Since I started getting rid of the pounds last year, I have probably bought more clothes than in the previous five years.  Shopping had become too easy. The right size was 1X, or 2X if you wanted a baggy fit.

Now I really have to try things on because it is impossible to figure out how a piece of clothing is going to fit nowadays. I get rid of pounds which show up as lost inches in various places at different times, so to speak.

I had heard about a practice called “vanity sizing” which has been going on the past few years. In order to make Americans feel better about themselves, I guess, the actual measurements for a given size have been steadily increasing.  Thus, as I looked around the store I had decided to shop at over this weekend, I suddenly realized that a lot of the stuff in the “normal” size departments had taken on the look of  “plus” size department stock. 

Frankly, this surprised me. Although I am painfully aware of the increasing poundage on ordinary Americans, for the longest time it had seemed to me that the “normal” size departments were places I couldn’t think about shopping. There simply wouldn’t be ANYTHING there that would fit me. No more.

Now I find things that are entirely too big for me, but are marked with sizes that sound “normal”– in other words, are sizes that would have fit properly and that  I would have worn at my present weight in past years. These are in clothing lines that are pretty well known and not cheap. (I shop sales and use special discount coupons, that’s the only way I would even buy some of these brands !)

So, rummaging around on the ‘Tubes, I found a very interesting article in an old issue of  the Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0304/p12s01-lign.html

The article says, in pertinent part:

Retailers may need to fine-tune the models they use for their patterns, suggests Jim Lovejoy, director of the SizeUSA project for TC2, a company in Cary, N.C. “If they’re using a white fit model, then how are they grading their patterns and their sizes to meet the black [African American] market?”

Three-D scanning devices were used to take the measurements of more than 10,000 people around the country and process them. These devices more accurately convey size and shape information than the old-fashioned, time-consuming measuring tape.

One of the significant things the survey revealed is how different average measurements vary from the current standards set forth by the American Society for Testing and Materials, especially for women.

The average size for a woman has been considered an 8, with ASTM standards listing that size as a bust of 35 inches, a 27-inch waist, and 37.5 inch hips. Overall, 69 percent of women in the survey had hips greater than 40 inches, “so that puts them up into size 12, 14 rather than size 8,” says Lovejoy.

According to the survey, fewer than 10 percent of women who should be a size 8 actually were, based on their measurements. Most of the women who had a size 8 bust had an average waist of 29.6 inches and average hip of 38.6 inches.

One way to address that problem might be to identify garments by shape within a size 8, Lovejoy suggests. “I might have a size 8A, and the A would mean that it flares out a little bit … so I have a little wider waist and a little wider hips.”

As for men, although their waists and hips are getting bigger with age, the average of their measurements came out closer to the current national average for men of a 40-inch chest, a 34-inch waist and a 40-inch hip, says Lovejoy.

Interesting, eh ?