All the Horrible Girliness

Three Surprising Things Post-Weight Loss

This probably wouldn't apply to someone who grew up thin, gained a little weight because of illness or pregnancy, and held on to it for a couple of years. I grew up fighting fat. My mother is fat. Her mother is fat. Her mother... etc. Lucky for me, my father is tall, and I am tall, so I never dipped into obesity. I did carry an extra thirty to forty pounds for about ten years after junior high, and recently lost it.

Observation number one: People still don't like me.

You grow up fat, you see thin people getting what they want. You hear stories of thin women getting free drinks, crying their way out of tickets, getting their flat tires fixed. You think this happens only to thin women, that your ticket to that comped martini is putting down the fork. Problem is, in the meantime, you learn to take care of yourself. You make enough money to afford the martini. You get a AAA card. You pay the ticket.

I am not horribly ugly, and now I am not fat, but I still don't get hit on. I don't get anything free. It could be that, very often, I am with Mr. Aran, who is big and beautiful and scary and does full contact knife and stick fighting. Without him, though, the veil has lifted: I have a personality that short circuits the process of taking care of me in any way. Nobody strikes up conversations with me because I used the Los Angeles bus system for a year, and cultivated a dont-fuck-with-me look while alone in public. And if I want a martini, I buy one immediately, because fuckeduppedness is on the agenda and I want to get started.

Observation number two: I am not Lucy Liu.

I mean, what the fuck? I push away the Krispy Kremes, learn to love skim and fat free, subsist on salads and pick at my own birthday cake and I still look like this?

Yes, I look good. Supah fly, ladies and gentlemen, especially in comparison. I spend entirely too much time in front of the mirror now, especially the mirror in the dressing room at Express, where I am weak-in-the-knees sex appeal girl. But still.

You spend a decade equating beautiful with slim and small and Asian, you're going to be disappointed when you lose your fat and you're still four inches too tall, white and dorky with a big ribcage, boxer shoulders and child bearing hips. I spent my teens and twenties thinking there was a svelte little Asian chick inside me, waiting for her chance to go shopping for knee-high socks and schoolgirl skirts, but I still look like a beer frau. A cute beer frau, okay. I accept that.

Observation number three: Shopping still sucks.

Not as bad as it once did. I used to spend hours trying things on, and the first thing that zipped up, was comfortable and did not make me look disgusting: I bought that. It had nothing to do with fashion or personal style.

So, when I first started losing weight, I had to let go of that mindset because the shopping bills were getting ridiculous. I looked good in everything, and something on the rack always fit. Very weird.

That doesn't mean it's easy. Women's sizes are retarded. Guys, you look at the tag and it says so many inches wide, so many inches long, it corresponds to your inchage so you try it on and you buy it. At Express alone, I am anywhere from a small to a medium, a 6 to a 10, depending on fabric and color. Swear to god, different colors in there mean different sizes.

This means that for every garment I want to try on, I have to take two or three versions of it to the dressing room. This never happened when I was fat. Back then, I just dug through to the very back of the rack and pulled out the biggest size, while catching smaller, weaker sizes on my industrial-size hanger, then stepping on them.

Salesgirls now do a strange, annoying thing, though. They recommend clothes. I go to the dressing room, and clothes appear over the top of the door. "This jean jacket looks so adorable with the pants you're trying on!" The first time, I yelped, "I'm in here!" because I thought they were trying to give my room away to some smaller, richer girl.

You really do spend a lot of time thinking you're being shoved aside in life because you're fat. It was sad to learn that the problem really wasn't how I looked. It was the lemon-lime scent of evil that permeates my personality. There really needs to be a Weight Watchers for that sort of thing.

posted by Samus @ 1:37 PM