I have been in a fight with my body weight my entire life.
When I was still in primary school, my mother, bless her, thought she was doing me a favour by signing me up for a weight loss program. I don’t blame her for anything; her intentions were always virtuous – she simply tried to do what she thought and believed was best for me.
Unfortunately, that weight loss program is something that I recall with anguish and torment, now almost 50 years later. The program required the weighing of food portions for each meal, the prohibition of snacking and a strict limitation of what I was permitted to eat.
I can still remember with dismay, the Tupperware containers containing watery, wilted and unpalatable tuna salad with only lemon juice as a dressing which was the solitary contents of my school lunch box.
Once a week, I was required to visit the program facility and step on to a scale in front of other miserable and dejected participants that consisted mostly of despondent middle-aged women. During the “weigh in”, the facilitator, a horrid and nasty lady, would first loudly publicise my weight from the previous week, and I would then be ordered onto the scale following which she would equally loudly announce my current weight.
If I had dropped a few, she would distinctly add “well done”, which got me a cordial applause from my other woeful, rotund accomplices. However, if the scales had tipped in the other direction, she would discernibly suffix the revelation with “shame”, following which ensued a heart-breaking BOOing from the rest of the forlorn and melancholy bunch.
Since then, during my life, I have been on every diet known to man and even a few of my own making. I have cut out food groups, I have tried Weigh-Less, Weight Watchers, Herbalife, the grapefruit diet, South Beach, Banting, paleo, Dukan, Atkins, intermittent fasting, cabbage soup and SlimFast to name a few. I had varying amounts of success with these and managed to lose some substantial weight at times, only to put it all back on again (plus extra), sooner or later.
Today, almost five decades later, I accept my body shape for what it is. I am 183cm tall, big-boned and weigh, depending on the day, around 145kg. I wear a size 46-48 pants and a least a 5XL top. My girth – the measurement all the way around the largest part of my body, my abdomen (over my belly-button) – is 150cm, about the total length of a standard sewing tape measure.
WHY I STARTED BIG OKES
While I have finally made peace with my body image, and learned to love myself as I am, one thing I continue to struggle with is clothing. I absolutely abhor going shopping for clothes. Mostly because the typical “off-the-peg” retailers do not carry any formal shirts/sweaters/t‑shirts/casual shirts etc. in anything over a 3XL, and most of them actually stop their ranges at XXL.
I get it, they are a business and need to carry stock that sells, and most men are smaller than I am. Occasionally, I see a 4XL on the rail and I optimistically hold it up in front of me with hopeful anticipation, which rapidly transforms into despair when I realise that there is zero chance that the buttons on the front will close around my belly.
Once in a while, when I do pick up a 4XL which may actually have a chance of looking passable, it results in a bit of a feeding frenzy because it happens so seldom. I look for other colours in the same style and size, and take four or five items with me into the fitting room to try them on.
The next thing I hate about shopping – fitting rooms. These are really unfriendly places for me, and people of my size.
Firstly, they usually have quite a few mirrors – the angle of these, coupled with the fluorescent lighting, which I assume are supposed to make you look good, exaggerate my size.
Secondly, they typically do not have anywhere to sit. Why do I need to sit? Well it is incredibly difficult for me to bend down to untie/tie my shoe laces because my belly gets in the way – I need to do this sitting down, so I can cross my ankle over my knee and attack the laces side on.
When you are my size, there are many things that are annoyingly small – airline seats and seat belts; sports cars; the gap between the table bolted to the ground with a bench bolted to the ground in some eateries; single car garages and parking spaces which prevent me from opening the car door “all-the-way”; flimsy outdoor furniture and of course, the standard sized fitting room. To dress and undress in such a confined space is heart-breaking, demeaning and rather exhausting. Did I mention I am unfit? Trying on clothes in a “no-room-to-swing-a-cat” cubicle results in sweating, and somehow the store air conditioners just don’t reach the fitting rooms.
Most often, I am lucky if one out of the five tops is adequate. Invariably, my selection of tops, albeit that they are the same brand and labelled with the same size, seem to be cut differently. It’s almost like the manufacturer or brand is taking the piss and having a laugh at my expense.
I have tried the online shopping thing, to find again that the sizes typically stop at 5XL. I must add that the three 5XL tops I bought from some store on Ali-Express, I donated to my 25 year old daughter who is slim and wears them as pyjamas.
WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT
So, armed with frustration, despair and hopelessness, plus the recollection of someone once telling me that “if you want change – be the change”, I started BigOkes.
The first thing I realised, was that 5XL tops fitted me across my shoulders with the correct arm length, but were still short in length and would lift up over my belly when I raised my arms. This was not so tricky to solve – the obvious thing was that there is no measurement for girth.
The standard grading for tops assumes that all bodies will have the same girth, regardless of chest, shoulder or sleeve measurements – as if all men are the same shape?
So, I grabbed one of my loosest and longest t‑shirts and attacked it with a pair of scissors to see where I would make the adjustments…
The next thing I knew, I was consulting with a CMT (cut, make, trim) specialist and the excitement slowly and gradually mounted. A new business venture begins, and the chance to give men like me a positive shopping experience, where they can buy some comfortable, well-fitting, high-quality t-shirts made by people and not by machines, right here in Cape Town.
