Size 4 Jeans

Back to what I was thinking about in the beginning, before I was interrupted by that miss you thing. Yes, I intend to be wearing a size 4 when I die, as I said.

I turned 40 earlier this year, and while the years have been good to my shape I know it won’t last without some intervention on my part. I’ll say it again, I HATE exercise. Blech. It’s not fun, and no matter how much I tell myself it should be, can be, will be fun and good for me, I still HATE it. Yes, that four letter word, HATE, will always be capitalized when it’s attached to the word “exercise.” Get used to it. BUT (and that’s a big “BUT,” which is also something I don’t like!), I like clothes. Specifically, I like having LOTS of clothes to choose from, so I can wear what fits my mood any particular day, or go without doing laundry for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I hate laundry too, but note the lack of capitalization on that one. Laundry doesn’t produce the same level of angst as exercise does, for sure.

The problem with the clothing is that if your weight goes up, your clothes don’t fit right. Jeans aren’t comfortable if they’re cutting into the fat on your hips (aside from being even more uncomfortable in more sensitive regions), and they don’t look good if they’re so tight that you’ve got muffin tops above the waistband. That muffin tops vision is courtesy of my daughter’s sixth grade Australian English teacher. She was a hoot, and she told her students that one day, that they shouldn’t wear jeans that were so tight that they caused muffin tops to show!

So what to do if your jeans are too tight? Buy more in a bigger size? No, no, no my friend. Never do that. If you do that, there’s no incentive to lose those muffin tops now is there? And why would you want to spend part of your precious clothing budget on the same kinds of clothes that you already have in your closet but can’t wear at the moment but for a little self control? If you start buying clothes in a bigger size, then you get into that whole “fat clothes, skinny clothes” thing, where your closet is separated by the Great Divide between what fits and what doesn’t and there’s no going back.

Then you get into that guilt thing, because you have all these too-small clothes that you can’t wear that are just taking up room, and maybe you start to feel like you’ve wasted money on them or you feel guilty that you haven’t lost the weight. That guilt will make it even harder to lose weight, and meanwhile you might even gain more, and have to go buy clothes in an even bigger size. The vicious cycle rolls on.

So I am conscious of (note that I did not say “obsessed with”) my weight. I am not willing to buy more clothes in a bigger size; I have a hard enough time finding clothes I like as it is in the size I am now, but that’s another issue altogether. And yes, being conscious of my weight means that I sometimes think I need to lose a few pounds, which gets harder and harder as the years go by. As my “over 40″ body starts to crawl up toward 120 pounds, I’ve realized that metabolism isn’t my friend anymore, and now I have to confront that big HATE-ing exercise issue head on. I will do it though, because I’m just not going to go down that Great Divide road. Nope, not going to go there.