I went to the mall yesterday. I haven't been to an actual mall in a really, really long time. I've been easing my way back into this whole shopping thing, but now I think I finally got the hang of it! We went to Nordstroms and had an absolute blast. We were treated like royalty!

My friend and I were shopping for dresses to wear for two separate weddings. We must have tried 30 dresses each, easily. So much fun! And I needed two of them, one for the rehearsal dinner and one for the wedding.

My body is weird! I have always needed dresses a few sizes up from pant size to accommodate my upper half. I used to think it was the breasts, but it's really my back, or my rib cage. I can't figure it out and neither could my friend. She was shocked and actually got angry for me. It was rather funny. Looking at me, I do not look deformed, but that darn zipper gets stuck just as it hits the back ribs. I don't know what it is. I guess I have a good, solid, strong, wide back.

Get this. In the same store, I wore a size 10 dress and a size 4 skirt.

I was so happy to tug the waistline out in the size 6 skirt and proudly say to the sales woman, "I need a size 4." That made me feel so much better after nixing all the size 8 dresses. LOL!

Oh, and my girlfriend is the opposite. She wears dresses a size SMALLER than pants.

How fun!! I have a wide back and shoulders too, so I feel your pain!

Congratulations ! Take it from me it only gets better.

The saleslady was really nice. She was tiny herself and said she had a wide back and also said that doesn't change with weight loss. It's not that I have a fat back. I don't. I actually never had a "back fat" to speak of. I just have some wide bones back there and it's perplexing to me because I have tiny feet, tiny fingers and tiny wrists, so that's supposed to mean I'm small boned. This was the crux of my insecurities as a teenager/young adult. I remember as a fourth grader playing dress up in my mom's beautiful dresses and being unable to get them zipped over my rib cage. I always thought I was fat because of this. I'm finally old enough to realize and understand it isn't fat, it's bone. Yet I still can't quite wrap my mind around it because again...all other indicators say I'm small boned.

I don't know. It's just a number on a dress that looks fantastic on!

Eliana-- that's awesome!! A size 4! That must feel incredible.

Your post about wide bones made me laugh. Last year, when my son was graduating from high school, I needed to buy him a suit. He is about 5'8" and 145-- he's a varsity soccer player and super athletic. He's very lean and muscular and looks like a trained athlete... We're driving to the store and he explains to me that he is insecure about the fact that he was wide hips. I tell him that he is totally crazy!!! There is not part of him that is wide.

We go to the men's suit department and we have no idea what size he wears. I'm thinking he must wear their smallest size because he's not super tall and he's very lean.... The guy comes over with a tape measure and measures his chest, and then his hips. When he measures his hips, he does this little grunt. "Wow," he says. "You have really big hips." My son smirks at me. "See!" he says. The kid had 8% body fat, so obviously it was just how he was configured....

It really made me realize that even super thin people may have body shapes that don't conform. Here was this super handsome athlete who was worried about his "big hips..." Go figure.

Yeah, it seems that regardless of your weight, many of the same body-shape quirks never change.

I have always had narrow shoulders, a wider-than-normal waist and very wide feet -- even when I weighed in the 120s (about 40 years ago!)

Fabulous! You have worked so hard- now some of the rewards
congratulations sweetie!!

I'm so proud of you for going to Nordstrom's! I still skulk through there like I don't belong. I'm not a small-town girl really, but I moved to a small town so on top of always feeling fat when I go there, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of that store. I'm so glad that you had a good trip and found some fantastic dresses!

On the weird body shape thing - my DH was really thin in high school - like scrawny thin, but he said that he could never find jeans because they wouldn't go over his huge thighs.

Sound like so much fun congrats on your success!

I feel you on the wide rib cage too. The one measurement on me that doesn't seem to be shrinking much is my bra band. I've dropped 4"-6" each in my waist and hips, and about 1.5" around my rib cage. I now wear the smallest size tops sold at Lane Bryant (although they're sometimes too big ), but I still wear a 42-44 bra...

Whoooo, size 4!! It sounds like you had fun. WTG!

What a fantastic reward!

I have an oddly proportioned body in some ways too. My rib cage is too SMALL... so that I've now realized (after getting some help at Victoria Secret) that I really should buy 32 C bras, even though I'm DEFINITELY a B cup... but a 32 B is a little to small on my breasts, and a 34 B is too big on my back. For some reason a 32 C works.

Similarly, I have a loooooong torso and short little legs! My sister is 2.5 inches shorter than me but her hip bones are over an inch above mine! It makes finding jeans that are the right length SO hard, and so many tops simply do not cover my whole torso. Its one of the reasons I almost exclusively wear dresses!

I think I figured it out, at least in part, not that it really matters.

For those who watch What Not To Wear, they always talk about belting a woman's clothes high up to accentuate the narrowest part of a woman's waist. That is not my narrowest place. In fact, we were playing with belts on some of the dresses and I always thought I looked bigger with the high waisted belts. My waist is at my bellybutton. That's where I'm smallest. Most women have a higher waist than I do.

Odd how just knowing is half the battle. These are things I really wish I'd had a good grasp of when I was young and thin and stupid. Maybe I wouldn't have packed on 100 pounds. Maybe.

I am smallest at my belly button too. I wonder if that will change after I lose the rolls that I still have?

Maybe...maybe not. I've been smallest at my belly button always. It was that way at 115 then 235 and now at 150. The question women ask about where to measure always baffled me because my gut reaction is of course it's at the naval! But that's because it makes sense for me. I hadn't realized just how different we all actually are.