Don't Wait to Feel Beautiful

Monday was the first weigh in for August and I'm happy to report that I'm down another 1.5 pounds to 226.5. I can hardly believe that I might actually see the 210s by the end of summer. I don't know when I saw them last. Senior year of high school? Maybe.

I'm running out of clothes that fit. I bought four new pairs of pants for work, which was a painfully expensive and impossibly irritating (thanks to vanity sizing) proposition, but I have precious else that doesn't hang off. This is a nice problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless. I complained about it to my mother. I told her that I was an 18 on the bottom and an 14/16-18 on the top (I'm a pear). She told me to come over and she could hook me up.

Let's rewind about four years. Back then, my mother was a little thinner than she is today (like so many of us). I used to make any excuse to buy her clothes, lovely clothes that I didn't think I had a right to wear. Pretty feminine things that I thought should never come in my size. I bought her matching shoes and purses, skirts and floaty shirts. I bought her things I always dreamed of wearing. She always looked beautiful in them. I called her my life-size Barbie, and while I loved that she had nice things to wear, I always felt sad that I could never look the way she did.

When I went to my mother's house this weekend, she brought me upstairs to her closet and started to pull out the lovely skirts and blouses. I said, "Whoa, these are too small." She said, "I bet they fit." I selected an outfit that used to be my favorite. I slid up the skirt and was surprised that it zipped. I pulled on the blouse and looked in the mirror. I thought I'd be squeezing out all over the place. I thought I would wish I was wearing Spanx. I thought I would be too embarrassed to let my mother see me, but, for the first time in my entire life, I felt pretty in an outfit. A feminine outfit. When my mother saw me, she cried.

The crazy thing is that in when I was a sophomore in high school, I only weighed 165 pounds. I was at least 60 pounds lighter than I am today. I don't have any pictures from that time. I avoided cameras at all costs, but I had mirrors. I never saw anything I liked looking back at me. I don't remember looking anything but obese. I never felt pretty and now, I can't even picture what I looked like at that weight.

Because of the way I felt about my body even when I was much thinner, I didn't have any hope that I would ever lose enough weight to feel pretty. That wasn't the goal; my health was the goal. Here I am, far short of my goal and miles away from the size 12 jeans I wore as a sophomore and I like what I see. I feel lovely. Maybe no one else (besides my mom) thinks I am. Maybe no one else ever will, but that doesn't matter. Only the way I feel counts.

There is no right size. There is no perfect weight. Don't wait to feel beautiful.

Did You Know I'm a Size 4?

That's right, a size 4. THIS IS NOT A TEST. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ADJUST YOUR COMPUTER MONITORS. DO NOT GO TO YOUR WINDOW WITH BINOCULARS TO SCAN THE SKY FOUR FLYING BARNYARD ANIMALS. This morning, I woke up and slipped on a pair of size 4 slacks.

Does this mean that I contracted a flesh eating virus that munched off half of my ass overnight? Perish the thought. Actually, I find reality to be slightly more annoying that. The truth is that, finding most of my pants to be too baggy and unflattering, I finally broke down and decided go shopping.

I marched into Lane Bryant, went straight for the pants and was greeted with a rack full of sizes 1-10. All of the sudden I felt a waive of panic. Did I accidentally wonder into Express? I scanned the room for the droves of pale, waifs that would grab me under the arms and escort me out the door saying, "there's nothing for you here." No. I was definitely in Lane Bryant. I could tell because I was surrounded by size 8 mannequins wearing cinched plus sized clothes--I think that's supposed to make the clothes look better. We wouldn't want to actually see how they would look on a plus sized woman...but I digress.

The over-sized clothes on the dummy also ruled out my other thought: that Lane Bryant had stopped selling plus clothing. Next I called my sister over to confirm that I wasn't hallucinating. Nope. Sizes 1-10.OK, no need to panic.

"Excuse me," I said to the nearest employee. "I'm a little confused by your sizing."

"Oh, it's new."

"But how do I know what my size is now? Do you have a chart with equivalents or something."

"Nope, I have to measure you," she said advancing on me with a tape measure outstretched.

Panic again. No way am I letting another soul know the exact circumference of my waist. Well, no one except for the entire Internet, you guys are OK. (I know I'm not going to get the Logical Blogger award any time soon.) "No thanks, I'm good. I'll just buy a shirt." Crisis averted. She walked away and my sister assured me that I was officially the biggest dork ever.

Then I began the unscientific process of finding pants that would fit. As it turns out, the pants were also color coded based on bodily location of poundage. So I spent some time holding pant up to my body and then I brought about 63 pairs to the fitting room. It took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that I'm a red size 4. Awesome.

I hate to be grouchy, but this has really got me all fired up. The color coding does make some sense to me. I actually like that they're making jeans to fit different body types. But I have to say that the new numbering really ticks me off. I realize that the numbering system for all women's clothes, at least in the United States, is basically arbitrary. Who knows what size 18 or 10 or especially 0 means? It doesn't go by poundage, and it might be based on measurements, too, but the actual sizes give no indication. But most women know what their size is and have a basic idea of what the next size up and the next size down would be like. Even if I'm not happy with my size, it's convenient to know what it is. It's bad enough to have to shop in stores like Lane Bryant without having to completely refigure my size when I walk in the door.

Can anyone tell me what Lane Bryant was thinking? Maybe it's some marketing ploy that's meant to appeal to my vanity. Maybe some women are more likely to shop at a place that enables them to wear clothes with a tag that says 4 instead of 18.There are so many reasons this gets me ticked off. Let me enumerate some of them.

1. It goes without saying that it irritated me that it took me so much longer to find pants.
   To me, it feels like an insult to my intelligence. I know there's no way in hell I could get even one leg into a pair of size fours from any other store. I'm fine with that; I don't need to delude myself and I certainly don't need anyone else to delude me!
   
2. Looking forward, I feel like this partially robs me of a victory I could enjoy in the future. I was really looking forward to the day I could stop shopping at Lane Bryant. Now, in order to do that, I'll have to go from a size 0 in LaLa Land to a size 14 or 12 in the real world. Even though I know it's arbitrary, I think it's going to throw me for a bit of a psychological loop.
   
3. It sends the message that smaller is necessarily better. If they were going to change it, I wish they'd made there pants size based on waste circumference combined with the new color coding system, but guess what? They didn't ask me what I thought.
   

OK. End of rant. Feel free to rant or defend in the comments.