The Last Notch on the Belt

I hate clothes. Not in an exhibitionist type way, but in a consumer type way. The consideration of style and cost, the trying on of items you know others have tried on not long before, the fact that at the end of the day I’m still going to wear the same pair of jeans for weeks at a time and make liberal use of sweatshirts, fleece, and T-shirts, it all makes shopping for new clothes both frustrating and futile. I just don’t care.

But then I decided I needed to get my weight under control. I’ve never been fat. My vanity always derails the gravy train before I get to that stage. But I’ve been chunky. Maybe a little husky. I add a chin here or there. Take my face to its cherubic max. Knock out a couple belt notches. We all know the drill.

This past Christmas I got to my heaviest ever. The loss of employment left me with little to do but watch TV and bore myself (when I’m bored, I tend to eat). Couple that with a little emotional support from Hostess during my brother’s Iraq deployment, and I scratched at 240 before I decided to halt my girth.

In a nice bit of serendipity, my mother and aunt had joined Weight Watchers to keep their emotional eating in check during Andrew's tour, and I quickly leeched the relevant dietary information from them. Instead of improvising “healthy eating” as I had done since college, I had an actual program that not only would give me some knowledge of culinary good and evil, but one that played into my borderline OCD. It’s all about points and charts and lists. And anybody who knows me and my organization habits (look at my DVDs) knows I’m all about the charts and lists.

So, seven weeks ago, I started tracking the points. For the first time since college, I’m below 215. Not only that, but I’ve done it in a healthy way. I’m quite thrilled with the results, and encouraged by the fact that it really hasn’t been that hard. The process has shown me just how much of my eating was just because I had nothing better to do. Once you can eliminate that, it's a piece of cake. Or piece of rice cake in my case.

Still, the slimming has not come free of cost. The earliest troublesome revelation was that of digestion. I’ve experienced noises from my innards that frightened me something awful, as if my stomach were asking “What the hell was that?” And at the risk of being a bit too blue for this broadcast, I’ve developed a much more intimate relationship with the restroom. To give you an idea, I finished In Cold Blood in a week, and it never left the basket next to the john. I’m hoping things will eventually settle down, but it’s a small price to pay to see my jawline again.

The costly payment I’m facing now is the one I’m dreading: clothing. The aforementioned favorite jeans have been retired. They’re now in the closet waiting to join the clothing convalescent home of Good Will. I’m down to the last notch on my two best belts, and unless I want to go ghetto fabulous and pop out some new holes they will both need to be replaced. I have shirts (like the one I wore to Christmas this year) that look like parachutes on me. The loss is even showing through some of my fleece, and the entire point of my fleece was to hide my weight.

Still, there is some hope. My brother bought more clothes in high school than I’ve bought in my lifetime, and I’m about five pounds away from raiding his closet. I knew his preppy ways would help me down the road. And there’s no greater kindness than keeping me from shopping.