An adventure in duct tape

Which also ended up sparking a lot of thought about things like body images, food issues and how those things affect daily life.

First, here’s me in duct tape. I look exhausted because I am. The process really did take about 90 minutes. And to avoid painful hair removal, I have my hair up in a clip with a headband for the stragglers at my neck. Although the comments on the website directions almost all said the wrappees got hot and had trouble breathing, I did not. In fact, Kent was the one who got hot.

We may need to redo the process with a longer t-shirt because I think the form would be better if it were longer. And we’re not sure how to get her cinched up—she’s actually bigger than I am which the comments also said would happen. I need to go back and reread how people solved that issue. I think Kent was afraid to pull the tape as tightly as it needed to go, plus my sacrificial t-shirt wasn’t really long enough.

Plus we still need to fill her. That’s going to be a chore and I am a little concerned the expanding foam will distort the form. But at least we’ve given the cheap method a try first.

Now the rest.

Kent will tell you when he’s stressed, he eats for comfort. Generally I don’t. I’ll know I’m hungry but food becomes almost something abstract to me and so I don’t eat.

I mostly know my triggers. I’ve found that certain kinds of emotional stress or having utter chaos in my personal or professional life or getting weighed and told the weight or counting calories usually means that dragon rumbles back to life.

But I also gained some weight the last six-eight months while working at DMT and would like to lose it. There’s nothing like sitting on your butt two to three hours a day for your commute to ruin an exercise plan! And that’s the issue: how does a woman with a known food issue drop a few pounds without triggering a sort of scorched earth policy toward food?

I also have a completely unrealistic idea of what my body actually looks like. I use work out videos pretty regularly and I always pick one of the people in it who looks like me. Or I think she looks like me. I told Kent about that and pointed to the woman in the video I thought was my body double and he about choked on his coffee. Apparently she is much larger than I am. I could have sworn we were the same size.

So I dragged my feet this week in getting the duct tape dress form made. You can see the potential pitfalls, right? Creating a tape form of me might be OK or it might be a swift wake up call to the dragon. The jury is still out on that but at least I don’t look at the form and think she’s a fat cow.