Skip to main content

A Jeans Wake-Up Call

I'm wearing jeans today, for the first time since... I can't even
remember. Spring, maybe?

You guys know how big of a deal this is for me. I didn't want to do
it, but it's 28 degrees in London right now and I can't even begin to
describe how sick I am of tights and leggings. So I bit the bullet.
The last time I tried on my jeans, I could barely button the 'normal'
pair. The fat jeans I bought a little over a year ago, though, felt
great. Only one problem: they're way too long! Which I don't remember
being a problem when I first bought them... But it must have been,
unless I've got the horrible shrinks.

Anyway, that day I gave up and went for the leggings/dress combo
again. But today, after I got my shit together and got the flat ready
for our housekeeper, I only had 10 minutes to throw something on. So I
held my breath, closed my eyes, and pulled on the 'normals'. And,
amazingly, they fit!

Ok, so they're a bit tight, but they're not awful, and actually my ass
looks pretty good in them (!!). But as I was strutting out of my
building, feeling pleasantly surprised by my body's cooperation, I got
a sharp reminder of the other reason I almost never wear jeans.

My abdomen was hit with a deep, searing pain. I'd conveniently
forgotten how badly even the slightest tight waistband hurts my
stomach. On the left side, about an inch above my tummy tuck scar, and
what feels like 2 inches below the skin, it feels like someone has
taken a blunt icepick and shoved it into an open wound.
It's gnarly. It's also why I never wear jeans, even loose ones, for
long flights or road trips. It doesn't matter how many times I flash a
flight attendant or freeze my legs off in the cold air from my dad's
always-open window; that other way lies excruciating pain, and I do my
best to avoid it.

Today, though, I don't have a choice. I can't go back to my flat until
10:30 at the earliest. So if you see a pear-shaped girl waddling (oh,
yeah, I also have a pulled hip muscle) around London with her pants
unbuttoned this morning, cut her a fashion police break-- she's
probably just trying to ease the pain.

Cheers.

Sent from my fancypants iPhone (so please excuse any typos)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Do fat women have it worse than fat men?

I've always said that being fat is harder on women than it is on men.  Not only is there a lot more societal pressure to be stick thin rather than just healthy, which men don't seem to get, but it's a lot harder to be seen as physically attractive if you're even ten or fifteen pounds overweight. Anyway, it seems I'm not the only one thinking these things.  There's an article in the NYTimes today about overweight and obese women doing worse than men financially, an interesting angle on the effects of obesity, and in it they say: Why doesn’t body size affect men’s attainment as much as women’s? One explanation is that overweight girls are more stigmatized and isolated in high school compared with overweight boys. Other studies have shown that body size is one of the primary ways Americans judge female — but not male — attractiveness. We also know that the social stigma associated with obesity is strongest during adolescence. So perhaps teachers and pee

Hitting bottom.

“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” my mother says when I tell her I can’t eat and I’m losing weight as a result of my most recent heartbreak, “maybe when all this is over you’ll look in the mirror and –” I have just enough strength left in me to stop her before she completely echoes the voice in the back of my head, the one that’s been telling me that not eating for days, while it might fuck up my metabolism in the long run, might also make me more attractive to potential new men in the short term. But I don’t want to be attractive to new men – never mind the nagging fear that it's impossible.   I just want my man to come back and erase everything he’s done to me in the past nine months.   I want to wake up tomorrow and have this all be a bad dream – the cheating, the lies, the images in my mind of him holding that conniving, revolting, vile girl in our bed, the searing pain in my heart that keeps me awake nights – and I want to roll over and playf

Can technology help me Lose It, or will I get lost in the numbers?

A few weeks ago I downloaded a new app for my iPhone called Lose It. It’s a calorie counter, but it also incorporates exercise, and the best part is that it’s pretty non-judgmental, as these things go. It lets you choose your own goal, and how fast you want to lost the weight, and then it just calculates the numbers for you. For example, I told it my current weight (I don’t want to talk about it) and that I wanted to lose thirty pounds (yes, hopelessly idealistic) in six months (hey, you gotta have some realism). And it told me my calorie allowance was roughly 2,100 per day. Way higher than I expected! Which is the other thing about this app: it makes me feel good about my eating habits! I have it tracking my nutrients as well, and besides the fact that I eat about twice as much sodium as I’m supposed to (yeah, yeah, whatever. Salt is gooooood), I’m pretty on-target with everything else. And I’ve been coming in under my calorie count pretty much every day. Even Easter! And I