Losing It!

When you’re overweight, you’re patently aware of your size, especially in a clothing store.  I think they’ve changed the sizes up as we’ve become a larger society.  I could be wrong.  I always thought a size 16 was smaller than what I look at in the mirror now.  I remember being a 14 after I had Matthew, before I got pregnant with Bekah.  When I look at pictures, I look small.

I’ve had a pink skirt suit in my closet for the past two years.  I love the style.  It has old-fashioned sleeves, the kind that are tight up to a couple of inches before the wrist and then fall into a flounce?  A button up front with two giant pink buttons and a collar you can either button up or let fall forward to form a v-neck.  It’s pink!  I HAD to get it even though I was too big for it.  Every few months, I’d take it out and try it on.  It was always too snug on top and definitely too snug around my waist and abdomen.  This morning, I took it out, just for giggles.  I knew it was going to be too small still because I haven’t lost that much weight or inches.  I took the skirt off the hanger and when I unzipped it, I thought, whoa, this is big.  Stepped into it and yep.  About an inch too big.  But I didn’t care.  I buttoned and zipped.  Slipped my arms into the top and I was crushed.  It’s so big that its TOO big.  I can’t explain the mixed emotions.  I wore it anyway.  Twirled about, feeling small, knowing it was going to get washed and then handed down to friends who are fighting the same battle as I am.  But I wore it once!

This is the second time I’ve done this in the past four months.  At the beginning of the summer, I had a pretty black dress, a bit longer than my calves, with small white polka dots all over it, sleeveless with a matching jacket.  Too small for me, too small for me, too small for me, then one day – Presto!  TOO BIG.  It just happened.

I’m fashion unconscious.  Both of those outfits could have hung in my closet for ten years and when I finally fit into them, I would have worn them regardless.  But I bypassed them both.  And they were two different sizes.  One is a 20 and one is an 18.   And I’m in a 16!!!

Celebrate!

Smaller plates have been very helpful to me.  We have dinner plates, salad plates, pasta bowls, etc.  I have a few large dinner plates left in my everyday cupboard.  As they break, I don’t replace.  Lately, Bekah and I have been wandering through the dishes aisle at the Family Thrift Center across the highway from us.  I specifically avoid dinner plates.  We buy salad plates and bowls only.  The girls and I eat off the salad plates now.  Matthew?  We still give him a dinner plate!

It’s important to realize my stomach can only hold so much food comfortably.  Filling up a dinner plate is detrimental to my waist line, but filling up a salad plate?  Not such a bad thing!  I fill my salad plate up only once.  I eat what my taste buds are craving the most, it varies from day-to-day.  We all know what we crave when we think of a certain dinner menu.  FAJITA BURGER!  I don’t even have to touch a french fry, but boy, that burger and me, we’re going to get up close and comfortable and it’s going to be sloooowww goood!  If I savor my burger, letting the flavors roll across my tongue, the texture of the guacamole, the sautéed onions, the cheese – treating each bite as if it were my last bite of food ever – I’ll be comfortably full by the time I finish only half.  Then I don’t take another bite of anything.  Not even the fries.  If I can feel the fries calling to me, I indulge in only one or two.  Just like with the burger, I savor the flavor.  If it’s a soggy fry?  EW.  I won’t even bother because there will be absolutely no satisfaction having a soggy fry on my tongue.

I picked up the pace on the elliptical rider today at the gym, managing to cover 1.5 miles in my 25 minutes.  Hannah let me borrow her iPod until I can get another one for myself.   Troy and I scheduled my training sessions for Wednesdays after work and Saturdays at Noon.  He had the nerve to suggest 9:00 AM workouts on Saturday.  I’m pretty sure everyone in the gym heard me laugh hysterically at that one!  I don’t know what he was thinking.

Are people awake that early on the weekend?