I could pull this look off… I just need to make sure I arrive to the party in a zeppelin.
While in the US Navy, I had multiple opportunities to find myself wandering the streets of Honolulu and Waikiki. While there, I made a point to select one finely crafted Hawaiian shirt to bring home from my travels. You see, while the military instills many outstanding skills and talents in its people, a fashion sense is most definitely not one of them, and at the time, I thought that a pink and orange shirt was the highest of high fashion, at least for me.
Hawaiian shirts fall into a category of clothing that seems tailor made for those of us that seem to treat a buffet as a challenge. The loose billowy fabric hides a multitude of cheese-covered sins, and we believe that it creates a blindingly colorful camouflage to hide our love handles and seismic movement. In truth, it accomplishes the opposite: wearing a Hawaiian shirt is the rough equivalent of a sandwich board reading “I GET CHARGED DOUBLE ON AIRPLANES!”
I’ve mentioned before how I feel about clothes shopping. Short version, after five minutes of leafing through rack after rack of clothes, I am very near the point of screaming out state secrets just to make the madness end. But, when you drop close to seventy pounds in five months, you find yourself facing a choice: Either hit up the racks, or get to streakin’, because your old clothes are hanging off you and look absurd. Even after a week where the scale didn’t twitch, I’m still making progress as my waist size dropped by an additional two inches. Since January, I’ve gone from a 44 to a 36.
I’ve always been hesitant to invest in decent clothes for a few reasons. One, as I said, I don’t like clothes shopping. However, now that I consider that, I do believe that part of why I loathed shopping as much as I did was that every time I drifted deeper and deeper into the depressing racks of the Big and Tall section, it was a constant reminder of just how bad things had gotten. Going into the dressing room was a tiny nightmare, because each time I started to pull up those pants, I would wonder if this was the time that the 44 no longer fit, and I was going to have to go that much bigger. It was disheartening, depressing, and I was paying someone to quantify just how fat my ass had gotten. That goes hand-in-hand with the second reason. What’s the point in buying decent clothes if they’re just going to be too small eventually anyway?
Now, I find myself hesitant to buy new clothes, but for the opposite reason. I am, at this moment, wearing a pair of jeans I bought at the beginning of this month. They are a 38 waist slim-fit. First off, the concept that I would ever wiggle something labeled “slim fit” over my formerly gargantuan ass is so foreign it should be wearing a rucksack and asking me for directions to the nearest hostel in enthusiastic Albanian. Second (and this is the crazy part), it’s four weeks later and the f*$king things are loose! This is amazing and infuriating at precisely the same time.
But, as I get closer to my goal size, I find myself thinking more and more about what I want to put on. My Hawaiian shirts are gone, after Jen seized an opportunity while I was out of the house to turn them into pillowcases and make sure I never left the house wearing those godawful things again. (I told her once that Hawaiian shirts made a statement. She agreed, saying that statement was “I dress in the dark.”) Jeans and polo shirts are a safe bet, but I actually find myself wanting clothes that are designed to fit my newly aerodynamic frame, clothes that, instead of hiding how bad I look, highlight how far I’ve come. This is uncharted territory for me, and there’s a large part of me terrified that I will walk out of a store wearing a top hat and monocle, certain that I’ve discovered the look for me.
Actually, I kind of like that idea. 1870′s chic, here I come.
No progress on the scale, but progress on the measurements. I’ll happily take it.
Jan. 2, 2013 Starting Weight: 280 lbs
May 26, 2013 Weigh-In: 216 lbs
Total Weight Loss in 140 days: 64 lbs
