Vanity, Thy Name is Bulls#!t

I can honestly say that I haven't felt this good in a long time. I started off the year wearing a size 18 and I'm now wearing a size 12. Wow. I'm finally out of the "women's" sizes and into the regular sizes. That should be a great feeling, right? Baloney.

You see, I've been a size 12 before - like 20+ years ago when I weighed in the comfortable 140ish range. I'm at least 25lbs heavier than I was back then and you can't tell me that I wear the same size jeans! In fact, at one point I got down to 135lbs and I was a size 10. And you mean to tell me that I'm a size 12 now? Please. There is a name for this monkey business and it's called vanity sizing.

Cosmopolitan magazine is not on my To Read list, but while searching online about vanity sizing, I came across this article in Cosmo, "Vanity Sizing: The Insanity of Size 0". As I was reading, I noticed a couple of sentences that explained the reason behind this sizing discrepancy:

Some time in the past several decades, designers tapped into a bankable truth: Women tend to feel better and buy more when we fit into a smaller size...Enter vanity sizing, where designers add extra inches of fabric to clothing without changing the number on the tag.

Huh. You mean people actually lie to themselves and want to be lied to? Go figure. (That's one of the reasons why I bought a pedometer, BTW.) I don't know about adding extra fabric, but I do know that Spandex is a vanity sizer's best friend. If you click on the picture you'll notice that the jeans contain 2% Spandex. That 2% makes all the difference in the world; without it, I doubt very seriously that I would be wearing size 12 jeans.

On the bright side: does this mean that when I reach my goal of 145lbs that I'll be a size 8? Or, dare I hope - a size 6! Wow! Golly, I've never been a size 6 or 8 before! The closest I got was a size 10...and that was weighing 10lbs less than my current goal weight. :-)