I probably am bu, but sister and clothing sizes?

[sailorcherries]

Before I start I know I am bu, I am not going to say anything to her, but does this annoy other people as much as me?

Both my sister and I are doing slimming world (we started together), she had a heavier start weight/bigger clothing size than me and has lost just about 3 stone. She is doing brilliantly in her weight loss. I am 6 weeks post partum and have lost my stone of pregnancy weight and a further stone, so one stone since joining. Despite her weight loss and achievements my sister is quite competitive about our dress sizes and weight loss. I am envious of her loss and I am very supportive of her diet, I think she is doing fantastically.

I am a size 14, sometimes a 16 for a better fit, at 5ft 7 and 14.5 stone. I'd like to lose a minimum of another 4.5 stone, but we'll see how my body shaprs back up when I reintroduce my weight training.
My sister is 5ft 11 and still about 17ish stone give or take. She started at a size 20, sometimes an 18.

Today she has just text me saying "ha that's me a 14 too! I'm beating you as I've lost 3 sizes now". Accompanying this was a picture of a size 14 top. The only problem is she has squeezed herself in to the clothes and it's unflattering but she is too caught up in the lavel size to care.

I know she isn't a true size 14 but I also know she views the label on her clothes as a very important marker. She will now not buy any clothes that are not a 14, regardless of their actual fit.

I spent a long time trying to become more body positive, understanding labels and sizes vary and dressing for fit/my shape as opposed to the dress size. I suffered from ednos and it has been a hard journey, her obsession with only buying smaller clothes sizes is starting to annoy me.

It's not just her, I know lots of women who squeeze in to a smaller size because they don't want to buy a bigger size. Obviously there are a lot of contributing factors to why women place such an importance on dress sizes, but is it unreasonable to be annoyed at my sister for making such a big deal of clothing sizes (especially when it isn't accurate) and not focusing on her overall achievement and health?

It's only a competition if you both compete. If you focus on your own goals , rather than worrying about how deluded you think your sister is, then you can just tell her well done and move on.

groupie
As I said before, years of weight training meaning I'm probably not as big a clothing size as I should be, given my weight. I also dress for my particular shape and own no jeans etc as they don't suit me and I don't like them, I tend to stick to tea type dresses or fit and flare. If I did purchase a pair they'd probably be a 16 or 18.

greedy she has always been taller and bigger than myself and her friends. It is definitely a contributing factor and she probably does measure herself against her petitie 5ft friends, despite that never being her shape.

PoorYorick believe all you want about the competitiveness.

Kimmy it's neither satisfying or amusing, I'm not that petty.

You and your sister are starting form completely different points. It cant be a competition when you are post partum. Supporting each other would be great but she isnt. Tell her 'well done' and ignore her comments.

""I'm a size 14, 16 to be comfy and I'm 9 1/2 stone! Only 5'2" though.""

I'm just on 5'3", at 9 1/2 stone I'm a size 10. I'm currently 15 stone and a size 16/18. I also did weights, so don't know if that makes a difference.

My two Son In laws weigh similar, one is solid muscle and the other carries too much body fat.

My DD (19) tried on different styles of jeans in Newlook, she has wide hips/shoulders but carries little body fat. She was a 12-16 depending on the style. There's been times that she has needed anything from a 10 to a 14 in the same shop.

OP what you've said on here, try saying to her.

My DD's have carried on the Sibling rivalry though.

YANBU @sailorcherries

Between October 2015 and June 2016, my friend spent 8 months losing 2 stone, by walking 3 miles four times a week, swimming twice a week, and cutting her food intake by about a third, and depriving herself of all the stuff she enjoys. Even after 6 months, just one person had said something about her weight loss; just ONE. Even though she dropped from 14 stone to 12 stone (she is 5 ft 5 ish.)

After a couple more months, a few more people started to comment. But the upshot is people didn't really notice for ages, until she started to wear different clothes, more suited to her new, slimmer shape.

Her weight then stalled at 12 stone for many months. However, she looks great, and at the age of 49, the (slow and steady) weight loss, and firming herself up by regular, gentle exercise, made her look 5 years younger.

Then about six months after she hit 12 stone, her husband lost 2.5 stone in 3 months. He is 5 ft 10 he was 15 and a half stone, and he dropped to 13 stone in 3 months. After having a tummy bug and losing 8 pounds in 5 days, he decided it was a kick start to a diet and started eating very little ...

