How Do I Dress While I’m Losing Weight?

I recently started losing weight, and am having trouble figuring out what to wear. It seems foolish to invest in clothes before I finally stabilize again, but wearing things that are too big not only doesn’t look good, but is not good psychologically. Any suggestions? — Paula, Milwaukee

Changes in your body, whether intentional or not, are intrinsically connected to changes in your emotions and sense of self, even before you start taking into account social messaging around weight and physical beauty.

Altering your shape can alter your identity in pretty essential ways, and since identity is expressed in part through clothing, losing weight (or gaining it) sets off a domino effect that is about more than just size. It’s also about how you communicate who you are to the world: whether you are happy or sad; whether you want to bare yourself, hide yourself, armor yourself, decorate yourself; whether you want to turn yourself into a goth, a prepster, a sophisticate, and so on.

That means any clothing purchases related to your new size should be made with care and deliberation. Well, that should be true of any clothing purchases, period, but it’s especially true when you are dealing with a different you.

You really need to live in your body for a while before you decide how you want to display it, because how you feel initially may not be how you feel later, and wardrobes can be, as you point out, an investment. Of both time and money.

But what to do in the interim?

It’s easy to see fast fashion as a quick fix: a jolt of serotonin when you are feeling unsure about who you are or how you will be received. After all, it takes less commitment, and changing your body doesn’t affect just you but also your relationships and how your friends and colleagues see you. Literally. But in the long term, such a stopgap solution is probably just a waste, in all meanings of that word.

According to a study by Statista, 23 percent of American women and 19 percent of men buy clothes they never wear. My guess is that this is in part because what can seem perfect when you are surfing shopping sites at night or on your phone while taking the subway can also seem, in the stark reality of every day, uncomfortable and obvious. So it gets relegated to the back of the wardrobe or to the landfill, never to be seen again.