Being "the fat girl".

It's not often I feel that way. I'm blessed with a high self esteem and a wonderful family and amazing friends who have always loved me and supported me, no matter what my size. I gained my weight as a young adult, early twenties. Until then I was a normal size, never "slim" or "skinny" but well proportioned and no rolls of fat!! Sometimes when I catch sight of myself in a window or in a mirror when I'm not expecting it, I am still surprised that the heavy woman staring back at me...is ME.

I rarely feel bad about the way I look. I'm blessed with good skin, healthy hair and I have to admit my best feature is my eyes. I think I have a good sense of humour and I am relatively intelligent. I've never felt "ugly" or "self loathing" the way I read some people describe in the WW forums or in some blogs I've read.

So this past weekend I went to Buffalo shopping with three women from work. These woman have come to be very special to me and I can already see, just after a few months, that we will be lifelong friends. I will call them S, A and Ad. We vary in age from Ad being 34 to A being 55. We all have a similar sense of humour and share our love of life and can laugh at ourselves. The only difference? You got it. S is size 4, A is size 2 and Ad is a curvy, but still slim because of her height, size 12. Me? Size 20. So you can imagine shopping with these women this weekend was slightly difficult. Everything they tried on looked amazing. Even if it was the wrong colour or style - everything fit. They would grab 10-15 things to take into the change room to try on and we'd have fashions shows. Me? I'd manage to find 2-3 things that I thought might look ok. Nothing looked amazing. Nothing made me feel beautiful. I know I'm being hard on myself. I have lots of gorgeous clothes and I look pretty good most of the time...but next to these "physically beautiful" women, I just looked fat. Cute, but fat.

Summertime clothes are particularly problematic for me. I have horrible upper arms. I call them "batwing" arms, all the Tee shirts the last few years have been with cap sleeves, showing off....upper arms...the one part of my body I really, really don't like. It's hard to find tee shirts that have real sleeves. Most of the time I wear 3/4 sleeves or I put a shrug or a shirt over a teeshirt or tank to cover my arms.

I'm also only 5' tall. Which means that the lovely "empire waist" style makes me look pregnant because it doesn't fall in the right place for my body. V-necks are cut too low, meaning I always have to wear tank tops or camisoles underneath. Pants never hang properly (even petites!) and the rise is always too long.

It was truly a day of hating how I look, hating how I felt about hating how I look....

There's no point to this post - just self pitying and I hope that typing it will make me get over it and move on to a new day.