His weight loss was quick (as it is for ALL men!) and he has been wallowing in his glory, boasting about how HUGE his 44 waist trousers are now, how loose his belt is, and how much better he feels now. Everyone is saying how noticeable it is, and he is puffing his chest out, and saying 'I am so proud of myself.'

In actual fact, it has aged him a bit, (he is 50 and looked 48-51 before and now looks 55,) and it's made him look a bit drawn and haggard. Still, he is insistent that he is going to lose another 2 stone! He is 13 stone now, and dropping to 11 stone is going to make him look ill.

My friend was pissed off with the same thing happened 10 years ago, (she lost weight and hardly anyone noticed, and then her husband lost a lot very quickly and people noticed HIS weight loss!) but she couldn't give a shit now, as she is happy with what SHE has done. She hit 12 stone a year ago and hasn't regained the 2 stone she lost, and she looks younger, and feels fitter.

She has re-introduced things she likes, but has less of them, and has smaller portions of everything. She goes for a swim of 35-40 lengths, or a (2-3 mile) walk almost every day. Her hubby just sits on his arse. He is still losing weight though, as he is not eating, bread, butter, cheese, pastry, cake, biscuits, chocolate, crisps, chips, ANYthing with carbs basically. As soon as he starts his old way of eating, the weight will pile back on.

So maybe you should take a leaf out of her book and not give a fuck.

Your sister is being a bit of a bitch actually, but I don't think she is doing it deliberately. Just ignore, and carry on with what you are doing. Then you can smile sweetly to yourself when she regains the weight....

I've always done weights too OP. It's just so depressing to see how hard I've had to work to Get smaller (am 10 st and still a size 10/12!).

It's not a belief as much as the exact words you have used on here...annoyance, at women who squeeze into too-small clothes and claim they're thinner than they are. And especially those who then attempt to use it to berate you. It would piss me off too, not blaming you for that at all.

If you really do want a constructive solution to this, my feeling is that no good ever comes of telling a woman she's not as slim as she's claiming to be. Even if it comes from a place of GENUINE AND SINCERE ALTRUISTIC CONCERN. It's just not going to help anyone.

I would suggest you either ask her to leave comparisons to you out of her weight loss journey because it's not good for your head given your previous EDNOS, or simply don't engage.

And go to a different SW club.

Firstly, for yourself a 4 and half stone weight loss (you would be 10 stone?) surely that would actually be too low a weight for you at 5' 7" especially if you do a lot of weight training, have a lot of muscles.

Tinty 5"7" and 10 stone is perfectly healthy. I'm 5"10" and 9 stone 11, BMI is 19.6.

Thing is, you say yourself it was a long hard journey for you to change your thoughts about size - and she's not been on that journey. She's not caught up with you in that regard, and it won't happen overnight. But I do understand how frustrating it is to see her trying to win a non-existent competition, and setting herself up to be unhappy when the size 14 jeans inevitably won't go over her hips, all when she should be pleased with herself for what she has achieved.

It's hard though, especially coming down from size 20 or thereabouts. I'm a 22-24 and being sized 20+ is definitely harder in terms of finding nice clothes. Being a (real) 14 would open up a whole new world of possibilities to me. Fucking hell, I could get jeans from GAP again! Or go into the main bit of H&M! That's a not-fat size! It's heady stuff.

You could ask her not to be so competitive on the grounds that it brings up ED stuff for you. The other stuff is her journey to make, though, really. All you can do is try to keep bringing it back to the concrete numbers, the pounds and stones.

Hope things even out for her with time. I can absolutely see where your concern comes from; but, she was probably never wearing the sizes that would fit well. I'm a similar height (maybe a touch taller), and currently wearing size 16-20 mostly; I've lost weight to 15 stone having started at about 16.5 so slightly under where your sister is now. At that greater weight I was 20-22 for things to actually fit.

This thread is hilariously ironic (not you @sailorcherries). You ask the OP why she is competitive with her sister and yet PPs are lining up to compete to prove how thin they are and to knock the OPs confidence even more. I mean really, do you need to bring your size 00 jeans onto a thread like this?

Those of you saying "I don't know how you can be a 16 when I weigh half what you do"? Knock it off. @sailorcherries has already said she's recovering from an ED. Shame on some of you.

