Retail Therapy

On Halloween I was getting ready to go to a party. I put on a pair of jeans that were waaay too tight, but I didn’t want to go the party wearing grey sweatpants with athletic stripes down the sides so... After struggling to get the jeans zipped, I sat in them for all of 5 minutes before I decided they were becoming a giant tourniquet for both my lower extremities, and I was  forced to go change. Sweatpants it was!  This morning I was very excited to discover that this same pair of jeans that were too tight on me back then were now quite loose and perfectly comfortable. It feels really great when that happens, like winning the lottery.  

My elation was short-lived however. I went shopping at a local department store, ostensibly to buy a coworker a Secret Santa gift, and decided to do some clothes shopping for my own bad self. After all, I reasoned, I deserve it; I’ve lost weight. 

There is nothing like clothes-shopping to take the wind out of your sails while in the first days of dieting. I needed a hoodie because it’s been unusually chilly here in SWFL. I tried on every single XL hoodie in the joint, short of shopping in the men’s dept, (and don’t think I didn’t consider it ) and not one of them fit. I couldn’t zip up any of them. Not one. Apparently I am freakishly huge. Actually, I’m not, I was being sarcastic, but that’s how I felt at the time. Just who are these designers making clothes for, the Olsen Twins?  

Eventually, I resigned myself to shopping in the "Women’s Shop", which, as most of you know, is Retailese for “Fat Lady Dept”. Everything in there was so frumpy-dumpy I felt like I was 100 years old. “Where do the overweight hipsters shop?” I wondered. Then I started to get mad, because anything in the store that was cute or pretty was too small, and all the plus-size clothes were made of horrible fabric, with either loud, butt-ugly designs that seemed like a cruel joke on fat people, or hideous, battleship-grey, wool, itchy housecoats designed to make one look like a baby hippopotamus. 

Determined not to let this situation bum me out completely, I continued shopping and eventually found myself in a tiny corner of the store, looking at some t-shirts that were actually a perfect fit. Something fell off one of the upper shelves and when I bent down to pick it up, there it was. One, lonely hoodie. The perfect color of plum with pretty, but muted embellishments. It was on sale. It fit me perfectly. 

Today on my drive to work in my new purple hoodie, I realized that there is a silver lining to this situation. Pretty soon, I will not have to shop in the plus size section anymore, and this was the Universe giving me a little something to think about, to motivate me, and something to remember someday, so I can help motivate other people to get in shape too. 

It was a good shopping trip.