Battle of the bulge
It is a struggle to love fashion though if you are a calorically challenged person. I look at some items and realize the price tag is too wide and my wallet is too thin - that I can live with because I will buy a piece rather than an outfit and find something so close among the masses, pret a porter if you want to feel better, that it will be on point. It is harder to work around the fact that if you leave a the land of the single digit sizes your choices start to become slimmer .. pun TOTALLY intended.
I look at belts - love the things - however, my waist or what should be my waist and I have never bonded with a belt except maybe for a few brief moments in the 80s when those double belts hung seductively around our hips. Even at my smallest weight belts did not go I just do not have that lovely dip the same way a lot of people do. I could admire them on others, my VBFF wears the double GG Gucci belt with a casual and sexy elegance that would make the design house proud.
I have struggled with weight as long as I can remember - I can almost mark times of my life by the diet fad; early 80s hot water with lemon fad (cause it "melted" fat), late 80s give up fat go for carbs and put in the Jane Fonda workout of course dressed in similar duds in front of my tv, 80's/early 90s Slim Fast cause 2 shakes a day and a sensible dinner (by which point I defined sensible as a slice of pizza - cheese, carb, veggie sauce ) were what I needed, 90s cabbage soup (that lasted a day yuck), the bagel a day, Weight Watchers, fat is good again carbs are evil to present 2000s gluten gluttony will kill you, fat no/fat/no carbs/carbs debate, give up whole food groups and processed food especially food color must go. If an alien where to come down and read this they would leave in a hurry because obviously we are NUTS (they are good for you but fattening but good for you).
Along this journey I have been multiple sizes - there is a size that I have never been, unless it is my Calypso shirt and 0 is for small/medium and the thing is cut big, and even when I die my skeleton will still not fit into that lovely size 0 shirt I had eyed while alive. I have made up my own diets - most successful for short term were the bagel a day diet, smoking, eat one day and not the next and breakups (those would initially start with large increase from living on Hagen Dazs for a week as sole meal). Those are as crazy as they look, you drop pounds fast but when the delirium from hunger and the inability to take a deep breath from smoking kick in you turn into human vacuum and pretty much find every pound you lost and it brings friends.
I hate struggling with weight and I will say Weight Watchers was by far the best and most successful, can we also say normal, program. Yet as I get older I find it harder and harder to lose and instead fist pump at not gaining. I love food and good food and believe it all temporarily effective but ultimate bullshit to give up anything forever, except bad food and all the crap they have to put in "diet" food to make it taste like food. I cannot drink my foods, that is reserved for my nursing home days and hopefully then they put some pina coladas on the menu and the only Shakeology I ascribe to is the one you get from an ice cream store or when a Shakira song comes on and these hips don't lie.
Amazing when I look at pictures, boy how I wish I was as "fat" now as I thought I was in my 20s and 30s. In my mother's mind she has often tried to "help" me by pointing out that my weight gain is not good for me... yeah thanks you think?!! She tries with good intent it never is taken as such. If you have struggled with weight you know your moments of intimacy have a thought of what does (insert body part or whole body) look like to the other person, do they find them as gross as I do? The term "well do something about it" yeah thanks, appreciate that brilliance cause of course I never have thought it.
I came to make more peace with my body after children - not because of the granola thought process that well my body housed these awesome people - but because I just do not have as much time to think about it. I live in an area where most of the mommies around me are dedicated to keeping their bodies in great shape - and I mean dedicated - and others worry about their weight so much that it is sadly an indication of how tied to their worth they think it is. My children make me conscious of helping them eat in ways that they will not have this struggle in life and teaching them to think about being able to do things and not be encumbered by weight issues.
I have battled the bulge and continue to do so - but I battle it more now to make sure I am healthy. It cannot be my obsession and I am so much more comfortable as I head toward 50 with who I am at any size because it is who I am and there is so much more I want to accomplish and do then focus on the scale or the tag that no one will see in my clothes. I want to eat Weight Watchers style because there are no evil foods but only too big portion sizes. While all of that is true I also want to continue to find those lovely fashions in sizes that are not only 0 - much like I know certain things do not go with my age I know certain things do not go with my size but what does should be out there .. much like the elusive truth in the X Files I know that these fashions are out there.
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