When I weighed 125 pounds and was running 8 miles at a time, I wore a size 10 and once, for about a week, I squeezed into a size 8.

Today, with 145 pounds of middle aged “shapeliness”,  my size 6 jeans are getting a baggy.

It’s wrong!  Nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy to keep the baby boomers spending money.

And I rarely miss the opportunity to rant about it.

However………

after reading a couple of articles, I have to confess that, just maybe, the only “wrong” is that women choose to believe that a size 10 today is the same as it was twenty-five years ago. If we are the intended dupes of this marketing strategy, then we’d better get smart and let them know that we’ve caught on.

The truth is that our old size 12-14 bodies are now size 6 or 8 and I need just to get over the new number and not be distracted by how small it seems.  If I need to be a Gap size 4 to have a healthy waist size, then I need to be a size 4.  And I also have to accept that, if I wear a size 10 today, it’s the same as the size 16 of my youth.  There’s no way around it.

Of course, in better quality stores, I wear a bigger size – which arouses my cynicism again.  What’s the motivation behind: “the cheaper the store, the more generous the sizing”?

I guess the bottom line is that we can’t rely on clothing sizes to let us know if we’re losing or gaining weight and we can’t actually say with confidence, “I’m a size____” without qualifying what that means.  All we can do is find clothes that fit us and flatter us and cut out the labels.  I will not be duped.