Anyone who has read this blog, or my other blog, Settling for More, knows that I’m style impaired and fashion challenged.  As much as I want to claim that I have a closet full of stylish clothes and that I’m always well turned out and beautifully dressed, I know that isn’t my reality.  The reality is this:  if it doesn’t have any holes and it doesn’t clash, it goes on my body.   I gave up long ago on trying to have a style,   and I contented myself with the idea that I looked clean and neat and decided that would have to be enough.

Unfortunately, looking clean and neat isn’t enough for me.  I want to wear clothes that flatter my shape.  I want to look well put together and, dare I say it, even fashionable.  I want to know how to be well turned out and proud of how I look, and I want to know how to do that without spending a fortune.   I need guidance, and so, as I often do, I turned to the Internet to see what was out there.   That’s when and where I found Cardigan Empire.

I love this blog so much I’d marry it.  There are a lot of reasons to love this blog, but one of the most prominent, at least for me, is this post.  I’ve made the resolution to dress better after I lose weight more times than I can count, which effectively postpones looking fashionable and pretty until sometime in the future.   As Reachel says, you deserve to be beautiful now, and dressing for your body type will help you find your good points no matter what size your body is at the moment.

For  those people who are anything but fashion savvy, this blog is a godsend.  Cardigan Empire gives instructions for determining your body type, tips on how to celebrate your best features, and ideas for how to dress your body, whatever shape it may be.  Best of all, there’s no judgment here.  No one body type or size is better than another, and the glories and tribulations of all body types are addressed.

For someone like me, who has spent years thinking her body was too big, the idea that even big bodies can be fashionable and sexy and pretty is kind of like being given the key to a jail cell.  While I won’t stop working to lose weight and get in shape, since I believe that will be healthier for me,  I am now also working to accept that my body is fine and should be celebrated just the way it is right now.  One way I’m going to find that acceptance is to keep reading Cardigan Empire.

It is, after all, clear I have a lot to learn.

It pains me to say this, but I’m a hypocrite.  I don’t like to admit it, but I do try to be honest with myself when I can, and this is one of those times when, as much as it hurts, I should be honest.   Believe me, it does hurt.

Some of you may already know from this blog that I have been working on finding someone to date.  I’ve put my profile up on several dating sites and I’ve been perusing the boy buffet, seeing what’s out there, and hoping to find a tempting dish I can call my own.   If you’d asked me when I first started this I’d have told you that looks shouldn’t matter and, for me, wouldn’t matter.  I was interested in kindness and intelligence and wit.  A few pounds here or there wouldn’t make any difference.  I would have believed I meant it too.

I’ve spent most of my adult life railing against men who expected every woman to be a size six with breasts the size of flotation devices and perfectly sculpted bodies.  It was so unfair, I’d cry, that men were so blind that they couldn’t see beyond a few extra pounds to the awesome person underneath.  Why were women held up to such unrealistic standards, I’d whine.  Why were men so unable to see inner beauty and so obsessed with outer beauty?  Didn’t they know that compassion and wit and intelligence counted for so much more?

When I started my search for Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Try It Out and See What Happens,  I was looking for kindness and wit and intelligence.  It was only as I rejected guy after guy that I realized I was also looking for George Clooney, or the nearest equivalent in my neighborhood.  I wanted the guy with the six pack abs and the roguish grin.  I didn’t want the guy who was carrying an extra 100 pounds and looked like his most strenuous exercise was walking to and from the fridge.  I was, to my dismay, doing exactly the things I’d condemned men for all these years.

I guess, at last, I’m starting to see that I’m just like everyone else, and that I have the same prejudices that everyone else has.  I may not like it, but I certainly can’t condemn others for doing what I’m doing myself.  The only thing I can do is try and be less of a hypocrite and live up to the standards I’ve tried to set for others.

They say people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Tonight, my glass house has a few broken windows.

I haven’t been writing much on this blog lately and I think I’ve figured out why.  Losing weight hasn’t been what I expected it would be.

I’m now about 40 pounds lighter than I was when I started on this journey.  My clothes are all loose and some are practically falling off me.  I can clearly see the changes in my body and I can feel the changes in my strength and stamina.  I’m succeeding at something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.  The only problem is that it doesn’t feel like I thought it would.

I guess, like most people who are fat, I had a dream of what losing weight and being thinner would be like.  I thought I’d get more confident.  I assumed everyone would notice and praise me for my achievement.  I thought my desire to eat and my cravings for foods I knew were not good for me would diminish.  I thought that I would learn to love sweating and exercise.  I fantasized that life would be better in every way.

I have to admit, in some ways it is better.  I haven’t learned to love exercise, but I’ve learned to appreciate it.  A few people have noticed my weight loss and complimented me on it.  I have gained a bit more confidence.  I’ve certainly gained more strength and endurance.  So there are improvements.

Still, despite the improvements, losing weight has not been the life changing event that I thought it would be.  I still have the same problems.  I still face the same challenges.  I’m still me, I’m just wearing a smaller size now.

I guess that’s the danger of dreaming for years about doing something.  When you finally accomplish your goal, or at least get closer to accomplishing it, you may find that what you dreamed is not the reality.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy about losing weight and I plan to continue to lose.

I just thought it would be more of an event than this.

I was talking with a friend last night and I mentioned that one of the things I wanted to write about for this blog was about how it feels to be the fat girl in the room.  That soul stealing moment when you walk into a room and the eyes of every guy in the place slide past you to see who might be coming in behind you.   Attending a party with the knowledge that the only guy talking to you tonight will probably be the bartender and that will only be to ask what you want to drink.  Developing crush after crush on guys who settle for thin girls who treat them like dirt.  Wondering if beauty is truly the only thing that matters, and hoping that you’re wrong about that.

