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How to solve clothing size dilemmas if you are not sure how big you wanna be?

post #1 of 27
6/7/09 at 4:01am
Thread Starter 
In January I was around 170-175 lbs but by watching my calories I am now 148-150 lbs. I'm 5'9 and 29.

However, I don't know if I should stay at this weight or not. A couple have people have told me I look sick because I don't weigh as much as I used to. Although I don't get that comment a lot, but that could just be because other people are too polite to tell me. On the other hand, it could be the people who gave me that comment are just shocked because I lost way more weight and hence didn't look as pudgy as they were expecting.

So all that is one consideration about if I should stay at this weight or not.

Another consideration is that I am finding counting calories and only eating a reasonable amount of calories per day to be a major pain in the butt. So much of a pain in the butt, that I'm not sure if I wanna keep doing it forever.

A final consideration is that all this presents a problem when I am buying clothes. I used to fit a 42 blazer and 36 pants and now I fit a 40 blazer and 34 pants AFAIK. But if I buy clothes at my current size and then decide in the future I wanna get bigger again, I'll have wasted a lot of money. If I buy clothes at my old size I could still wear them although it wouldn't look perfect, obviously. I don't have a lot of money to throw around hence knowing what to do about this is very hard for me.

I would like to hear your advice about how I should best reconcile all these matters.

Thank you.
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post #2 of 27
6/7/09 at 4:40am
Are you planning to lose more weight or are you just maintaining?
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post #3 of 27
6/7/09 at 4:48am
^or beef up?
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post #4 of 27
6/7/09 at 5:18am
I won't try to deeply answer your dilemma, but I will briefly address the fact you've gotten comments of looking sickly.

For one, it's important to get a sense of what kind of person(s) told you this. Are they obese. Were they joking. Are they dickheads. Are they family. Are they old.

What are their standards of beauty and does it relate to you at all? Why would this individual feel as if it is within their sphere of commentable phenomena to call you sickly?

I know a woman who tells me that my jeans... my jeans with 8" leg openings... aren't cool. "They don't cover your shoe, they should cover your shoe."

I don't think a 5'9 at 150 lbs would look sickly at all. Maybe you have a really unique frame, but I doubt it. Your waist has shrunk. You've lost weight off your belly. It's not like it all came off your face and hands, skeletor.

Are you gaunt? Is there nothing you can pinch off? Are you generally healthy? Do you eat a balanced diet or have you maybe lost color from calorie restriction? Did you have swine floo when people called you sickly?

If you're interested enough, start lifting weights. Your physique will stabilize and improve. The only way you'll end up losing your new size of clothing is if you gorge yourself and balloon back up. You won't lift weights and suddenly blow up in the same way you can gain pure fat and do so.
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post #5 of 27
6/7/09 at 5:48am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gradstudent78 View Post
Are you planning to lose more weight or are you just maintaining?

Ideally I'd like to lose more weight off my face specifically, whose pudginess is what motivated me to lose weight in the first place. I was told on this forum that you cannot lose weight from your face specifically, so I decided to lose weight overall.

My face isn't as pudgy as it was, yet it still appears too pudgy for my liking. I'm curious if it would get less pudgy if I got to 140?

And I also notice a lot of fat around my belly. My stomach is not flat at all. Ideally, I'd like to lose that fat and have a flat stomach.

Additionally, my legs are really flabby at the top where they attach to the rest of my body, yet skinny and fit at the bottom. I'd like to lose that flab at the top.

If I could do all that and maintain 150, then that's what I'd wanna do. But I'm just a layman who doesn't know anything in regards to all these things, so I have no clue what is best.
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post #6 of 27
6/7/09 at 5:58am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by db_ggmm View Post
I won't try to deeply answer your dilemma, but I will briefly address the fact you've gotten comments of looking sickly.

For one, it's important to get a sense of what kind of person(s) told you this. Are they obese. Were they joking. Are they dickheads. Are they family. Are they old.

What are their standards of beauty and does it relate to you at all? Why would this individual feel as if it is within their sphere of commentable phenomena to call you sickly?

I know a woman who tells me that my jeans... my jeans with 8" leg openings... aren't cool. "They don't cover your shoe, they should cover your shoe."

I don't think a 5'9 at 150 lbs would look sickly at all. Maybe you have a really unique frame, but I doubt it. Your waist has shrunk. You've lost weight off your belly. It's not like it all came off your face and hands, skeletor.

Are you gaunt? Is there nothing you can pinch off? Are you generally healthy? Do you eat a balanced diet or have you maybe lost color from calorie restriction? Did you have swine floo when people called you sickly?

If you're interested enough, start lifting weights. Your physique will stabilize and improve. The only way you'll end up losing your new size of clothing is if you gorge yourself and balloon back up. You won't lift weights and suddenly blow up in the same way you can gain pure fat and do so.



I don't know if I'm gaunt or not. I definitely don't eat a healthy diet. In the morning I eat a yogurt or a couple of nutigrain bars or granola bars and then at night I eat a frozen pizza or frozen lasagna or frozen shepherds or pretty much whatever frozen stuff that my local grocery store carries that I can just bake for 30 minutes and be ready to eat. I'm sure that crap isn't good for me, but I don't know what else to eat. In fact I've asked what to eat before on this very board but I don't recall straight answers....think I was told to post my diet or something but when I said I just eat frozen stuff that wasn't specific enough? I don't remember exactly, but the point is I have no clue how to eat healthily, so I eat crap instead.

