Losing It: Clothes

Before I begin, let me acknowledge the well-known and widely-held attitude that it is profoundly irritating when people complain about something "good" that is happening to them. For instance, "I got this new job with great pay and great benefits. Man, do I hate filling out HR paperwork! I mean, form after form. And everything in triplicate." OR, "I am in love! It's wonderful. He/she is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am EXHAUSTED. We can't spend a moment apart, but that means I can't get ANY sleep." OR, "I just won the Nobel Prize. But now I have to spend my Saturday night at home writing a lecture and then I have to fly to Sweden. SWEDEN! Do you know how many connecting flights that entails?!"

The reason that we tend not to enjoy these sort of complaints is that it is hard, on the receiving end, not to see them as bragging, with thin (so thin as not to be believable) attempts to mitigate the bragging by showing the "downside" of the speaker's boon.

Or maybe I am just cynical?

The reason that I raise the issue is that this post might smack of that to some of you. But I want to make two disclaimers. 1) As I have already said elsewhere, I have honestly mixed emotions about this process. And the extent to which I see losing weight, for me, as a "good thing" is definitely unknown. 2) What I am about to discuss is truly irritating. And it brings up several important issues about clothing and bodies.


So, here goes. NOTHING FITS. I put something on in the morning--something that fit the last time I wore it--maybe a couple of weeks ago. Or worse yet--something that I just bought two months ago. Then I go out into the world. And inevitably, by the end of the day, it has been pointed out to me (most often either by my mother or by the observant eight year old) that I absolutely cannot wear that piece of clothing again. Last week I wore a pair of pants and later realized that I could put both my arms down between my hips and the pants, while inside them. (That means that I fit in the pants, but so did both of my forearms.) WHAT?! How did that even happen?

I have a perpetual heap of Goodwill offerings next to my door. It gets bigger weekly. I find it unsettling to not know what will fit and what will not. The space around me gets bigger, and the space inside me gets smaller. There are some benefits. I feel lighter. It is like deciding to get a lot of hair cut off all at once. The stylist hands you a mirror at the end of the haircut so you can look at yourself and says, "how does it feel?" It feels like lightheadedness. You go to shake it out, and you shake too vigorously for what you have left. You go to run your fingers through it, and you find yourself feeling for ends that are no longer there. This feeling is simultaneously exhilarating and destabilizing. (And if you think that the analogy doesn't work: I woke up a few mornings ago with an itch in my lower back region. I reached for it sleepily and ended up overreaching. Seriously. I couldn't figure out where my lower back had gone for a few confused tenths of a second.) I also have developed a waist. A noticeable one. I don't mind that. In fact, I may even enjoy it, even though it leads to a fairly constant need to hitch things up.

The clothing turnover reveals something interesting about my weight story. Two things have struck me. First, my Goodwill pile, increasingly, is full of clothing that I have owned (and have worn) for a long, long time. Many of them for ten years. Second, the two boxes of clothing that I have been plundering as I've outshrunk (? is there a term for the opposite of outgrown? And if I give these clothes to someone are they hand-me-ups?) others, are full of things that I've never actually worn. Things that, often, still have tags attached.

I think a lot of women have "fat clothes" and "thin clothes" in their closets. My impression is that most of these women have actually been able to wear both, and keep them in the closet with the idea that their weight may continue to fluctuate. I also have "fat clothes" and "thin clothes". But they are different. The "fat clothes" are my clothes. The ones that I wear all the time. The ones that I see myself continuing to wear. I don't really expect them to get too big or too small for me. I may get rid of things--but if I do it is because I am tired of them, or they wear out, or I decide that I never really liked them that much to begin with.

But the "thin clothes". What about them? Most of them are things that I bought KNOWING that they wouldn't fit. But, usually, they are things that I fell so in love with, or felt were such a great deal, that I couldn't pass them up. They are, more than anything else, in my closet because I felt that I needed to buy them, not because I ever really expected to wear them. Sound crazy? It should. Because it is. As I have begun wearing pieces out of these boxes, I have realized that I never expected to wear them. They aren't so much reflections of hope of being able to fit into them as reflections of an inability to pass up shopping opportunities.

MYTH NUMBER THREE: Fat people all try to lose weight. Those that are still fat have tried and failed multiple times. My attitudes about the fat/thin clothes probably make more sense if they are read though the lens of a non-dieter. Before my illness, in my adult life, I have only ever lost a significant amount of weight on two occasions. I went away to college and, instead of gaining the Freshman 15, I dropped about 25. But this wasn't a concerted effort. In fact, I think I ate more that first term of college than I remember eating in any one period of time in my life. But I was miserable on the little suburban campus and I didn't have a car, so to get away I had to walk. And I did that a lot. Everyday. I walked miles and miles a day. I also lived on the third floor of the door (with no elevator), so I was constantly climbing stairs.

The second time was a few years ago. Again, I was pretty miserable. In my desire to be less miserable I saw a nutritionist (who told me to start eating breakfast--but that is for another post) and I started running. I probably lost about 25 or thirty pounds then.

In between those two events (fifteen years apart), I made no real attempt to lose any weight. I gained some, but it was pretty slow, all things considered. My attitude has always been this: It may look bad to everyone else that I am fat, but it would look worse to try and fail, publicly, over and over again. I understood, from a very tender age, the concept of the yo-yo diet. I also accepted that real weight loss (the kind when people don't gain it back) does require a "lifestyle change" and a real commitment. If I am being really honest, I also knew that I just didn't have it in me. And until I did, I didn't want to pretend that I did.

I had the following exchange with one of my close friends after she read my first two posts here:

Friend: Do you know what you have done?
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: You have to do it now.
Me: Do it?
Friend: You have to lose the weight. You have proclaimed it. You referred to your "journey."
Me: Yes. I know.
Friend: And you have to do this too (pointing to the computer). You have to write. You have to keep up with this blog.
Me: Yeah. I know that too.

That's kind of the point. Getting sick made the decision for me. It forced a lifestyle change. It has forced a change in my attitude about my weight. I'm not sure why this did when other things (relationships, desire to have children, my own unhappiness with my appearance) didn't. But something has changed. And there is a need, signaled in part by the existence of this blog, for me to declare it.

That pile of Goodwill clothes--some of which I have owned for a third of my life--will go this week, before surgery. That is also a kind of declaration. And tags will come off of other clothes, like the skirt I'm wearing today that is three sizes smaller than anything I was wearing two months ago, and I will wear them as a declaration too.