I never thought I’d be grateful to a data visualization. But then I read “Sizing Chaos,” by Amanda Sakuma at The Pudding — a deep, beautifully lucid exploration of how women’s clothing sizes in this country are as arbitrary and unmoored as stock prices — and something in my body unclenched.
Sakuma doesn’t just chart numbers. She shows that there is no consistent “true” size 8 — or 10, or 16, or 18. Every brand defines these labels differently, and there’s no regulatory standard enforcing any agreement. Sizes are literally made up — a fact that, for years, I lived inside.
Let’s talk about my lived data.
For years — decades — I existed in the only acceptable fashion zone. In a modeling career spanning the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, my waist was exactly 26.5 inches. My hips could not exceed 38.5 inches. These were not choices I’d make today; these were imposed boundaries — hardwired into contracts, bookings, camera angles, and industry norms. That precision was stressful, seriously.
Not “stress” in the Instagram-worthy sense. Real physiological threat.
Because here’s the thing about stress: your nervous system does not care about semantics. It cares about pattern recognition, energy demand, and threat activation. If every morning your livelihood depends on whether a tape measure says yes or no — your adrenal axis wakes up on high alert. That triggers cortisol, alters hunger and satiety cues, disrupts sleep, shifts water retention — and rewires your baseline. That’s biology, not mere feeling.
After I stopped modeling, my body changed. My hips went up to 44. Then down to 38. Now somewhere in between. The world kept assigning arbitrary meaning to these numbers — “gain” or “loss” — but the underlying reality was simple: I was healthy, evolving, living.
Here’s the brutal truth: losing the ability to work out for 10 months — due to dysautonomia, immune dysregulation, and nervous system fragility from cumulative stress — does change your physiology. I gained 10 pounds of fat, plus four pounds of water weight that now shuffles like bad deck chairs during a storm. My pants pinch. I feel uncomfortable. Guess what that does to your vagus nerve? Your regulation set point?
You’d think our culture would connect the dots. But we don’t. We treat body size as willpower, not as the output of nervous system algorithms. We treat inconsistency in sizing as a trivial inconvenience, not as a chronic stress input that nudges cortisol and sympathetic tone upward every time a woman tries on another “fit.”
That’s exactly why Sakuma’s piece matters. It deflates the myth that there is a universal “ideal body” encoded in sizing charts — and replaces it with a more honest reality: the only universal body is the one you live in.
And here’s the part no fashion article ever acknowledges out loud:
Our bodies register social demands as threats.
Whether you’re being measured for a sample size 8 in a showroom at 6 a.m., or staring down a vanity sizing label that refuses to match your tissue reality, your autonomic nervous system doesn’t care about intention — it cares about perception. Persistent external evaluation shifts you into a slight but chronic sympathetic state. Over the years, that rewires baseline regulation. That’s why I now have to actively cultivate calm — breathing practices, slow movement, vagal engagement — not as a luxury, but as a necessity.
Some people treat weight and size like static targets. I now treat them like ecosystem outputs — variables that reflect context, stress, meaning, and regulation.
So let’s give credit where it’s due:
Thank you, Amanda Sakuma, for making sense of what women have felt but couldn’t name — that sizing chaos isn’t our failure. It’s a structural artifact built on archaic standards and unregulated definitions. It’s not actually about our bodies. (The Pudding)
And to every woman who has cried in a dressing room, tugged at a waistband, or wondered why her hips seem insubordinate — here’s what science and lived experience both tell us:
Your body is not broken.
The system is.
And your nervous system is doing the best it can with the input it’s been given.
Regulation is not passive.
Regulation is resistance.
And loving your body in spite of inconsistent label logic — that’s radical self-care.
