"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, 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.