Thursday, January 31, 2008

Diet myths

There's a popular saying in weight-loss groups that goes like this: "Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels." Um, I don't think so. Whoever said this definitely never stuffed a fistful of french fries into a piping hot Double-Double.

Here's something else tossed around in these circles that isn't exactly true: In those commercials for diet products like yogurt and Slim-Fast, they often have this slender young woman who warily pulls her thin jeans out of the back of her closet, and when she tries them on OMIGOD! They finally zip up! And off she bounds to the mirror to admire her perfectly flat tummy. Yeah, that's not usually how that experiment goes.

Don't get me wrong, if you're like me, you definitely try for that moment. You just have a habit of showing up to the party like ten pounds too early. So you huff and puff and wiggle and jiggle and twist and tug, and 20 minutes later, you're in. But just as you're about to shoot a victorious fist into the air, you look in the mirror and see that whatever didn't get squeezed into the denim is now bubbling up like an inner tube. Meaning your "thin" jeans make you look like way more of a blubberbutt than you actually are.

So I use pants to measure weight loss in a different way, one that's much easier on the self-esteem: When I can slide my jeans off my body WITHOUT EVEN UNBUTTONING THEM, that's how I know I'm making big-time progress. This week, eight pounds lighter than I was at the start of December, I reached that milestone. My husband can confirm this, since he witnessed the shrieking lady jumping up and down in her underwear, waving jeans above her head. Which I'm thinking would be a far more entertaining commercial.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

YOU ROCK!

Robyn said...

Yay for you! My test isn't really about whether I can get them on or button them. My test requires a hand mirror for accurate butt viewing. No, you can't just turn around and crane your neck. This, unfortunately, gives the illusion of a nice butt. I think I tricked myself for years. You must get the hand mirror and really look. Only then will you see the drooping buttocks that make you quickly rip those pants off and look for something with a bit more give, like a potato sack.