Anne Hathaway Is Every Woman With Instagram Post On Weight Gain

“Love what you have been given,” Anne Hathaway shared on Instagram

Who hasn’t stood in front of their closet or dresser cursing all the pants, shirts, and dresses they no longer fit into? Anne Hathaway shared her thoughts on weight gain, weight loss, and clothes that don’t fit on Instagram this week. Her situation is completely relatable to, well, all of us.

The Oscar-winning actress took a shot of an old pair of jeans she was cutting up to make a pair of shorts out of. “There is no shame in finally breaking down and making your own jean shorts because last summer’s are just too dang short for this summer’s thighs,” she wrote. Hell yeah, sister. And you get to brag about your DIY skills, so — bonus.

We all know where Hathaway is coming from on this one. My bed gets covered in clothes that are just a little too tight at least once a week. And that’s after I forced myself to say goodbye to boxes full of clothes that didn’t fit when we moved last year. My fiancé essentially refused to let go of clothes that didn’t fit only for us to move them across the country then donate them to Goodwill.

There’s no rule about when you should toss your older clothes out, but we totally understand why anyone would get a jump start on the process. The pre-baby jeans or the favorite dress from our 20s can bring back fond memories, but often they hurt us more than they help. Instead of letting us focus on who we are now the outdated closet can make us focus on who we were before the kids or before the marriage or before the aging process truly began. And any psychologist will tell you that focusing on the past too much can lead to some crappy feelings.

Arianna Rebolini from Buzzfeed, wrote about this exact experience recently. “I was beginning every single day with a terrible task — facing a closet that told me my body wasn’t right, and choosing which way I’d like to be made physically uncomfortable that day. My clothes were undoing years of work toward accepting my body as-is, coaxing me into old beliefs.” So she made the decision to toss the stuff that didn’t fit and build a wardrobe that represented her current self. “If you open your closet and realize things are no longer fitting you, you don’t have to assign it any emotional significance,” she explained. “You haven’t failed. You can just buy some new clothes, or tailor the ones you have. I promise that it’s not a big deal, and that you’ll wish you’d done it a whole lot sooner.”

Saying goodbye to clothes from our thinner days isn’t an easy task. Holding on to them can reinforce the idea that we were somehow better before because a number on the scale or a dress size, which is total bullshit. We were awesome then and we’re fabulous now.

Hathaway’s comments echo the same message. “Bodies change. Bodies grow. Bodies shrink. It’s all love,” she wrote. “Love what you have been given.”