I bought a lovely new top a couple of weeks ago, one size smaller than I’ve worn of late and my intention was to lose enough weight to be able to wear it on my holidays. I was feeling very confident as I fished it out of the wardrobe last night and tried it on. I started to sense it might be a bit too snug as I pulled it over my head and realised it didn’t contain as much elastic as I’d thought it did. I wasn’t wrong, but driven by the desire to get into something the next size down I pushed on regardless.

So, I concluded that it will look lovely when I’m another fifteen pounds down, but right now there’s not a hope in hell of me wearing it. Not if I want to move around. Or in fact breathe.

That said, at one point I thought I was going to have to wear it between now and when I’ve lost those fifteen pounds because I couldn’t actually wriggle my way out of it. The fabric had my arms in a vice-like grip and I couldn’t move them enough to reach around and pull it over my head. I  flapped around the bedroom busting moves for a good fifteen minutes before I finally managed to escape and put the offending article back on its hanger.

Now, I love the top and I’ll keep it of course…at some point over the next couple of months it’ll definitely fit me. But it dawned on me as I shoved it back in the wardrobe that I felt really fat. Which is ironic, because the only reason I tried the top on in the first place was because climbing the stairs to bed I’d felt really skinny and I was convinced my turbo-charged January meant I’d done enough to get into it.  Bugger.

I reckon it’s because I didn’t buy it from a fat girl shop. I’m wearing a size twenty now, which for my friends Stateside is a sixteen…the stuff I’ve bought in that size from fat girl shops is comfortable on me, you know? This one came from a regular store for regular girls, and as I stomped around the bedroom  last night trying to get the circulation back in my arms I hold my hands up and admit to using a few choice words about the skinny pattern-cutters who clearly want girls with bingo wings to stay the hell out of Dodge.

Having had experience of being fat through the ages, it’s definitely easier now to walk into a regular store and find stuff in bigger sizes, but it sort of defeats the object if they begrudge every extra inch of fabric. It’s like they want to tap into the fat-girl market without having to actually make them feel welcome. I imagine a gaggle of skinny designers sat around the table looking mardy with their herbal calorie-free tea debating whether they could even get away with charging more for fat-girl sizes, after all people who can afford to eat so many hob-nobs can clearly afford to pay extra, right?

Logic tells me that it shouldn’t matter what it says on the label as long as something fits and it looks nice, but I have a skinny friend who refuses to shop in a certain store because she has to pick up a ten when she’s really an eight. See, contrary to that wicked rumour, size matters… 🙂

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