If Your Clothes Are Too Small…

As we transition from spring to summer weather in the northern hemisphere, you might be getting ready to pull your old summer clothes from storage...

And there’s a possibility that during the last 9 months, your body has gotten bigger.

Maybe you ate a bit more than you intended to around the holidays. Maybe you’ve been struggling with your mental health and have been using food as a coping mechanism. Maybe you’ve been too busy or too tired to work out as much as you’d like. Or maybe you’ve been going through some other life change that brought on consequent changes in your nutrition and exercise habits.

For whatever reason weight gain has occurred, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; there is nothing inherently wrong or bad with your body changing.

I can’t remember who I heard this from, but I came across the following remark regarding sizing up in clothes, which I’m paraphrasing here:

“If you lost weight and were buying new clothes for your body after it got smaller, you’d probably feel pretty happy about the need to go shopping.

So it’s not the fact that you need to buy new clothes that’s making you unhappy. It’s how your body has changed that’s making you unhappy.”

You don’t have to feel happy about your body changing, but feeling neutrally about those changes is a step in the right direction.

Because if you want to heal your relationship with your food and your body, it’s important to step away from making getting smaller a celebration, and getting bigger a tragedy.

Giving yourself permission to dress in clothes that fit you isn’t resigning yourself—it’s accepting and respecting your current shape. It’s a form of self-care.

Similarily, you don’t need to get rid of your smaller clothes if they don’t fit anymore, but you also don’t need to keep them prominently in your closet and shame yourself if you can’t fit into them.

And I share the above from experience…

I used to have clothes I kept around as “goal clothes”, which is a behavior I now strongly discourage. Because this line of thinking infers that your body isn’t good enough until or unless it’s a certain size. You’re giving all your power away by allowing the size of your body to dictate when you can feel happiness and self-worth.

If you really want to take back your power, you can lean into the Food Body Self™ acronym B.A.R.N., which stands for Body Acceptance, Respect, and Neutrality.

As mentioned above, one way to do this is to wear clothes that fit—without shaming your body if you need to size up—and to think of dressing for your current body as a form of self-care.

And if you’re struggling to wrap your mind around this concept, we would love to support you in achieving a sense of peace and ease with your body—the sense that you’re at home—through Food Body Self™ coaching.

But above all else, if there’s one thing you take away today, let it be this:

If your clothes are too small, it doesn’t mean your body is the wrong size; it means your clothes are the wrong size for your body.