When you first start Intuitive Eating (IE), if you’ve been keeping yourself lower than your set weight by restricting what you eat, it’s not unusual to put on weight initially and to find that your existing clothes don’t fit anymore. Here are five tips to help when your clothes size is increasing.
Prioritise comfort over size
It’s not unusual, when you’re still being influenced by diet culture, to have a particular size in mind. As well as your dream size, maybe you have a size you feel like you should be and that you don’t want to go over. So someone might be constantly dieting to reach a UK size 10 (their dream size), while telling themselves that while they’re working reach size 10, they can’t go over size 14. If that’s you, then even before you started IE, you may have been telling yourself you were a certain size, even though some of your clothes in that size didn’t fit anymore, and some were tight and uncomfortable. Part of IE and body positivity is making your comfort a priority, and feeling comfortable in what you wear. In that case, you may find yourself buying bigger clothes right at the beginning of your journey, as you start to accept that it’s the clothes’ job to fit you, it’s not your job to fit the clothes.
Sizing isn’t standard
They may be roughly in the same ballpark, but we all know that there is no standard sizing in women’s clothes. Even a very quick glance through a few clothing websites shows a variation. This means that even if you had the measurements you’d been dreaming of, you wouldn’t be the corresponding dream size in every shop. A size 12 at Marks and Spencer has a 29.5” waist and 39.5” hips. Meanwhile, the H&M size guide lists two size 12s, measuring 28.5” / 37.75” and 30” / 39.5” respectively. Then Sainsburys Tu has a 32” waist and 39” hips. And none of this takes into account the stretchiness of the fabric, where the waist sits in the clothes compared to the length of your body, and a host of other fitting issues. With that in mind, does it make sense to let sizes affect your mood? You can vary 2 sizes just by going from one shop to another.
Out of sight, out of mind
If you open the wardrobe every day and see your favourite but too-small jeans staring back at you, it’s not surprising that you would feel disappointed that you can’t wear them. One of the most helpful things to do when changing sizes is to go through your wardrobe, try everything on, and take away everything that doesn’t fit. If you can live without it, give it to the charity shop or sell it on eBay. If you can’t stand the thought of letting go, pack it into an opaque box or bag on top of the wardrobe, or somewhere else out of the way. This has two advantages. First, when you open the wardrobe now, you’ll know that everything you see there is something that fits. Second, when you don’t see your old clothes anymore, you’ll probably forget what most of them were. Leave them packed away for at least six months, and then go through the box again. You’ll probably find that you’ve moved on from a lot of the clothes and can get rid of them more easily if they still don’t fit.
Get creative with what you’ve got
You might feel like you’ve got nothing left to wear now your wardrobe has been cleared out, and your first urge might be to go out shopping and buy whatever fits you, even if you’re not that keen on it, or don’t feel good in it. Now is a good time to try something like Project 333, or any other minimalist capsule wardrobe plan. Keep the pieces you’ve got, go out feeling comfortable and “put-together” every day, and learn to love how you look at your current size. After three months, you may feel you need to get a few new pieces to cope with the changing seasons, or you may feel happy with what you’ve got. Either way, you’ll be glad your wardrobe isn’t crammed with every sad sale item you found in your size, no matter how far away from your style.
Follow Fat Fashion
Find some people on Pinterest or Instagram who shop plus-size and look amazing. When you first start moving away from diet culture, you may have spent most of your time looking at magazines and clothes catalogues full of size-8 models, and feeling like something’s not right if you don’t look the same. There are so many beautiful people out there who are rocking bigger sizes, and the more you look at them, the more you’ll feel inspired to dress to impress. The Curvy Fashionista is a good jump-off point.
One of the main changes that I noticed from starting IE and learning about body positivity, was that even though I objectively weigh and measure more now, I have far fewer “fat” days when I’m wearing clothes that fit me, and when I’m flexible about the size on the label (my current wardrobe ranges from size 16 – 22, depending on shop, fabric and body part). A lot of the negative feelings I had before came from the pressure I put on myself to be a certain size and squeeze into clothes that were too small. Although it can be hard at first to gain weight, if it’s a necessary step in your recovery from diet culture, you’ll feel much better when you work through it. I hope these tips will help you with that.
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