More on clothes

I've been going to Weight Watchers for a few months and have successfully lost about 28lbs. This brings me far from my ideal weight or my ultimate goal (which is actually a good bit more than the "ideal") but it's enough to make me feel and look better than I have in quite a long time. My clothes have been falling off me so it's time for some replacements.

It's one thing to wear baggy tops when the weather is still chilly, but it's really uncomfortable to wear baggy flappy trousers. I can't imagine how those young chaps go around with their pants hanging down to their knees - they've probably forgotten how comfortable it is to wear clothes that fit! I've been thinking about moving out of trousers, but that's a big step for me. No I'm not a transvestite or seeking gender reassignment; it's just that I haven't worn a skirt or dress in years because I find that they are too uncomfortable to deal with and I can never find shoes to look good with them. It's really the stuff you have to wear underneath that's horrible. If you are a woman with lumps and bumps and are forced to wear not one or two, but three or four waistbands (eg skirt, slip, tights and possibly underwear) and then a bra and shirt above, it's not that comfortable. Waistbands and bras cause bulges in the middle (unless you want to wear some other foundation garment to squash it all up to your boobs or down to your thighs!). We've all seen the doughnuts that some people carry above their low-rise pants but in my case there are at least four of them and it's really not a pretty sight. So a dress might help.... if not for the stupid undergarments.

Gripe 1. Why are slips/petticoats made of clingy sticky nylon? If they aren't nylon, they're something else which sticks to the fabric of the skirt or dress and impedes free movement of the wearer and the dress.
Gripe 2. Why don't they make more bra-slips of assorted sizes?
Gripe 3. Why is there no viable alternative to nylon tights (aka panty-hose)?
Gripe 4. Why do American women tolerate the ill-fitting tights that seem to be all that are available over here? Perhaps they've never had the pleasure of a comfy pair from Marks and Sparks.

Anyway. I prefer to wear natural fibres all over when possible, but it's very hard to find stylish, well-fitting undergarments in anything but man-made materials. I can't be alone in finding many man-made fabrics hot and uncomfortable, can I?

For now I'm sticking to trousers - long thick ones in the winter and thin cropped ones in the summer. My days of wearing shorts were limited to a few brief years in the early 1990s when I felt slim enough to wear them and before my legs started to resemble English road maps. I am seriously never going to expose my legs ever again but it would be nice to be able to wear something long and light in the way of a cotton skirt in the summer without the need for nylon to hide my modesty.

Perhaps this is all too much information for the faint-hearted reader, but hopefully someone will be able to relate to it and maybe someone out there will know of a place where I can buy what I'm looking for. But getting back to trousers for a moment... as I mentioned the other day, I tend to shop in Target for the sake of cost and convenience. I won't spend a lot on clothes when I'm heavy because I want my 'heaviness' to be temporary and therefore an investment in 'good' clothes would be a waste. So on Saturday I invested a princely $15 (about £10) in a pair of black chinos. They were two and a half sizes smaller than the ones I was wearing before and I thought they would be fine. They felt fine when I tried them on so I ripped off the paper labels and wore them for a day. BUT cotton being cotton, the trousers 'relaxed' in the wearing and loosened up to the extent that by the end of the day they were feeling distinctly too big and flappier than in the morning. Now instead of gaining a pair of nicely fitting trousers to get me through the rest of the winter, I have another pair of baggy pants to annoy me.

The only solution is to lose a few more pounds and try again in April, before I go to England. Watch this space....