Holy Cr*p! I Can Cross My Legs!

I attended a wedding this last weekend. It was a formal wedding, so I had to wear a dress, which is a circumstance I try to avoid. When I do find it necessary to wear a dress, I make it as comfortable a dress as possible. More importantly, I wear the most comfortable flats I can find in my rather shoe-poor closet. Sidenote: I am not at all a typical girl when it comes to shoes. I tend to buy them as cheap as I can and wear them until they are falling to pieces, and fashion? That’s a foreign word to me! Plus, comfort is the #1 most important feature when it comes to shoes. Price is #2, and color is #3. I do own a few pairs of heels, but only because they were bought for a very specific outfit.

It took me a long time to figure out that the main reason I don’t like wearing dresses is because I am overweight. Isn’t it weird how we deceive ourselves? I seem to remember liking dresses ok when I was a kid – maybe I will ask my Mom when I developed the aversion. But I have caught myself several times during my adult life actually saying “I hate dresses. I’m a jeans & sweats gal!” Now that I am spending more time on metacognition, I realize that I told myself this because I didn’t want to face the real issue: my weight!

Anyhow, being overweight makes wearing dresses a pain (Mumu’s excepted, of course). First of all, there’s the issue of shoes, which I already mentioned. Heels are uncomfortable enough if you weigh 120 pounds, but teetering on a couple of ½ inch square pedestals at 275 is an entirely different matter. And there is a lot more weight shoving your toes into that viciously tapered end, which causes painful pinching unless you have the foresight to buy really wide-toed dress shoes, which (if you manage to find any) look pretty darn weird.

Adding to the shoe problem is the pantyhose problem. Personally, I believe that knee-high pantyhose were invented specifically for fat girls who were tired of struggling with the pulling of stretchy-yet-fragile mesh up past all the bulges. The industry would probably tell you it was for women wearing slacks who do not need “full support,” but I know better. I cannot tell you how many pairs of pantyhose I have ripped with my fingers the very first time I put them on – one tries to be careful, but they are tricky! It is easier to avoid ripping and tearing the things if you buy really big ones, but trust me, pantyhose are not a clothing item that qualifies as “the bigger the better.” In fact, I went to an event earlier this year where hose was needed, and I forgot to consider that it was the first time I had worn hose in about 30 pounds, so the pair I wore was actually too big. I spent the evening running to the restroom to hike up my pantyhose (not something you want to do out on the dance floor!) Pantyhose have to actually fit. Of course, another way to avoid ripping hose is to buy the really expensive ones, like Sheer Energy™ but who wants to spend $5.00 on a flimsy piece of nylon netting?

Shoes…pantyhose… these are issues when it comes to dress-wearing for the thin-challenged; but the biggest problem when it comes to dresses is the issue of leg-crossing. Crossing your legs is something most little girls learn how to do before entering grade-school (and even earlier if they are church-goers). When wearing a dress, whether you are 5 or 95, it is essential to keep your legs together and to sit like a lady rather than a basketball player on the bench waiting to go back into the game. You can keep your knees and feet primly together, you can turn both knees to one side and pull your feet back a bit, or (most comfortable of the 3) you can cross one leg over the other. The thing is, when one is overweight, it’s darned hard to cross one leg over the other! And the fatter you are, the harder it is. I don’t remember when I lost the ability to cross my legs, but I couldn’t do it for a very long time. I could put one ankle on top of the other knee – never got so big that I lost that ability – but that’s also an uncool position for someone in a dress. I could hold my legs together primly, but after a few minutes my thigh muscles would start quivering in protest, because after all I was squishing all of my thigh fat against its will! The only ladylike position I could approximate was the knees-together-and-to-the-side-feet-tucked-back-a-little position, and even that wasn’t very comfortable.

So, anyhow, I was at this wedding last Saturday, and we were waiting for it to begin (it started a bit late) and I glanced down and realized I was crossing my legs. Actually sitting one-leg-over-the-other, knees-together, one-foot-swinging-slightly, with my knees crossed! I cannot remember the last time I was able to do that, yet here I was, doing it unconsciously! (I actually think that what made me notice it was the beginning of pain in my knee, because although I am able to cross my legs now, I can’t do it for very long before the topmost knee starts to complain about it.) I elbowed my husband and whispered “Look, honey, I’m crossing my legs!” which naturally he did not understand the significance of, but I had to tell someone, and when you are sitting waiting for a wedding to begin it’s not polite to whip out the cell phone and call your weight loss accountability partner.

It’s things like this that keep me going on the weight-loss journey, because will-power is a ridiculous myth (topic for another time). I mean, wow! I can actually cross my legs! This is actually working and I am actually getting thinner! Maybe once the knee pain thing goes away I will start wearing dresses more often. :)