Size 4 Jeans

To go way back in this Size 4 story, I was a shapeless stick with bony parts sticking out in spots as a child. I was always thin no matter what I ate, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Food was okay as long as it was something I liked, which was the tricky part, being a picky little thing back then.

And no, I was not anorexic, as doctors used to worry with pointed looks at my mom during those yearly checkups during childhood. Okay, maybe I was technically anorexic based on my height and weight, but I didn’t throw up my food voluntarily to stay thin. That’s just gross. But I couldn’t gain weight. It was physically difficult, if not impossible. I actually tried to gain weight once, because I thought the Army sounded like a good idea and they wouldn’t let me enlist if I didn’t weigh 120 pounds or something. I ate and ate, and still was 1.5 pounds shy of the minimum, and I finally gave up trying to get in and considered it their loss (thank goodness I came to my senses, I decided later, olive drab not being my color and all). I lost that “extra” weight that I put on for the Army in short order with no effort beside just eating normally, and when I got married at 22, I carried only 94 pounds on my 5′8″ frame. Can you say “skin and bones?”

Yup, that was too thin. I was often sick, since I guess my immune system was not up to snuff because I was sooo thin. I wonder what my husband saw in that stick, sometimes. Cooking dinner every night added ten pounds to my body in about a year though, and having babies completed the transformation from “stick” to “pear.” Then I had hips, but no boobs. I was definitely not blessed in that department, and while my breasts were a bit closer to a nice size (but still not the perfect size, truthfully) while I was pregnant or nursing, that little bonus left with the extra baby fat after delivery of the little bundle of joy.

My mother is a definitive pear shaped woman, so I come by that fairly honestly, but she at least has breasts, though her hips are proportionately larger and she has that relatively small waist which is where the pear part comes in. Okay, she has way too much in the breasts department, so I’m not at all sure why I was left out, but there it is. Just so you have the full picture here, a little trip to the plastic surgeon fixed that problem in my early thirties, and I have no regrets on that score. Now at least I am balanced, breasts to hips, and I feel more feminine instead of like an adolescent boy.

These days, I like a lot of foods that I wouldn’t have touched in my youth, and it’s correspondingly harder to stay thin. Granted, I’m not sick as often anymore, and I generally feel better overall (and there aren’t so many bony parts sticking out!), but there’s no way I’m going to watch the numbers on the scale climb any higher than they already have, thank you very much. Size 4 is just the right size.