I admired a friend’s pair of fabulous floral leggings at a wellbeing retreat a couple of years ago, during a yoga session when I was supposed to be focusing on my breathing.
It took me all this time but I finally ordered a few pairs from the website of the company that makes them. When they arrived I tried them on and was astounded to find they were way too small. I emailed the company and they replied that it can be hard getting used to their sizing. Fair enough, I thought, and ordered a few more pairs in the next size up, which arrived this week. To my horror, these were also too tight, and they were purportedly already a size bigger than anything I’ve ever bought. What was going on? Had I been putting on weight and not realizing it?
I’ve been trying to cut back on my drinking in a vain attempt to improve my general health and reduce my risk of premature dementia, but I may have allowed myself some more frequent late night ice cream treats as a reward. Was this tactic coming back to bite me in the (increasingly generously sized) bum?
In spite of attempts at promoting body positivity in recent years, obesity remains a social solecism, even more repellent to the general populace than aging. With, you could argue, statistically similar chances of being ameliorated by will power alone
I had anorexia in my late teens. This was the eighties when it was just becoming a thing. Even at my worst I think I knew people found my skinniness scary and abhorrent. I got better without outside intervention, but it was years before I stopped lying in bed at the end of the day, counting up the calories I’d eaten in the last 24 hours. Being told by a female GP in my 20s at a routine appointment for birth control that I was an idiot and my anorexia would inevitably come back one day, was not as helpful as I think she imagined.
Watching TV last night, I ate an ice cream sandwich that was lying around in the freezer. I looked at the kilojoule count on the back and gasped at the enormous number, but ate it anyway.
Don’t you hate it when people start telling you about the dreams they had the night before? Well, too bad, because I’m telling you about mine. In the midst of all the usual nonsensical goings on that you just accept in your dream world – such as people and places constantly morphing into others, unnoticed – there was one detail that sticks with me. I was looking for a dress to wear for a wedding, and dug one out from the back of a closet that was basically a tent dress. I remember looking into a mirror at the unflattering sight of the enormous garment, and my bulging double chins, and sighing “Ah well! This is my life now”.
I emailed the leggings company again yesterday, and they replied, without any admission of sizing problems, that the new season’s leggings were more “true to size” and if I’d like to order those, they’d probably fit better. This in spite of all the five star ratings on their website (take that, smarty pants neurosurgeon from a previous post!) You could argue that I should use my consumer dollars to good effect by not supporting this enterprise, but on the other hand, they’ve got a really good sale on…
Not sure what the lesson is here, exactly. It’s scary that self loathing is always just one slip-up away, I can tell you that much.