or a good kick in my oversized ass. There was no revelation, I just started keeping track.

This was during a "eat small meals throughout the day" fad, so I carefully consumed six 200-250 calories snacks/meals each day. It was a pretty good time - I didn't feel hungry or deprived, and I lost 20 pounds that semester without exercising. The calf pain disappeared, and I finally connected that the pain had had to do with my weight. 


Part Two: How I Lost Fifty Pounds, and then Gained Most of it Back will be coming soon. 

The Million Dollar, or Seventy Pound Question: Why Did I Get Fat?

Why did I get fat? I started gaining extra weight in kindergarten, and reached what would be a healthy weight for my current height by age twelve. If only I could have just stopped there.

Nope.

This is a topic to which I've given a lot of thought. Childhood obesity is a highly debated and heavily researched area, with sciencey people looking at factors such as my family and my environment, citing fun things like easy access to junk food, no access to healthy food, and too much television with too little exercise. And of course, my genetics. It's mostly experiments on mice and a lot of correlational studies (let's link video games to obesity!), because we can't go experimenting on children.

I don't know how much I fit into those risk factors - I was really lucky. During my childhood, there were always fresh fruits to snack on, and vegetables with every meal. Dessert was reserved for Friday night and special occasions, and my parents only ever bought soda or white bread for guests. Most meals were homemade and eaten at home.

Except when we had wax.

My family was and is healthy. But I was still a chubby 10-year-old who was jealous of her friends in their cute pre-teen bikinis, but who still sneaked extra Oreos at school parties and didn't understand why she couldn't just make herself skinny by wishing hard enough.

It was probably more emotional. I suffered from depression and had low self-esteem as a kid. My parents are wonderful, and did all they could. But I was still an unhappy child. Science says that could have contributed to weight gain.

My current hypothesis is that the initial chubbiness was a fairly standard weight gain, the result of a few overindulgences and being so excited by the junk food that came my way at school or friends' houses that I overdid it and ignored my hunger or fullness signals. This happens to plenty of children, and they often grow into their weights (less so these days, but it used to be more common).

But being a little overweight helped create that classic cycle. I felt badly about myself, so I ate more. My parents wanted to help me lose weight, but they didn't really know how. I didn't know how myself. Food could be both a reward and punishment. I could eat to spite their attempts and punish myself, or I could eat to feel better, or feel in control. Eating felt guilty and great. Or maybe it's a little of all of that.

High school was much better - I slowly got out of feeling depressed and generally grew up a little.  I think time was the biggest factor. But food was still comforting, and while I seemed to be maintaining my weight, it was about 30 pounds too high.

College is a more complicated story, for later.

All in all, I think, I hope, that I'm at least a little more self-aware than I was as a child, and now have the tools and knowledge to get healthy.