If you’ve ever been around babies, you know how quickly they grow. Sometimes, toddlers are known to go down for a nap and wake up visibly taller. That’s completely normal for young healthy kids. What doesn’t get taught to us though, is that our bodies never truly stop growing, and we go through what’s essentially a second puberty in our mid-to-late twenties that will leave us emotional and uncomfortable in our bodies.
This is hard to deal with when we’ve been taught that we eventually stop growing. Some older sources say we stop growing at 18, some newer ones say 25, and some say it depends on the sex. But if there were ever a point where we truly stopped growing, no one would look old. Our bodies are constantly changing and it doesn’t always have to do with genetics, it could be the environment and your nutrition that affect how you look as well.
Growing doesn’t only have to do with height either, as a lot of people don’t get taller in their late twenties onward, but their bodies continue to grow in width and length. Shoulders can broaden with increased muscle mass and womens’ hips widen with age to prepare for giving birth, both of which obviously affect how clothes fit. These changes might not happen as quickly as they do with toddlers, but it’s normal to not be able to wear the same size pants you wore a year ago, as in that time your body has grown and adjusted to your diet, your exercise activity, and just the natural growth that happens as we age.
It doesn’t mean anything other than you’re a living, breathing person, whose healthy body is going to do what it needs to to keep you alive. While surprising to see you still need “back-to-school” clothes every year or so, it’s not abnormal, and is something to be celebrated.
