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.

Food has always been the way I dealt, or didn’t deal, with how I felt about what was happening in my life.  Someone made me angry and I didn’t get mad, I got pizza.  I was happy and needed to celebrate so I went out to dinner.  There was chips and dip when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in, chocolate when I was sad or tense, and cheesy, gooey nachos drowned in sour cream when I felt completely unloved, even by myself.   Although I may give voice to my feelings on occasion, it’s far more likely that I’ll stuff them away, and stuff myself with food to keep them from coming out.

I would guess that I’m not the first overweight person that uses food as a coping mechanism.  Food has always been easy for me, especially when emotions were hard.  Food never let me down, was always reliable and was always there, in easy reach, often before I asked for it.  When personal relationships were rocky, when jobs or education or romance didn’t work out,  when I felt stressed or when the world just felt too demanding, food was a comfort, something simple  that seemed to soothe the rough edges.

Dealing with the rest of the world could be hard.  Food was easy.

One of the thing that I’m trying to do as I work toward getting healthy, both physically and mentally, is to figure out why I do what I do.  Some may argue that this leads me to some excessive naval gazing, but I find it helpful.  I’ve started to stop and think before I pick up that phone and order a pizza or before I eat that whole bag of chips.  I stop now and ask myself why I want to eat what I think I want to eat, and often the answer isn’t hunger.  Often the answer is I’m mad, or I’m sad, or I’m lonely.  Very rarely is the answer I’m achieving things or I’m content or I’m happy.

I’m starting to discover that part of the answer I’m seeking isn’t stuffing my feelings by stuffing myself.  I need to let myself feel what I feel and I need to express those feelings when appropriate.  That’s a hard thing for me to do, but I’m working on doing it more often.

And that, surprisingly enough, feels good.

I haven’t updated this blog in a while.  There are a couple of reasons for my silence.  One is the fact that I was hospitalized with double pneumonia for 10 days in the beginning of November.  When I got out of the hospital, most of my focus was on getting my stamina and strength back.  I was also barred from exercise for a while, and I allowed myself to be convinced that being sick also meant that I needed to eat to build up my strength.  Basically I gave myself a license to pork out and be lazy for the last few months.  I’ll give you one guess what the results of that were.

Now, however, it is a new year and a new start.  The good news is that most of my muscle tone has held up pretty well.  The bad news is that the pneumonia really sucked away a lot of my stamina.  It didn’t do my breathing any good either.  That means I have some ground to make up.  Some of the gains I made have now been lost, but I guess I just have to accept that.  As I generally say after any of my health adventures, it could have been worse.

I have started to get back into exercising and I’m also working on getting my eating back into shape.  Over the next few weeks I plan to share a lot of what I’m doing here on this blog.  I have some new theories about eating and a few ideas about exercise as well.  I also got some new exercise DVDs I want to review, some of which I liked, and some of which weren’t for me.

I’m looking forward to a new year and a new start on meeting my weight loss goals.  If I have any say in it, 2010 is going to be a successful and  less weighty year.