We all know that size is just a number, but when that number varies from place to place for something as simple as a pair of pants it’s an extremely frustrating situation.
Deena Shoemaker only realized that her pants come in very different sizes when she was organizing her closet. For example, her size 6 pants fit her EXACTLY the same way as a size 12.
Shoemaker works with teen and preteen girls, so she knows how sensitive they can be to numbers, and how conscious about their weight it makes them.
She says:
“I remembered all the times I’ve heard girls say they’re ‘fat’ because they went up a pant size, or talked about all the diets they’ve been on. I’ve tried telling them it’s not true but they never really seemed to believe me. All the pieces fell into place for me when I saw my own pants. The lies they were believing were coming from something so commonplace that they didn’t even recognize it as the source of their hurt.”
The 27-year-old decided to post a photo collage on her Facebook profile to show just how misleading the number can actually be:
She captioned it with this:
Clearly many people agreed with her, because the post has been shared more than 60,000 times since, and more than 2,300 people commented on it. Most of them agreed with her message.
Maybe it’s easy for people to say that numbers don’t matter, but young girls are vulnerable and they believe they do, even if the numbers are completely illogical and inconsistent.