Also I think my skin color is still off as as described in this thread:

http://www.styleforum.net/showthread.php?t=97150

However, that was the case way before I started losing weight.

As for the people who said I look sick:

One was a friend who I've known for 13 years.

One was a woman who I met on the Internet and then was disappointed in my looks because my face was pudgier in the old picture of me that she had seen prior to meeting me, and she wanted me to look like that; and also not be anywhere near so skinny as I am.
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post #7 of 27
6/7/09 at 7:59am
Quote:
Originally Posted by stylemeup View Post
I don't know if I'm gaunt or not. I definitely don't eat a healthy diet. In the morning I eat a yogurt or a couple of nutigrain bars or granola bars and then at night I eat a frozen pizza or frozen lasagna or frozen shepherds or pretty much whatever frozen stuff that my local grocery store carries that I can just bake for 30 minutes and be ready to eat. I'm sure that crap isn't good for me, but I don't know what else to eat. In fact I've asked what to eat before on this very board but I don't recall straight answers....think I was told to post my diet or something but when I said I just eat frozen stuff that wasn't specific enough? I don't remember exactly, but the point is I have no clue how to eat healthily, so I eat crap instead.

If we told you exactly what to eat (provided a 1-week meal plan, etc.), do you think you could do it?
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post #8 of 27
6/7/09 at 10:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by stylemeup View Post
In January I was around 170-175 lbs but by watching my calories I am now 148-150 lbs. I'm 5'9 and 29.





A final consideration is that all this presents a problem when I am buying clothes. I used to fit a 42 blazer and 36 pants and now I fit a 40 blazer and 34 pants AFAIK. Thank you.

That's sounds very improbable. To weight 150lbs and have a 34 waist. Are your clothes fitting you like a tent?
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post #9 of 27
6/7/09 at 11:26am
^ I think that's possible, given a high enough body fat %.
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post #10 of 27
6/7/09 at 11:38am
The reason people are saying you look sickly is because at 150lb, even at 5'9, you're going to start looking somewhat emaciated. It's not a great look on a guy. I'm no more than an inch shorter than you, and my normal weight is around 170-175lbs. Everyone including family members and friends started telling me how skinny I look (and not in a good way) back when I was eating light and doing only cardio and made my way down to 145-150lbs, trying to get a six-pack. And looking back at pictures from that time I can tell why- I was skinny as fuck. I probably lost more muscle than fat at the time, and that's probably what's happened to you.

You should just focus on eating right and doing some weight-lifting mixed with some cardio. You'll burn off fat without looking scrawny. I wish I'd just done that five years ago when I started trying to take care of my body.

Also keep in mind these boards are filled with guys fitting into waist size 28 skinny-fit jeans, so you'll probably get somewhat skewed responses here.
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post #11 of 27
6/7/09 at 12:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by lee_44106 View Post
That's sounds very improbable. To weight 150lbs and have a 34 waist. Are your clothes fitting you like a tent?

+1 And what seems even more unlikely is that you would lose 20 pounds and only go down one pant size (36 to 34); minus 20 pounds would drop you at least two pant sizes, unless you've got big hi bones.
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post #12 of 27
6/7/09 at 12:12pm
New clothes can serve as motivation to maintain weight loss, but based on the OP's statements and perspective, buying new would be a bad idea. He needs to focus on being healthy from the inside out, and could benefit from spending time around more supportive people.
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post #13 of 27
6/7/09 at 4:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by stylemeup View Post
In fact I've asked what to eat before on this very board but I don't recall straight answers....think I was told to post my diet or something but when I said I just eat frozen stuff that wasn't specific enough? I don't remember exactly, but the point is I have no clue how to eat healthily, so I eat crap instead.

Do you have basic knowledge of healthy eating? Do you insist upon eating veggies with every dinner? Do you eat a piece of fruit for a snack instead of a bag of chips?

You understand that eating less has caused you to lose weight, but do you think of it in terms of calories? Does it register that the frozen shit you eat is mostly preservatives and cheap, long shelf life fats, high in calories and low in nutrients?

re: skin stuff. Do you catch a bit of sun each day and does your diet lack Vitamin E?

If your statement of cluelessness is correct, begin by reading basic healthy eating articles that pop up on the Yahoo main page and WebMD. You have to have basic building blocks of knowledge because the topic is too vast to tackle here. Thousands of articles are written on this every year, start skimming.
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post #14 of 27
6/7/09 at 7:45pm
You sound like you don't have much lean body mass for your height. Try increasing this by lifting weights (lookup compound weight lifting exercises) and/or activities that involve the use of your whole body to do work, like swimming or climbing. You know you need to eat better, there's lots of basic guidelines to help start this process on the the net. A lot of these things start with willpower and motivation, you're already a step in the right direction so keep this up.
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post #15 of 27
6/11/09 at 4:27pm
If you're 150 lbs at 5'9" and still have a 34" waist and you look fat in various places, then, as others have said, you need to be focusing seriously on exercise. Lift heavy weights and do some cardio. You are apparently skinny-fat, and your condition will only get worse if you continue to lose bodyweight without focusing on improving your body composition (i.e., fat to muscle ratio).
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