madermouse's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2/10/03 Lane Bryant has the cutest damn clothes! They seem to be one of the few fat lady stores that don�t think that heavy women need to wear a) cheap material with big ugly patterns or b) grandma styles. Even when I don�t have any money I still torture myself by going in. Oh, who am I kidding. I usually I relent and put something on my LB credit card, but I pretend I�m not going to buy anything while I�m driving there. Shopping for clothes has never been a pleasure for me. Well, not never, never. But as a teenager, I lived in a very small town that only had one younger-style clothing store that didn�t carry any sizes larger than a 14�.which I grew out of when I was like 12 years old. We had JCPenny�s which carried plus sizes, but the styles were hideous and geared towards older women. It was tough being a teenager and having no place to buy cool clothes. My mom drove me to Billings once a year, where I would go to Lane Bryant and get some new things. But back then � I don�t know how many of you remember � Lane Bryant wasn�t the hip, chic store it is now. It was better than JCPenny�s and Sears, but the styles were definitely for older women�not teenagers. Consequently, I often looked �overdressed� in high school. I wore a lot of stretch pants and long shirts and big sweaters when other girls were wearing short skirts, worn-in blue jeans, and tight t-shirts. When Wal-Mart came to town in my sophomore year, I was thrilled! I found clothes I could actually afford on my allowance and they weren�t particularly grammfied. Moving to Portland was a shock for me. I found myself engulfed in options for fat-lady clothes. (Catherine�s, Lane Bryant, Smart Size, Just my Size, Magical Creations) Finally, shopping for clothes became fun for me, pleasurable even. I spent lots of money, and I was able to dress the way I wanted to (for the most part) for the first time in my life. Of course, that slowly changed. I remember going to Lane Bryant and having trouble finding things to fit me. It was true, when they switched over from being the grandma-type store, to the hip chic store; their sizes got a tad smaller. At first I thought it was all I my head. But I held up a dress I�d bought just a year earlier, and it was so clearly a bigger size than any of their current dresses, I knew something wasn�t right. I was so pissed that I wrote the company a letter about it. They responded to me via e-mail saying that they did some market survey, and their sizes ran larger than any others in the nation. So they downsized the fit of their clothing to become more uniform with the other companies. The pounds packed on, slowly but not unnoticeably. I will always remember the day that I walked out of Lane Bryant in tears, unable to fit into a single thing there. There was no denying it anymore, I had �officially� grown out of their clothes. It was devastating. The same thing happened at Wal-Mart too, and then Just my Size. Trying on clothes became this humiliating task that left me sad and angry and ready to binge on pizza or fast food. But still, I kept gaining weight. When I grew out of most of the 30/32 sizes at the Avenue I became a slave to the Sillhouettes and Lane Bryant catalog that carried sizes up to 5X. For most of the years between 350lbs and 375lbs I felt tortured by clothes and shopping for them was a demoralizing experience. Flash-forward to this weekend�257lbs. I flitted through the local LB store, grabbing anything in a size 26/28 that looked cute. Sometimes I like to try things on that aren�t totally my style or things I know I can�t afford just �because I can�. So there I am in the dressing room putting on blouse after blouse, and they all fit wrong or look weird. Finally, I walk out and ask the clerk � �Is this supposed to fit like this?� She says, �It looks way too big on you! You need a smaller size.� She went out on the floor and got me a smaller size (22/24) and waited as I tried it on. It fit perfectly. I went back and grabbed all the shirts in a smaller size, and they all fit!! So�feeling particularly daring, I snagged a pair of pants in a size 26, just to see if they�d fit. THEY DID!!!! I sat down in that dressing room, stunned, and just stared at my feet for what seemed like an eternity. I had waited for this moment for nearly two years, and here it was actually upon me. Could it be true that I�d actually gone down another size? I hadn�t worn a size 22/24 since I was a Junior in high school! Maybe these styles were all just cut generously? I neurotically stood up to inspect the blouses. It was about this time the little voice in my head said, �Heather � do you really think that all 6 of these blouses AND the pants could be accidentally cut too generously? Or is it more plausible that you�ve gone down a size?� Hmmm�. that�s a good question. I decided not to over think it. Hell, maybe it was true that the current styles were generously cut to be baggy and that�s why I was suddenly able to wear a 22/24. But no matter how you look at it, I sure as hell wasn�t able to fit into ANY 22/24 in the last 10 years. So I decided to leave it at that. I didn�t think much more about it the rest of the weekend, but the seed was planted. For the first time in 8 months, I felt the adrenaline rush of being smaller. Even though the numbers on the scale have been slowly coming down, it almost seemed unreal. But I could totally connect with the idea of wearing a smaller size! I imagined myself at my brother�s wedding in June in a new beautiful smaller sized dress. I visualized myself exercising all spring and finding my health again by summer. I dreamed of feeling strong and confident and happy again. And so shall it be! I feel a renewed sense of purpose. Something just clicked inside of me. I realized that if I have to limit my diet to exclude all the fattening, chocolaty, heavy, bad-for-me foods anyway, I might as well use it to my advantage. I now weigh 257 � only 7 pounds away from my 250-pound goal. Wouldn�t it be amazing to see 250 sometime in the next two months? So now, instead of resentfully being angered about all the changes I�ve had to make, I�m going to embrace them. I�ve got to change my attitude about all this illness and try to remember that we all subconsciously devise these plans for ourselves in life to learn lessons. Would it be so crazy that I devised all of this so I could come to terms with food again, so I could lose more weight? Although it�s been pure hell, I know that I am a stubborn human being and I do the most learning under duress. I shudder to think that I went through all this so I could get out of a stagnant rut, but who knows. Stranger things have happened. 2:49 p.m. - 2/10/03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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