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What Fat Women Want

Wanting to be thin is only part of the story.

by Frances Kuffel

Frances Kuffel is the author of Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self. See full bio

May 27, 2009, Diet

May I Wear Wool After Memorial Day???

Sometimes it's about the size and how I look.

It's official: I have the first blister of the season from wearing shoes without socks.

I've been up to my elbows in dust, dog hair and vacuum-sealed bags ever since.

I have clothes running from size 6 to 2X in my closets, on my shelves, in my storage space downstairs. I'm togged out for pretty much whatever mischief I put my body through.

But where, oh where, are the crummy clothes I wear when I take my Labs down to the dog run? The one pair of sweatpant capris I left out over the winter are so big now that I get thigh burn from them. Luckily, one of the Fat Lady catalogues had a Memorial Day sale and for $45 I bought more of the same gray capris and shorts that will get stained with muddy paw prints, dirt kicked up and slimed from pulling cartons of trashed lo mein out of Daisy's mouth. If I could find my old dog duds I might have had more space, saved a few dollars and had some good dust rags.

That quest led me to several marathon try-on sessions in which I burned as many calories as I would have jogging up Columbia Heights from DUMBO. I had to shower before trying on clothes and then again afterwards. The good news is that a whole lotta stuff fits that wouldn't have three months ago. The bad news is that I can't find that last crop of camisoles I bought, and there's a margin of stuff that doesn't fit yet and won't look good for a while beyond that.

More bad news? If ironing isn't bad enough, I'm tired of some of these clothes. I'm watching the next four months assume something like a life after a long spell of isolation and hard work. I have theater tickets. I'm going to have visitors. I'll be visiting my parents. I'm going to the country for a couple of weekends, and to Prague in September. God help me, I even have a date this week.

Another $200 bites the dust.

Sometimes it's about abstinence -- the focus and self-respect I get when I eat three weighed and measured meals a day and forego sugar and flour completely -- and sometimes it's about the weight. Then again, sometimes it's about the size and how I look. The last four or five days it's been the last consideration. So I go to websites and look around for good-looking bargains while I wonder what genius thinks it's a good idea to make sleeveless clothes without providing matching shruggies.

All of this turned into more chaos when I noticed that the photo on my personal blog that was taken about a month ago is also eleven pounds ago. My head, when it comes to summer clothes, is starting to turn into the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.

Should any men be reading this who have wondered why women are so obsessed by shoes, now you have 70 per cent of the answer. For the most part, they fit year after year.

And we don't have to iron them.