HUMOR
So Long, Skinny Genes…LOS ANGELES 12 January 2010 |
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I have skinny jeans and I'm not happy.
I've never had skinny jeans before. Of course I've put on weight since my college days - probably around 20 pounds (I was 5'8" and 125 when I graduated. Hate me? That's okay. I hate me too now). But I never noticed a dramatic change. It just sort of snuck up on me - this morning.
Sure over the past 10 years I've given birth twice - once to twins - and I noticed that I am rounder, softer...a bit more "zaftig". And it's not like 143 pounds is even so bad. I actually feel pretty good about myself naked. My butt is still kind of yummy, when I suck in from the side I can achieve a lovely silhouette, and my boobs have magically maintained a firmness and defiance of gravity despite the shifting landscape upon which they are perched. It's just that there's more "stuffing"as my daughter referred to it recently, and I never really noticed.
I had always been thin. Naturally thin. I spent my life eating exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, and it burned right off. When my 10 year old was a toddler, I could eat the macaroni and cheese off her plate and still look fabulous. It wasn't till I hit 40 that I noticed the hint of Spaghettios on my butt. But I chalked it up to just not having a lot of time to exercise. I could get rid of it whenever I wanted to. Or so I thought.
"I'm so lucky, I have a fast metabolism," I would say to friends who dared to eyeball the cup of chocolate pudding occasionally found in my hands.
And I believed this twist of fiction.
My jeans always went out of style, or I had long since lost track of them, before I ever outgrew them. And if I did have a pair of jeans long enough to notice they were getting 'snug', I always had a great reason why they were no longer hugging my hips, but rather strangling the bajeezuses out of them; they were in the drier too long, I'm bloated...it's Thursday.
Maybe if designers had kept the waistline of jeans up around my midsection, I would have had some sort of "control" group -- some reality-smacking way to gauge the growth. A "constant" against which I could judge the ever increasing, pudding-and-childbirth-induced wave of flesh. Maybe then this wouldn't have happened. But no. My fat responded positively to this fabulous new trend and like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed flat from the bottom, the "paste" came up and out the open flip-top cap. Hey, if they closed, they fit.
But this morning, I went to put on my favorite jeans, which had disappeared for about a year and had resurfaced after a good closet cleaning. They didn't close. And it wasn't pretty.
I couldn't use any of my old excuses, and I had to face the music. And put down the pudding.
So now I have "skinny jeans." And maybe - just maybe - one day they'll fit again. If I diet and exercise and don't pick at my kids' chicken nuggets.
Or maybe, even better, I'll just wait for them to go out of style.
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very funny! my favorite line: “. . .they were no longer hugging my hips, but rather strangling the bajeezuses out of them.”
i’ve made the same excuses about too tight jeans, blaming that time of the month, the dryer, mercury in retrograde. . .
Sarah,
The thing about jeans that gets my goat is that they are no longer at the waist. They are two, three, four inches below. This results in the very unfortunate description of “muffin top” on even really thin women. I think that happy anorexic women designed them because they have no body fat to form into the top of a muffin. If I could sew, which I can’t, I would make jeans that fit real women.
My Dad used to call my Mom “zaftig,” and he absolutely meant it as a compliment.
Really, shouldn’t there have been a hygiene film during one’s senior year of high school to prepare the young women well in advance for what 40 would bring? It seemed like an urban legend until it happened.
143 pounds is good. Really good. Still jealous. And I’m only 24-years-old.
I have the opposite problem - I spent a good portion of the last couple of years working out and trying to take care of myself. Then 2009 happened, and bam. All gone. Now I have ‘in shape’ clothes that will hopefully fit me again properly at some point in time.