I’m not ashamed to say I dieted to fit into my size 10 jeans
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Buried at the bottom of my chest of drawers is a pair of cropped, straight leg, designer jeans I bought years ago. Every so often, I get them out, put them on, get depressed at how tight they are over my hips and bum, and put them back in the drawer. I can’t bring myself to get rid of them because they feel like some sort of totem – that to ditch them would be to accept that I will never fit comfortably into them again, and somehow, I have failed.
I have been around the same dress size for the past 20 years, give or take three pregnancies and a bout of extreme dieting in 2008 when I got married. In most shops I am a size 10. I’m a healthy weight for my height, and I generally feel OK about my body. So why am I hanging onto those jeans? And is aiming to get back into them again a good thing?
It’s a hot topic right now, after Serena Williams, who gave birth to her second child five months ago, posted a clip on Instagram earlier this month of herself trying on a denim skirt and not being able to get it over her bottom. “I got this cool Valentino skirt when I was pregnant, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna be able to fit this when I don’t have a belly,’” the tennis star laughed. “I can’t fit it. But this is my goal.”
Williams has been widely praised for the honesty of the video. “Serena Williams is all of us” as one headline put it.
It really is – for any of us who’ve had children and watched, incredulously, as some star who’s just popped out a baby is back on the red carpet looking teeny tiny within weeks, it is a relief to know that we’re not the only ones who took a bit of time to lose the baby weight; that having a bottom and boobs, especially if you’re still breastfeeding, is not only fine but normal.
“We shouldn’t be ‘bouncing back’”, points out Camilla Lawrence, a women’s health physiotherapist. “Your body’s done something amazing and you might not get back into your jeans straight away and that’s OK.” What’s more, Lawrence adds, women put on adipose, or fatty tissue around their hips and bottom during pregnancy, which is hormonally necessary for breastfeeding and often won’t disappear until after you’ve stopped.
“I would say five months is really early to be worrying about being anywhere near getting into [your pre-baby] clothes,” says Lawrence. “It takes nine months to grow a baby – it’s going to take at least nine months to be anywhere near back where you started.”
But what about those of us who haven’t just given birth? Is dieting to fit back into certain items in our wardrobe a healthy goal, or a recipe for body dysmorphic disaster?
“Whilst it might seem a rather flimsy reason, if fitting into a favourite piece of clothing is the motivation you need, then it’s as valid as any other reason,” says The Telegraph’s nutrition expert Sam Rice who devotes the first chapter of her book, The Midlife Method: How to Lose Weight and Feel Great after 40, to how the right motivation is key to achieving lasting lifestyle changes.
“If my jeans are too tight, I go ‘right, time to do something about it’,” admits the journalist Esther Walker. “I never weigh myself because I don’t think scales are helpful. It’s just all about the clothes.” Walker has what she terms a ‘benchmark skirt’ that she’s had for years; she no longer wears it as she’s changed shape, but she puts it on every so often to check it still fits. If it doesn’t, she knows it’s time to take herself in hand.
I’m the same – those jeans aside, there are other items in my wardrobe that give me a good indication of whether I need to eat a bit less, or visit the gym a bit more. A twirly, high-waisted navy skirt that occasionally needs a breath in to get the zip up, for example, and a pair of wide legged trousers that I’m sometimes happy to tuck a shirt into and other times would rather let the shirt hang over. “Personally, I prefer to monitor my weight by how my clothes fit rather than getting on scales,” says a colleague. “My goal is to always fit into my jeans. Is this a bad thing?”
“It’s complicated, and one size [if you’ll pardon the pun] does not fit all,” says Alice Jameson, a personal trainer. “I do not think having a short term goal to fit into an item of clothing, if it is a significantly smaller size, is a sustainable model. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that those jeans could be a motivator.
If you have worn them fairly recently and they’re not the thing you bought thinking ‘they don’t fit but one day they will’ then perhaps set yourself a three-month goal initially. Twelve weeks is the minimum amount of time you need to see significant changes to your body.” Rice says the same: “You need to go slowly, ” she advises. “A realistic rate of weight loss is 1-2 pounds a week, so don’t be tempted by diets promising anything quicker.”
Then there’s the issue of body shape: what type it is, and how it changes over time, or with exercise. Jameson advises “coming to terms with your body shape, and dressing it well,” rather than obsessing over changing it. As we age, not only can our shape alter, but how we want to live might be different. Can we realistically, for example, go to the gym five days a week – and do we want to?
“There is a significant element of, do you really care enough?” points out Jameson. At 42, you might care less than you did when you were in your 20s or 30s. It doesn’t mean you’re going to put on loads of weight but you’re not going to fret about the relatively minor changes.”
She’s right: there have been times in the past when I’ve been slimmer, sure, but that primarily involved denying myself food I really enjoy. I deployed the 5:2 diet after having my second child, but this no longer suits my lifestyle.
“Applying a healthy dietary plan is good,” says the nutritionist Dr Gabriela Peacock, “but it’s not about going on a diet, it’s about getting in control of your body and your eating habits without starving yourself. Once you start looking after your body and get a bit fitter, you’ll feel great about yourself; you’ll look in the mirror and think ‘I look good in this dress’ rather than fretting over another piece of clothing where you can’t do the zip up.”
