Fat, Diets, Neurosis and Old Clothes

Looks like my non-scrappy friends read my blog more than my scrappy ones based on the lack or response to the LO post. I'll keep that in mind :-)

I'm on Day 60 of my diet. Saturday morning the wii Fit had me down twenty-three pounds from my starting weight. That's pretty good. Once I'm down thirty I want to go see the doc who said with my thyroid I can't lose weight and shake my skinny (er) rear end at him. That of course wouldn't be very modest but a girl can have her fantasies, right. It bugs me like nothing else when people say I can't do something.

While living a life free of all animal products, gluten, sugar, caffeine and alcohol was never something I imagined doing, it's been good. I've had so many smaller health problems disappear entirely, I'm off almost all meds and according to my GP, I'm better nourished than I've ever been.

What I don't like though is the reading labels, weighing myself, constantly pawing through my closet for something that fits well - it makes me feel neurotic, and FAT. I've never paid so much attention to my food or my body in my life. Frankly, I've always left that level of obsessing to the pretty-but-cuckoo chicks. I mean at my worst, my husband thinks I'm hot, I think I clean up well, I'm reasonably pretty at thirty-five and I still garner unwanted male attention. My self-esteem has been unaffected by my pant size - I really like me: mind, soul and body. But since this diet, I've felt fat, unattractive and more insecure than I have since I was fifteen. It's just strange being so vigilant about every single bite of food that enters my temple. I think about food, weight and size way too much now. But a diet so full of restriction does require an amount of planning and cooking that my previous lifestyle did not.

I've found it pretty easy, neurosis aside, to stay the path. Not one bit of contra-band food has passed my lips. Since I am doing this for my bone disease, cheating doesn't make any sense. Really, if you compare the luscious taste of bratwurst to the rest of my life in a wheelchair, the bratwurst is considerably less appealing.

Yesterday I was feeling a lot better in the morning and when I was dressing the two brown paper grocery bags at the top of the back of our closet caught my eye. Those bags mock me - really they do. Wrapped in their scratchy caress are all the clothes I've out grown over the years that were, in my opinion, timeless: A-line skirts, wide-leg, pinstriped dress pants, suits, sheath dresses. The items date as far back as 1997! Some were deposited after I had Trenton in 1996, most hit the sack when I gained forty-five pounds on Depakote (FWIW, my doc said most of his clients on that particular blend of meds gain over 100 pounds so I did "really well") and the rest tumbled out of favor after my hysterectomy (that five or six pounds pushed a few things to their limit) or dribbled in after my bone disease. It was almost like strata, each layer representing a time in my life where my figure changed. Those bags represented 56.5 pounds of change since my wedding day.

Instead of being intimidated by the contents by the bags, I decided to take that 23.5 pound loss out for a spin and see how far I could burrow through the bags before they got too tight. The entire first bag fit. And I was right, the clothes are timeless and awesome. I was positively dreary over my favorite skirt hanging so low on my hips that it was about four inches longer and very unflattering and lo and behold, the original skirt that was the inspiration for my too-big favorite skirt fits again - and I love it as much as I ever did. Same for the dress pants and all the other skirts. My suits are still WAY too small - but they are size eight, tailored Georgiou two and three piece suits and I'm a mile from getting back into those. They're teeny.

As for timeless, only the mini-skirts were a poor choice. I laugh at the thought of the number of times I've moved those tiny things. While they fit, they just aren't appropriate anymore. But, when I came downstairs to show Chris he said, " I love that skirt. You wore it to meet me at the airport in San Diego." Must have been very memorable. LOL.

Anyhow, I'll keep you posted on my progress. Changing my eating habits has been such a great help for my bone disease and losing weight has been a wonderful byproduct of those changes.