The Skinny Little Bitch Project: All Your Shirts Are Belong To Us

The Skinny Little Bitch Project is a biweekly feature dedicated to examining the role of weight in celebrity culture and the impact of size in one woman’s daily life. The entries may be triggering should you suffer from an ED or body image issues. For more info on the project, or to read it from the beginning, please go here. This is not a health plan we are endorsing, we do not promote dieting and hope this project will increase awareness.  Please read at your own risk.

I have reached the point of beginning to mourn my outfits.

I have long been a clothes-horse. Sometimes I will deliberately not do laundry just so I can buy a top. It’s disgusting and I make no apologies, especially these days. Because most of my shopping is done at Bolton’s (where, if you’ve seen it before you’ve seen it for more) and also because the last time I ate refined sugar was July 15th so woe unto thee who strives to loose my grip from this shift dress, mkay?

While others may shake their heads at the excesses of celebrities who will state that they only wear items once before discarding them, I quietly nod with deep understanding – an outfit can be as fleeting as a feeling, and sometimes it’s best to let it go.

Of course there’s the other half of the equation. There’s the – “I was wearing this when he kissed me for the first time,” or the “I found out my pitch for that column had been accepted when I had this bra on!” No doubt, being human, we conflate memory with nearly everything.

Oddly I’m aiming for more of the first and less of the later as I come to the hard realization that it might be time to get rid of some of the clothes in my closet that were once staples. When I used to yo-yo, I never threw out anything. I had shirts I couldn’t fit into on either end of the fat-skinny spectrum, but I held on to them because I recognized that part of me was a girl who would forever be striving for an unreachable goal, punishing herself with food – either too much or too little of it – and when that happened, I’d need to have these out-sized clothes to cover my body and the shame that resided therein.

This time around I’m realizing how self-defeating that was – not in the way in which it undermined any “dieting”, but in the way I was undermining my own intentions – however misguided they may have been – towards bettering myself. It really underlines, I guess, how my self-image was characterized by mental flagellation, with my ill-fitting clothes serving as some sort of hair-shirt. So, resolved: As I continue to lose weight, I will also lose items of clothing that don’t celebrate my body. I will try not to buy transitional pieces of clothing as tempting as that may be, and instead work on rocking some of the pieces I never wear for reasons of economy and also cowardice.

A large part of this Skinny little Bitch project is the idea that I mentally turn myself into a skinny little bitch – a woman who doesn’t give a fuck. A skinny little bitch wouldn’t continue to wear flowy slash baggy tops designed to hide every bump, lump, line, and inch – she would pitch them. Actually, she’d probably, “repurpose” them into a line of designer handbags, but let’s face it there are some things I am just not prepared to do.

Closing Observations:

• How could someone who espouses her love of clothes as much as I do own as many tops whose sole function seems to be to apologize for the body of the person they are covering instead of celebrating it? My boobs look too good for that nonsense.
• I’ve completely neglected the whole “Will Begin Dating” aspect of this project which is shameful – hopefully by next week I will have something lined up. We’ll see.
• Ha ha ha, I like how I was all “Don’t worry guys, I’ll get myself a date-man in less than seven days, much like some bizarre romantic comedy set-up.”
• And you know what, speaking of which, this whole “being skinnier means you will get a boyfriend myth” – totally a myth! I am nearly TWENTY POUNDS lighter than I was when I began and I still GET ZERO PERCENT OF ALL THE ASS. Let this be a lesson to you girls – it is what inside that matters! And my insides are a garble! NEXT PROJECT: THE GARBLED LITTLE INSIDES PROJECT: UNDOING THE DAMAGE OF THE SKINNY LITTLE BITCH PROJECT. I kid, if anything, my continuing inability snare the male gaze has made me…brazenly confident? In a sort of “Whelp, at least it wasn’t my fat ass they weren’t digging!” sort of way? We’ll talk about this next week.
• Nothing tastes as good as spraying whipped cream into your mouth and bellowing “It’s low carb!” feels.

October 2nd:

Weight – 188 lbs

17 lbs lost

48 lbs to go.