The Dress

When I weighed 198 pounds, I thought I was hiding my size by buying expensive clothing. I bought a size 1X bright red sweater and thought, Well, when they see how beautifully cut it is, they won’t notice how big I am! The only person I was fooling was myself.

The day came when I was going to a formal wedding. My daughter was a flower girl at her babysitter’s wedding and I wanted to buy a beautiful fancy dress for myself. Unfortunately, I still weighed 198 pounds.

I decided I couldn’t buy a 1X; I had to buy a size 18 to make me look slimmer. There was only one store in town that carried the size I wanted. They had three dresses that were appropriate for a wedding.

I hated how the first two looked, but loved the third one. It was a sleeveless, filmy, ankle-length, navy-blue dress, with a beautiful blue and lavender brocade jacket. I thought I would look like a million bucks in it. I tried it on. Disaster! It had a side zipper, but I couldn’t zip it up. So I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I’d just wear the jacket to cover up my flesh sticking out the side.

All went well until we arrived at the wedding. Somehow, I missed the fact it was outdoors at the end of July. It was 95 degrees and 95% humidity. There I was, sweating away, and I couldn’t take the jacket off. What misery I felt that evening. I tried to put the shame out of my mind. However, my higher power reminded me of that awful experience two months later when I saw that a Twelve-Step program for compulsive overeaters was starting in my workplace. I attended that meeting for a few years. I lost 50 pounds in the first six months, but decided to change my food plan and gained 15 pounds. I tried to diet it off over the next two years, but nothing worked. I felt like I had lost my chance.

Then I met someone who moved to my town and came from another Twelve-Step program in Boston. She began that meeting locally and I followed her into that program. Eventually, I moved into FA when it began and I’ve never left. After five months, I weighed 127 pounds.

The promises of the program say that we should not regret nor forget the past, but I never want to forget or regret “the dress.” It got me where this food addict belongs and keeps me here, all these years later.