Today's numbers:
- Today's weight: 243.5 lb
- Change since last week's weigh-in: 0 lb
- Cumulative weight loss: 90.5 lb
- Adjusted average weekly loss: 2.66 lb
Heh. What was I saying in my last weekly weigh-in post about my little weight loss pattern? Here it is again: a flat week immediately following a week with a large drop (in this case, last week's drop was 5.5 lbs). And again, I swear I wasn't doing anything significantly different with my food or activity level this week compared to last week. Not sure what's up with this pattern, but hey, in the long run it's all averaging out, so I'm not gonna sweat it.
Meanwhile, as of Monday I have passed the "six weeks since surgery" milestone--significant because I am now officially done with all post-surgery activity restrictions. Technically, I guess I'm supposed to wait to have that verified by the docs in my final followup appointment on Thursday. But I could not wait one more second to kiss that goddamned elastic abdominal binder goodbye--so it's now history! Yay! My huddled kishkes yearning to breathe free are now liberated!!!
Seriously, you have no idea how much that binder was getting on my nerves. I hate clinging restrictive clothing of any sort, and this medical girdle was like my worst nightmare of that kind of garment--ill-fitting and uncomfortable no matter which way I tried to wear it. Plus, on the occasions I removed it (to shower and take care of my incision), it was pretty damn obvious to me that my torso muscles were becoming dependent on the damn thing and losing tone, something like how leg muscles begin to weaken from lack of use while a broken leg is encased in a cast. Obviously, in the case of the binder, taking a load of work off my muscles was the whole point--specifically, giving my abdominals a break while they healed up from being cut open. But now I've got a bunch of catching up to do in terms of re-conditioning all those muscles. Fortunately, to judge from how I feel right now after my first day out and about without the tummy-rubberband, the muscles seem to be getting back on the beam pretty quickly. Wonder how they'll feel tomorrow ...
Anyway, one of my little errands today was buying some more clothes, as even the clothes I bought to replace my pre-regimen clothes are now falling off of me. Not complaining at all--as far as I'm concerned, this falls into the category of Problems You Like To Have. But it's still at least a logistical problem. For one thing, even though I'm not going to push myself all the way down to my supposed "ideal" weight on the official doctors' charts, I'm still expecting that I'll be dropping several more sizes before I'm done ... so all this wardrobe replacement can be a bit of a financial drain. I'm trying to stave this off by shopping the discount stores, clearance racks, and consignment shops; buying naturally loose-fitting styles I can get away with wearing through at least a couple of size changes; and only buying a relatively few versatile pieces to tide me over through each change. But at the same time, I don't want to look like a shlub, so I'm trying to buy nice stuff rather than total crap.
As my wardrobe is morphing right along with me, I'm realizing I'm sorta backing into my very own real-life fashion makeover. Who needs reality shows when one's personal reality offers so many possibilities? So, even though my efforts to keep costs down are somewhat putting my clothing choices at the mercy of what I find on the sale racks, I'm still giving some thought to how I want to display my changing bod to the world. I don't know that I want to change all that much--I've been into informal, high-comfort, hippy-dippy, mostly-natural-fiber clothing for years now, especially since my employment in high-tech and then freelancing has freed me from any need to ever dress more formally (or less comfortably). But I do like to be more conscious of my process--if for no other reason than using it as yet another tool to personal understanding.
Now, any fat person in our culture can tell you all kinds of horror stories about clothing humiliation. Things have admittedly gotten a helluva lot better than when I was a kid, when being fat doomed you to a wardrobe of truly ugly clothing in that 1960s frumpy doubleknit that seemed to be backed with a thin layer of sponge rubber. Oh yeah, and then there were the trips to what my mother, herself significantly fat, used to call "the fat ladies' store" to buy clothes for herself as well as me; she radiated humiliation at having to buy her clothes in such places, which of course did wonders for my self-esteem too (vhat, you mean you hate that your first-born daughter isn't nice and skinny because you can't get vicarious thrills out of dressing her up like your personal living Barbie doll?)
I wish my mother could have lived to see what some of the producers of larger-size clothing are putting out these days (hell, I wish my mother could have lived to see today, period, but I've whined about that in a previous post). But anyway--yeah, I wonder what she'd think to see actual designer denim jeans in plus sizes, lots more natural-fiber clothes, and even some stabs at high fashion and sexy/romantic garb--and in shops you can actually find in mainstream malls, not in some hidden-away warehouse district in the back of beyond (no wonder my mother felt shame going to such shops--the way they hid those stores you'd think they were porn shops or something).
Still, there's plenty of cheesy crap to be found in the plus size clothing industry even today. Many manufacturers still seem to have no idea how the hell to fit the large-size body. Sometimes they just take a missy-size garment and make it big in all directions, winding up with sleeves proportioned to fit King Kong, or gaping armholes on sleeveless garments, or dresses shaped to fit a boxcar rather than a body. I especially love when they do this blow-up trick on a style that, while it looks great on a missy-proportioned body, looks totally wrong on one with big tummy, hips, ass, etc. Dresses cinched in at the waist with a belt, for instance--that leaves most plus-sized women looking like a potato sack with a rope tied around the middle. Why these people can't realize that plus-sized bods are often proportioned entirely differently from missy ones, I have no idea. Probably because it's just so much cheaper to do the blow-up thing with existing garment patterns than come up with an entirely different pattern.
Oh yeah--and there's still a ton of cheesy fabrics out there. The sponge-rubber stand-up-on-its-own doubleknit may be gone, but there's still more than enough polyester out there to choke a bunch of plus-size customers.
So--into this jungle of clothing choices I made another expedition today, and managed to escape with a few finds:
- Two pairs of black leggings in a mostly cotton blend knit (there's some polyester and a little spandex in there too, but the 57% cotton content makes them feel pretty decent). One pair is capri length, the other cropped just above my anklebones--very useful lengths in the still-hot SoCal autumn.
- One very girly pink teeshirt, 100% cotton. I usually don't do girly clothes, especially in pink. But this shirt is trimmed in black stitching and binding, which takes the girly edge off (and reminds me of my punk-rawk days); plus it's got an oh-very-trendy butterfly design in wee black and silver glittery studs on the front. Nice to feel like I'm sorta-kinda keeping up with some kind of trend somewhere. Plus I can get into butterflies. Symbol of transformation, and all that.
- One tie-dye teeshirt, 100% cotton, in shades of a Georgia O'Keefe Arizona landscape. Trust me to pick through nearly every single item of clothing in a bourgeois plus-size chain store and find the only tie-dye shirt in the joint. And it's a damn fine one too--multi-level horizontal dip-dye, with scattered crinkles and vertical stripes throughout, plus a smattering of little sequins sewn here and there. And even despite the tiedye and sequins, the label says it's machine washable! Hurrah!
Best of all, all the above was on clearance, so I paid just a little over 60 bucks for the lot (including sales tax). See? I did learn a thing or two from my mom about Olympic-level bargain-shopping.
I realize the above is hardly destined to set the fashion world on its ear--let alone that insufferable duo who host that dreadful "What Not To Wear" series (I almost wish somebody would nominate me for that show so I could tell those two exactly where to stick their yuppie-conformist fashion sense). But it does show in microcosm how I want to drape my bod for display to the world--with comfort, color, and joie de vivre. Vive le difference!
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