What Do You Do When Clothes Don't Fit?
Also: Yes, three kinds of orange snack crackers, plus links and my new favorite planter.
FAT TALK comes out in four days, so you still have time to preorder and enter the preorder swag giveaway (how fun are these postcards!!) and the bookclub giveaway!
Let’s Talk Spring Closet Stress
I have a lot of very specific anxiety about what I call “shoulder season dressing” —these stretches of the year between the clear cut seasons (winter is cold! summer is hot!), where figuring out how to just be weather-appropriate becomes a daily conundrum. Case in point: I put our puffy winter coats away last weekend because we had three days in the high 80s here. Then on Tuesday, my 5-year-old came home from school in a winter coat borrowed from the Lost & Found because the temperature had dropped into the 50s and her teacher thought she’d be too cold to play outside during recess. Gah!
And it’s somehow even more complicated to figure this out as an adult because we’re usually dressing not just for weather, but also for all those amorphous other reasons—to look professional, to look “hot,” to look creative and interesting—that we layer on as we absorb the many expectations the world has for our bodies. And then the other thing that happens when we change seasons (in weather and in life) is that we pull out last year’s clothes and usually discover that at least some of them no longer fit.
There is a longer essay in all of this that I’m pondering and will probably write in a few weeks, after I’ve also navigated what I’m wearing on book tour during shoulder season (which is bringing! up! all! the! feelings!). But for today, I thought we could talk about what to do when you have that “oh shit it doesn’t it anymore” moment. Because even if you’re working very hard to divest from diet culture and anti-fatness, this can still be such a bummer. You might really have loved that dress from last summer! New clothes are expensive! Bodies are hard!
Have you figured out any strategies for being kind to yourself in these moments?
What do you do with the old clothes (that, hopefully, feels better than continuing to hang them in your closet where they can taunt you)?
Or if you’ve dealt with this recently and need to just vent about how much it sucked, we’re here for that too.
I do ask that you avoid using specific clothing sizes or weight numbers and to remember my comment section ground rules. And thank you to everyone that makes this one of the few truly good places on the Internet.
Book Update: What If You Weren’t Scared of Your Child Being Fat?
I adore that headline and everything else about this profile of me (and the awesomeness of Burnt Toast!) that the great Erica Schwiegershausen wrote for The Cut. (Also this photo by Yael Malka!)
I don’t adore the comment section, of course (and the Instagram post is maybe even worse?) but we all know what happens when this conversation goes mainstream. And yet—it’s so important for it to go mainstream. Anyway, if you’re a hater that’s popped over from there: Yes, I stand by the quote about stocking three types of orange snack crackers at all times.
In other book news, you can now read an excerpt of Chapter 9 (daddssss!!!) in The Atlantic. And this excerpt of Chapter 5 (on the diet culture of doctors) in TIME.
We’ve also got some amazing reviews in:
“Along with moving stories of the families she has interviewed, Sole-Smith offers data…Fat Talk also questions the received narrative of the ‘obesity epidemic’ and traces a far more complicated relationship between health, weight, diet, disease and mortality.”
—Kate Cohen for The Washington Post
“Through dozens of interviews, Sole-Smith gathers and shares the experiences and observations of people in the trenches…She weaves these stories together with findings from published research, her keen observations of social media and cultural trends, and her own experience as a mother and as a woman in a changing body who inhabits the same weight-focused world we all do. If she’s left a stone unturned, I can’t find it…The day I started reading this book was the day I started recommending it.”
—Carrie Dennett for The Seattle Times
And! The FAT TALK Book Tour starts tomorrow!
If you’re local to the Hudson Valley, you should come to the Desmond-Fish Public Library at 3pm Eastern on Saturday, for my official launch event withJulia Turshen. (Register here.) We are hoping to hold this one outdoors, FYI, so dress accordingly!
If you’re in or near New York City, you should really, really come to McNally Jackson at the Seaport on Tuesday at 7pm Eastern, for my conversation with Kelsey Miller.
And no matter where you are in the world, you can attend my virtual event on Wednesday at 8pm Eastern, with
, hosted by Women’s and Children’s First in Chicago. Register here.Friday Links and Recs
The Twitter/Substack feud means I can’t embed tweets right now but this, from national treasure Kate Baer was important enough to screenshot.
The next book I cannot preorder fast enough is absolutely
's UNSHRINKING.Also loved this chat with my friend/neighbor/fellow Substacker
!
And
on the power and complexities of women's sports. influenced me to buy this planter (she has the square one) and it truly is so good: Attractive, lightweight, frost-proof. Why are so many planters so very, very bad? I so far just have this scabiosa in it because we're not past last frost here, but verrry excited to play around with annuals in a few weeks.
And
articulates my anxieties about the new Barbie Movie (yes I still want to see it!).
For the last couple of years I go ahead and try everything in my closet on when the season changes - if it's definitely too small or if it's a bit small and I don't love it then I put it straight in the "get rid of" pile, and if it's just tight but theoretically wearable and I absolutely love it I move it into the "storage" part of the closet as I kind of intermediate step. It has been an absolute game-changer for me having only clothes in my closet that I know will fit me comfortably, and makes getting dressed a 1000 times better experience.
Thank you SO much for the shout-out! It means the world to me, coming from you. Recently, when I've gained weight and clothes don't fit, I try to clearly separate the annoyance at having to spend the time and effort and money to reinvest in clothing from the lingering internalized fatphobia that might be affecting my thinking by asking myself, would I feel different if I needed to buy new clothing because I had (unintentionally) lost weight? If yes, it shows me I have work to do--and more importantly, makes me angry enough at fatphobia and diet culture to spur me into action directed outward, not inward. Obviously that doesn't take into account all the complexities here (the privilege of having the means to buy new clothes, and the privilege of having clothes available in a new size, just for starters). But posting it here just in case it's helpful to anyone else! Also: stretch fabric is MAGIC.