Tips for recovering shoppers:
1. Decide if you want to go alone or have a supportive person with you.
2. Tell whoever you go with that this might be a difficult experience and talk about ways to make it easier.
3. Take time to get ready. It'll be easier to look at your reflection if you're feeling good about your hair and make up.
4. Prepare yourself and give yourself a pep talk.
5. If you find something you like, take multiple sizes to the dressing room.
6. If something doesn't fit, take it off immediately!
7. If something is unflattering, remember it is the clothes that are unflattering- not you!
8. Don't buy something that you wouldn't wear with the body you have now.
9. If you don't find anything, that's okay!
10. Have a fun activity planned afterward.
11. Make sure you have a dinner buddy. We all agreed in treatment that one of the hardest times to eat was after realizing we grew a size.
One of the things that is almost sure to happen in recovery.... body changes. Rarely do people maintain their "disorder weight" as they start a healthy relationship with food.
Personally, my weight fluctuated more than thirty pounds as I went from restricting to binging, then to bulimia. For someone who is not even five feet tall, that is a lot!
As you can imagine my clothing sizes changed quite a bit.
The feeling of failure and grief when I no longer fit in to a certain size was overwhelming.
Although I no longer feel depressed when I grow out of a size, it is still triggering to pull on jeans and not be able to button them.
As a woman in recovery- it has been a while since I cried over clothes. Today was one of those days.
I stood in Nordstrom's rack trying on boots after boots, only to not even be able to get them passed my calves. It was an awful feeling. After a dozen boots I was really struggling to keep tears away.
I was working really hard to keep any negative body image voices away but it was taking a lot of effort. For some reason, having my mother there was just making it worse. It was a humiliating experience and I just wanted to be by myself.
Finally I gave up on Nordstrom's and my mom said she needed to go home.
I was left with a choice. Do I go home empty handed? Do I go to another store?
I've been waiting boots for A LONG time so I took a deep breath, listened to some feel good music in the car, and drove to DSWshoes.
In the car I kept saying to myself, "find shoes that fit, don't change your body to fit the shoes." This was something that I learned in treatment. If something doesn't fit, oh well! Take it off and find something that does! Don't buy it with the promise of loosing weight.
I also tried to think logically and realized that if I can't fit in these shoes, I'm sure that there are many people who cannot. Also, the boots being too tight is a reflection of my height, not my weight. The thickest part of my calf happens about four inches before an average sized woman!
At DSWshoes I tried on some boots that didn't fit but I felt much stronger. I reminded myself that I am not an enormous ogre. I am a beautiful, wonderful, strong, and sassy woman. I'm not going to let some skinny boots get the best of me.
