According to a U.K. study, you aren’t the only one guilty of buying clothes that are a a size (or two…or three) too small for you. Out of the 1,000 women polled in the survey, a whopping 48 percent admitted to buying clothes that are just too small for them.

And if you’re anything like me, you know exactly why so many women are guilty of this bad habit. What’s a better incentive to lose weight than those jeans always being just a little (okay, a lot) too snug? A phenomenon the Daily Mail has called “size denial,” buying clothes that are simply too small for us is not only motivation to lose weight, but also allow us to convince ourselves that we, well, are smaller than we actually are.

The study showed that 10 percent of women are buying clothes up to three sizes too small, and only 38 percent of women would admit to going up a dress size after losing weight. Clearly, we have a bit of a problem with numbers. But as the Daily Mail article reports, this issue is also related to the inconsistency in sizes at popular stores.

While you might be a size 10 at one store, you could be a 6 at another. This variation in fit and sizes not only leads to insecurities, but quite frankly, leaves us all wondering what size we actually are in the first place.

As someone who once cut the tag out of her jeans because she didn’t like the number of the size, I’m fully aware (and I’m sure you are, too) of how ridiculous it is to wear ill-fitting clothes just because we prefer the smaller number rather than the larger one. But we still do it. So what has to change?

In the same survey, 83 percent of women polled agreed that there should be stricter government guidelines specifying sizes so there’s less of a question what sizes we’re actually wearing and what sizes really do fit us. While stricter guidelines may not be the entire answer to women feeling better about the size jeans their wearing, it would certainly be a good start.

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