Hear hear Wombling.

i don't see how it's actually possible for 00 and 14 suites to be so far out that they are the same. A 00 is a US size, roughly equivalent to a 2 in the U.K. If you are using US sizes, then a 14 is roughly equivalent to a 16-18 in the U.K.

No-ones pattern cutters are so bad that they can't cut a 9-14 inch difference accurately! One of those garments was seriously mis-labelled.

@Wombling - there are discrepencies in shops. I'm a 12 in H&M, a 10 in Hobbs, but am often a children's size in Monsoon and M&S. (pear shape, I go by the largest size I wear which is usually a 12 in jeans).

Welsh - I'm 5ft 10, 15.8 and wear a 14 in jeans, 16 in tops (boobs, my waist is a 14 but my boobs don't fit in!!)

Thanks, pooryorick, that was really interesting. I still don't get one thing though. I agree that height and weight have increased steadily and therefore manufacturers need to make clothes bigger overall, but surely the range of waist, hip and bust sizes has increased much more than the height? Most people are overweight, 20% or so of the population is clinically obese but then there are still skinny people too, who find it increasingly difficult to find clothes to fit at certain discounted retailers eg Peacocks without resorting to wearing clothes aimed at the teenage market. So therefore surely we need more sizes at the top end of the scale rather than effectively shifting all the sizes upwards?

Mycarsmells, yes...there is a massive diversity among women's shapes and proportions, which is why nobody should expect mass produced clothing to fit them like a glove. And also why it's actually good that there's so little sizing consistency across shops, because they're profiling their customers. The more diversity in cut and shaping, the better chance you have of finding something that works for your shape SOMEWHERE. If everywhere was working from exactly the same model, there'd be no point looking elsewhere once you've established a single store doesn't fit you.

The more plus sized you are, though, the smaller the differences between your measurements are likely to be. The Fashion Incubator blog also has a great post to explain it here.

Stores should make larger sizes, sure, and I think a lot of them do. I'm sure that 20 years ago you couldn't get anything much above a 16, maybe an 18 at a push, unless you went to a specific plus sized store.
But you do still need to account for what to do with the wasted fabric (is there enough left to cut a correspondingly small size? And could anyone realistically get into that size?), the costs and logistics of a whole new fit model and size run (because while people do tend to get larger as they get taller, even a size 30 person isn't going to be eight feet tall), and so on.

So as we get bigger, manufacturers adapt by changing their medium size to the newer average and scaling around that (which is all the numbers in labels mean; a system of scaling for pattern cutters to follow). This is why a size 12 now is bigger than 30 years ago. It's happening, for sure, but it really isn't to try to insult your intelligence or play to your vanity.

One last thing - you might be surprised at how long fashion is in the making. Next autumn's high street trends and ranges will already be set and bought and planned. It takes a while for the industry to catch up with the newer demand.

Thank you. Good explanation.

Maybe it'd be healthier to say to her that you don't really want to be part of these discussions because of your ED?

I got sucked back into bad habits when I was friendly with a girl with anorexia. It would've been better if I'd had firm boundaries and kept myself safe.

I'd recommend the same. So much of the language around dieting is like ED-lite at best, it can be triggering.

My thought as I'm reading this is that there's some unaddressed competition between the two of you.

My mum does this to me if we're both cutting back. She'll constantly tell me how well she's doing (she is) and that she'll soon look like my sister, rather than my mum. She'll insist on trying on my clothes (I'm a smaller size and our figures are built differently) and saying how soon she'll be smaller than me. This bothers me, but not because I'm worried she'll be smaller- it's petty rivalry on her part.

The competition is my dad's attention (in her mind).

Do you two have anything like this going on? Does she feel that you're more 'successful' (not sure if that's the right word) than her in other areas and she's 'winning' at weight loss?

If I were you, I'd text back 'I'm proud of you. I could really do with your support right now as, 6 weeks pp I'm feeling a bit vulnerable. This time next year we will both be catwalk ready.' A bit of honesty goes a long way.

@Groupie123 of course there are discrepancies, I didn't say there weren't, but 00-14 isn't a discrepancy, it's ludicrous.

I can't work out how 10st would be too thin for the OP at 5'7. I'm 5'9 and just over 10st currently and feel massive. I'm a size 10-12 currently whereas I was a comfortable 10 at approx 9.5 stone.

Nowhere near "too thin". I think this is a problem with society nowadays that we are not sure what slim looks like v