I was looking online this morning for references to waist size reduction in relation to weight loss. I could not get over the sizes of the waist sizes being reported in relation to weight. Things like 285# 43" waist. Or 5’7" 195# 34" waist.
I have been dieting off and on this year and have lost about 2" off my waist and about 15#. My pant size is 34" but I have an honest waist measure around the belly button of 43". I have to believe these guys are going by pant size. Looking for factual answers on the internet is challenging. Not talking about athletic builds here.
Don’t go by pants size either. US clothes manufacturers are notorious for “vanity” sizing. A pair of jeans sized at 34 is almost certainly not really a 34 inch waist. More like 38 or so.
My wife’s complained about this recently. Ordering clothes online (which to me seems inherently risky anyway) that are ostensibly her size, and they end up being way too big.
They should at least put the real size in a spoiler box, or something.
And regardless of vanity sizing, sizes are not consistent. I have two sets of pants from the same manufacturer - same size, same style, just different colors. The second pair is noticeably tighter than the first one. The difference is at least a full inch, though I haven’t measured it.
But going back to weight loss: everyone wants to exaggerate their success. Ever notice how they flatten out their fat pants, but they’re wearing the thin ones? Take two identical pairs of pants, and the flat ones will look 50% wider than the round ones. It’s basic math (circumference = pidiameter, so flattened pants are pid/2 - or about 1.57d wide, while pants being worn have a visual width of just 1d).
Or ever notice how everyone who loses weight also gets better lighting, improved makeup and a suntan? Women turn blonde and men get thicker hair.
Are you talking male or female? Some men (hangs head) let their pants ride down on their hips as they age and get fatter, so the waist size of our, errr, I mean their, pants stays the same even as their gut gets bigger and hangs over their belt.
I recently bought some new dress pants and the sales person insisted I wear them around my actual waist - that added something like 4 inches to what I normal buy. I wear those pants differently, up high around my belly button. It also explains why old men wear them so high, because they have to either go over or under the gut. In the middle and they fall down to the hips and are then too loose.
You know, I’ve been doing informal research on diet and weight loss for some time now, and the whole field is permeated with bullshit. In fact, I think a big part of the reason diets fail is self-deception.
And the clothing, food, and diet industries encourage self-deception with vanity sizing, faux-diet foods, and ridiculous diets which promise to let you pig out on tasty foods.
But I will say, I don’t know for sure that when I measure my waist, I’m really measuring my waist. Some instructions say to measure the narrowest part of your waist, some say to put it around your belly button, and I don’t know which one is correct. So maybe these guys are just measuring the wrong part of their waist.
I don’t see that working anyway - weight loss simply isn’t uniform, and you could lose a lot of weight before seeing it reflected in your waist size. And yeah, most people just report their pants size, which can be way off - especially in this age of different rise lengths.
I wonder if that’s it. I never wear pants up to my belly button. Looking at my waistline, they’re sitting at about 4 inches below, and have all my life. Even when I was at my maximun 205 lbs, I’ve never owned pants greater than a 34" waist. Now at 170-175 lbs, my pants are in the 30"-31" range. I’m wearing 32x30 inch jeans right now and if I pull them up to the belly button, I have about 2" of room yet.
There may be vanity sizing involved, I don’t know. But I also think I have a somewhat smaller waist than usual for men, too.
I’ve heard both of those, but for my recent BMI measurement at my workplace’s employee health day, they measured atop my hip bones. So that’s 3 places to measure your “waist.”
A day ago I approached a circular metal bench in a baby precinct where a vast young woman had her back to me and saw an enormous pair of naked buttocks. Unconcerned at the fact her trousers had slipped so far, perhaps the severe heat caused the cold metal to be a comfort as she chewed the cud. The effect was not erotic.
To be clear, they had you feel for the upper peaks of the hip bones on your sides, and then measured there (not across the hips themselves). That spot ended up being slightly below my navel.
Kill 'em. (I’ve got mama fat pads on the top of my iliac crest, with a comparatively small waist above that. I just measured, and there’s a 7 inch difference.)
And of course they also insisted I’m an inch shorter than I think I am, as they did with my officemate (but somehow added a couple inches to another coworker who’s never been over 5’ in her life until that weigh-in, perhaps that’s where they went…) and I’m as a result ever so slightly into overweight in BMI. I mean, I know I needed to lose a bit of weight, but no need to make things seem even worse!
That was my best estimate, at least. The woman measuring complained that I had “a lot of clothing on” when she was trying to help find the tops of the crests - if dress pants and a belt is “a lot” I guess she might have been confused in general.
(I’ve got mama fat pads on the top of my iliac crest, with a comparatively small waist above that. I just measured, and there’s a 7 inch difference.)