I was going on about how horrible it is to be the fat girl in the room when my friend offered me a view from the other perspective.  She was always the woman that guys admired.  She won’t admit to being the woman every guy wanted, but she has garnered her share of admiring glances and knowing grins.  It sounds to me like great fun.  For her, though, it’s embarrassing.  She really doesn’t want the attention.

I think, when you’re the fat girl, you’re convinced that if you could just be a size six all your troubles would melt away.  You imagine that being noticed by everyone would be far better than being ignored by the same group.  You assume that everyone who notices you would be nice and respectful and someone that you would want to notice you.  After all, it’s got to be better being the belle of the ball than it is being the wallflower, right?

It just goes to show that everyone has different ideas about what an ideal experience would and should be.  To tell the truth, part of me likes being relatively invisible.  I’m not sure how I would react were I the center of attention solely as a result of my appearance.   I may greatly enjoy it.  I may find it very uncomfortable.

Mostly, right now, I’m just hoping I get a chance to find out.

I have never considered myself pretty. When I was a kid, my sister was the pretty one and I was the smart one. She was the popular one, who dated from the very moment she was allowed to date, and I was the one who sat home on Prom night and pretended not to care. I was awkward in social situations, lacking in self confidence, and generally messed up.

I’m not sure quite when I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t compete when it came to looks, but I imagine it was quite early. I consoled myself with the fact that I was intelligent and funny and caring, and tried not to mind when the eyes of every man in the room slid right past me to land on the bleached blonde with the big boobs next to me. I told myself that inner beauty counted for more. I told myself it didn’t matter. I lied to myself a lot.

At the age of 39 I am finally starting to work on my appearance. I’m losing weight. I’m trying to pick up a bit of fashion sense. I coming to grips with the fact that, while I may not be a raving beauty, I’m not actively ugly either. I’m attractive even. It’s rather a revelation, and one I’m not entirely sure I’m comfortable having. It seemed easier when I thought I couldn’t compete. Now that I’m beginning to think I can, things become a bit more complicated.

I suppose this is something I’ll need to work through. I was overweight for a lot of years mostly because I was full of fear. Some of that fear centered around being attractive. Now that I believe it is possible that I could be attractive, I’ll need to work through that fear. I’m kind of excited about that. After years of feeling that I couldn’t compete in the beauty pageant of life, it’s rather nice to discover that it’s possible I can.

I have one picture of me that I like.  This is, mind you, out of probably hundreds of pictures that have been taken of me over the 39 years I’ve been alive.  I don’t photograph well and I never have. 

Pictures are especially abhorrent to me now while I larger than I want to be.  I don’t have a full length mirror in my house, so I don’t really get to see my body all that much.  I know I’m losing weight and getting fitter, because my clothes are fitting better, but I don’t really have a perception of how my body looks to others.  Until, of course, a photograph is taken.

This week we had to take an photo to run with an article I wrote.  I’d put it off as long as I possibly could, but it had to be done.  Since it’s written for publicity, not pay, I just had someone take a picture using a digital camera.  When we looked at the pictures, all I could focus on was how big I looked.   It was as if I had formerly been floating above the ground and someone had pulled me back to earth by fastening a lead weight to my ankle.  Suddenly I felt like I weighed 500 pounds.

I have to wonder if this is a common problem for people who are overweight.  Do those who are only a little overweight exaggerate their fatness in their own minds?  Are those who are overweight do their best to ignore their size until they’re confronted with it by something like a picture? 

As for me, I’m going to try to be more comfortable with having my picture taken.  Pictures are great ways to capture moments in time, and I have some pictures of friends and family that I truly treasure.  I don’t want to always be on the outside of those pictures because I’m afraid I won’t look as I want to look.  I’d rather be in the picture, smiling for the camera and enjoying the fact that I’m getting healthier every day.

When I look at pictures of myself before I was a teenager, I realize that I haven’t always been fat.  When I was a baby I was practically Skeletor, due to a heart defect.  After that was repaired, I grew up being a normal weight for a child of my height and age.  So, in the reality of the world, I never was a little fat kid.  That reality only happened in my head.

I was a fat teenager.  There’s really no surprise there.  Fat is commonly one of the ways that women try to avoid unwanted sexual advances.  In my case it didn’t work.  Fat was also how I expressed unhappiness and there was a lot of it to express when I was a teenager.  Mostly, though, fat was safety and food was a refuge.  If I could just eat enough I wouldn’t have to feel.  If I got fat enough, maybe I’d be left alone.

Unfortunately for me, I carried my defense mechanism through to my adulthood.  I still carry more weight than is healthy and more weight than I want to carry.  It isn’t that I eat too much, although I have been known to overindulge.  It isn’t that I don’t exercise, although I don’t have as regular a schedule as I should.  Those problems could be overcome though.  The problem that I can’t seem to beat is this:  I’m scared of being thin.

I don’t really like the little fat kid that exists in my mind, but there’s a safety that comes with that image.  The little fat kid doesn’t have to worry about attracting a man or being loved, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that won’t happen.  The little fat kid doesn’t have to compete in any “who’s the prettiest contests” because, again, it’s a foregone conclusion it won’t be her.  The little fat kid is a perfect excuse for every “I don’t want to” or “I’m scared to” that I might otherwise have to confront.  The little fat kid suit is comfortable, albeit constricting.

I’m starting to realize that getting thin is as much mental as it is physical.  I know I can eat properly.  I know I can keep to an exercise schedule and I certainly can sweat.  What I haven’t learned how to do yet is evict the little fat kid from her perch in my brain.  I think, when I learn to do that, I’ll really be on my way to being thin.