Jameson agrees. “You live with your body; you don’t have to live with those jeans,” she says. “Choose a different pair of jeans that you like, and fit into those.”
Telegraph writers reveal the garments they still hope to squeeze into
‘My daughters have given up on my very Eighties LBD but I can’t’
Judith Woods
Somewhere inside a storage box in my basement there is a teeny tiny Lycra dress embroidered with flowers. It was bought for me in Edinburgh in the 80s as a gift by my then boyfriend. I was in my slender 20s and it clung to me (as did he) like a teeny tiny dress should. I felt amazing in it. I looked amazing in it.
In my work-hard, play-harder 30s it still fit – worryingly, if anything it was a little loose. But such figure-hugging frivolity was no longer in fashion so I only ever tried it on in front of the mirror.
Later that decade I had my first child. Thanks to breastfeeding the weight fell off me afterwards – but not everywhere. I remember seeing The Dress in a drawer and apologising to it: “I wish I could wriggle into you but I think we both know my astonishing new embonpoint would split you.”
Then in my 40s, I had another baby. This time my body didn’t bounce back so effortlessly and I don’t recall my LBD even surfacing.
A decade on, I feel slightly melancholy that although my student daughter seized upon and carried off every Y2K garment left in my wardrobe, she gave an apologetic little smile and gently placed the dress aside.
Then again, I’ve noticed it’s showing its age and the elastic has started to denature (ah, it comes to us all). A casual observer would probably consign it to a rag bin; hence it’s now below stairs rather than in my bedroom.
But I still have my photo – and the sight of teeny tiny me in my teeny tiny dress never fails to make me smile.
‘My evening suit trousers from the Nineties are how I gauge if I need to lose weight’
Roland White
Try not to think too badly of me, but in my spare time I like to dress up as a butler. Not a very convincing butler perhaps, but we’ll come to that in a moment.
For many years, I’ve helped to organise murder mystery weekends for friends. Playing the butler helps me to keep an eye on what’s going on, and to solve problems before they get out of hand. Also, the butler is never the murderer.
Because we have a tight budget, I’ve always used the trousers from my evening suit, paired with an eBay frock coat.
I bought the dinner suit from the Sloane Street branch of Hackett in the early Nineties, and felt very grown up because my previous evening wear was about a tenner from a secondhand shop in Bath.
As you can imagine, these trousers have seen a thing or two. They have been present at a masked ball that was interrupted by a stabbing. They have seen a monster emerging unexpectedly from a lake. They’ve been on a scene at more murders than Hercule Poirot. Pulling them on again always brings back fond memories.
But at our last event, I was confronted by true horror: it was a struggle to get into the trousers. That was a warning. Over the summer, I lost more than half a stone.
Some of that weight has reappeared, as weight does, but I wore the trousers only a couple of weeks ago, and they fitted like… well, the trousers of a slightly slimmer chap.
We’re organising another event this year. And as the bodies pile up, I will confidently be able to maintain the butler’s traditional sangfroid – without having to hold my stomach in at the same time.
‘The stress of work gave me back my 25-inch waist of the Nineties’
Rowan Pelling
I’d never been into one of Bond Street’s boutiques until 1999, when my eye was caught by the slinky, retro vibe of a flimsy slip dress in Anna Molinari. I needed the frock-of-all-frocks for a big party I was throwing for the Erotic Review (which I then edited) at China White. My existing wardrobe consisted of charity shop finds and Topshop’s finest gear and I wanted, for once, to feel properly glamorous.
I was the thinnest I’d ever been in adult life (a couple of pounds under eight stone), due to my frenzied pre-children lifestyle and I just about managed to ease the dress over my hips and bust – clocking as I did so that I’d need the tiniest thong known to womankind, or to just go commando. It cost a queen’s ransom but when I hosted the bash I felt like Bianca Jagger heading into Studio 54.
A few years later I just about managed to squeeze into it for my sister’s wedding, albeit with a long linen coat buttoned over it for decency. After that, it sat in my wardrobe whispering reproachfully, “You will never be that sylph-like creature again.” Two pregnancies added their inches.
And then, almost 20 years later I started another magazine, The Amorist, and a familiar combination of 12-hour days and stress whittled me down a dress size and, to my amazement, gave me back the 25-inch waist of the 1990s. When I needed a knock-out gown for the most thrilling wedding celebration I’d ever been asked to (an old university friend who’d married a duke) there was the Molinari dress, fresh as a daisy – proof that the most stylish garments never go out of fashion.
I was delighted to find invisible undies had come on by leaps and bounds, so I didn’t have to forsake knickers. I was so delighted to fit into it that I asked a friend to take a photo of me bouncing on a bed in it.
Since then, it’s been back in its protective drycleaner’s layers of eco-plastic apart from one promenade round the garden during lockdown (Covid also made me thin) and I’ve regained the pounds that stop me prancing around in it. I suspect the next wearer will be one of my nieces, or the girlfriend of a son. But there’s a rash side of me that would like to give it one last grand social whirl, if just to embarrass my offspring.
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