The Clam Rampant

Kasia March 22nd, 2007

Remember the movie What About Bob? Remember “baby steps”? “I’m baby-stepping out of the office…”

Baby steps are something I’ve really come to appreciate as I’ve gotten older. I never did when I was younger; I wanted everything done exactly right RIGHT NOW!, thank-you-very-much, and what do you mean I can’t save the whole world before breakfast? What about if I plan to eat late, say, more of a brunch-y thing? No? Well, I’ll show YOU!

Predictably, it didn’t work out well. Consistently. There’s a quote I’ve heard attributed to Einstein – don’t know if he was really the source – that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, by that definition I was insane, but I did come by it honestly (sometime I’ll tell you about my family).

So about five years ago I discovered a site called Flylady.net, which is run by a really neat woman named Marla Cilley, a.k.a. FlyLady. (She likes fly fishing – what can I say?) One of her big catch phrases is “baby steps” and another is “You can do anything for 15 minutes.” She’s a gem – I strongly recommend you go check out her site. I’ve started implementing some of her suggestions piecemeal, and lately have been trying to do it more consistently. I can tell you that my life runs much more smoothly when I’m following FlyLady.

Recently, The Big Seester found a book called The Four-Day Win that talks about the importance of setting small, incredibly achievable goals for yourself…in other words, baby steps. After a recent shopping excursion, I have decided to implement a modified version of The Four-Day Win.

Let me ’splain. (No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Bonus points to anyone besides TBS who gets that reference.)

I am of Rubenesque proportions. Shopping, therefore, is a trial. I really enjoyed shopping when I was thin, even though I was even a larger-than-average size then. (I was a size 12 despite being a biscuit underweight. Darned peasant genes!) But now…well, let’s just say I leave unnecessary shopping “until I lose some weight.” When I say “unnecessary” I mean if there is any possible scrap of clothing in my wardrobe that is not obscenely tight or ridiculously loose, that could POSSIBLY be construed as acceptable for a given occasion, by the loosest imaginable standards, I do not shop. I even wore a black suit to a wedding because my mother (who knew I didn’t have cash to buy an outfit anyway) told me that as long as I wore a glitzy top to dress it up, it was OK for an evening wedding. And I wore a brown suit to a summer daytime wedding, because hey, they said business casual! (In my defense, I aggressively shopped for an appropriate dress to wear, but the only one I found that came close to suiting my needs was out of my budget.)

However, as my loyal readers know, I expect to be received into the Church at the Easter Vigil. So I decided to suck it up (figuratively speaking) and go find an appropriate dress or suit to wear. I don’t have a lot of springy or summery clothes anyway, at least not that are work-appropriate, so hopefully I can then go on to use whatever I buy as a nice work outfit.

I hit five stores in two hours. Zilch.

Now, there are a few basic mistakes (in my opinion) that fashion designers make when they are creating clothes for plus-sized women. And hey – who decided that size 14 was the line of demarcation anyway?! (See earlier point about having been an underweight size 12 in high school.)

Anyway, the first mistake that they make is in terms of patterns. For some reason, The Powers That Be (hereafter referred, for the sake of my fingers, as TPTB) have determined that chubby chicks like me need big, garish designs on our clothes. Especially on tops. I think it’s supposed to camouflage our figures.  I don’t think it works. And even if it did work, I don’t like big, garish patterns.

However, the alternative seems to be to put us in either incredibly drab colors (again with the camouflage) or ridiculously bright, garish ones, which guarantee that we’ll be seen from 300 yards away. I saw a near-fluorescent lemon-yellow sweater in the plus-size section at Kohl’s. Thanks – if you include a Mag-Light with that, I could go climb up into the nearest lighthouse when the bulb burns out, because there’s no WAY anyone would be able to miss me!

The other thing they do that drives me bonkers is that they completely miss the mark when deciding what should and shouldn’t be available in plus sizes. Want a skimpy halter top? No problem! Want a pair of hip-huggers? We’ve got  you covered (so to speak). Want something tasteful and feminine? Umm…<scratches head and looks around>…no, we don’t really have anything that fits that bill. How about you try on this dress? It’ll make you look like a streetwalker, but it comes in your size!

In short, there seems to be very little room for me in plus-size clothing. In fact, I’m more or less in a no-win shopping situation, because I have little money, conservative tastes, and am overweight.

I’m not changing my tastes, and I don’t expect to have more money in the near future. So that leaves me with one alternative: lose weight, which I have been trying unsuccessfully to do for several years. I’m down five pounds from my highest weight ever, and have been hovering here for a couple of years. Wooo! Go me! 

So instead of doing the usual unsuccessful nonsense, I have decided to do a couple of things.

First, my employer has set up a ‘wellness program’ for employees. Since I’m overweight enough for it to be considered a health risk (though pride does require me to specify that I’m not really that big!), they’re giving me a little kickback for participating.

But mostly, since I know what I need to do and the issue is more about me actually DOING it, I’ve decided to modify the “four-day win” idea and conquer with baby steps. It won’t do anything for me by the Easter Vigil, but hey – God loves me even when I’m fat, right? And the Vigil isn’t about me or how I look anyway. (Yes, I did need to say that. Pride is a nasty sin.)

The “four-day win” means that you pick a ridiculously achievable goal, do it for four days, reward yourself, and then build on it incrementally. Kind of like the time TBS tried to potty-train her cats, by putting the litter box on newspapers by the toilet and gradually building it higher and higher, slowly, so they didn’t even know it was happening…which was a great idea, and probably would have worked, except that she didn’t brace up the newspapers with anything to stabilize the pile…I’m sure you can imagine the scene. Yeah. It was a mess. …and she hasn’t tried to potty-train her cats since.

Me, I’m stubborn, and I take a lot of time to learn habits. So I’m doing a seven-day win. For the next seven days, I will walk five minutes each day. I don’t mean walking to and from the car, or walking to Kroger. I will go for a five-minute walk on my lunch (or whenever) solely for the purpose of walking. If I do it all seven days, I’ll reward myself by unplugging the phone and taking a long, hot bath with some sort of product in it, with a nice candle burning and a totally unserious book. Maybe TBS will lend me an Agatha Christie or a Trixie Belden. Then the next week I’ll walk for ten minutes. After I build up to 30 minutes a day, I’ll start looking at food-related goals.

And in the meantime, maybe I’ll become a plus-size fashion designer. 

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