It's no secret that women's clothing sizes are difficult to navigate — and now one woman is proving just how useless that number on the tag can be.
Personal trainer Sia Cooper was shopping for new clothes this week when she tried on a pair of shorts and a pair of jeans, both in the same size. Cooper, 28, was shocked to see how differently they fit. The first item, a pair of khaki shorts, was too tight.
"I couldn't get them up my thighs," Cooper, of Destin, Florida, told TODAY Style. "I felt very discouraged ... I was like, did I gain weight? Did I get bigger?"
She went to another store and grabbed a pair of jeans in the same size — they were way too big.
"I started getting frustrated," Cooper said. "Like, what the heck? It's just crazy that as women, we go shopping and we're so excited about it, just to let ourselves down because of the size of our pants. Sizing can be so different. A size 5 in one pair of pants can be completely different than a size 5 in another."
Cooper, who runs the blog Diary of a Fit Mommy, shared her experience on Facebook, sparking a conversation about how much stock women put into sizes — herself included.
"At one point in my life, I only wanted to be a size 0 because all of the models were a size 0," she wrote. "How crazy is that? It's a terrible way of thinking and you shouldn't fall into that same trap, either."
The photos show Cooper wearing both of the items she tried on — one squeezing her thighs and clearly too tight, and the other gaping at the waist.
In her post, she also offered some encouragement to women dealing with the same sizing issues.
"Stop worrying about the tag on your jeans and start worrying about how you feel inside," Cooper wrote. "Numbers are just numbers. They don't tell you much! Don't be a number! You're more than a number, friend."