Slipping off my fingers...

Everybody who has ever gained a lot of weight knows about the dangers of elastic waistbands and sweatpants. You gain and gain, and the friendly elastic gives and gives, allowing you to ignore the damage for a very long time.  Belts, too, usually have some extra notches you can use before you have to discard them.

The only thing that is truly merciless in showing a weight change is rings.

Of course, on the way "up", when I noticed that my rings were starting to cut into my fingers, I attributed that to water retention. After all, it was summer, wasn´t it, and my hands always swell up in summer. Or it was "that time".
And then the rings I used to wear suddenly didn´t fit at all any more, to the point where I had to use soapy water to pry them off my hands. One I even had to cut through with a pair of pliers before it cut off the circulation in my finger completely.
So, I stopped wearing rings, mostly. Only a few family heirlooms, from great-aunts who had had stronger bones than I have, still fit, and some rings that I wore on my middle fingers when I first bought them. Now they barely fit on the ring finger. 
Buying a ring had become a major embarassment, so, I didn´t.
Then my now DH and I decided to get married.
And that meant getting wedding rings.
I had actually contemplated postponing the wedding until after I had lost that weight. Or, marrying without rings and getting these only after I had lost that weight.
After all, I was at my highest ever weight.
But my fiancé wanted nothing of that.
He insisted that our lifetime, our time together, was too precious to spend it waiting for something that might or might not happen. (Boy, was he right!) And he wanted a proper wedding, with me in a white dress, and , of course, rings.

I was lucky and found a white dress on clearance that fit me, and then we went to get our wedding rings.
While they were beautiful rings, mine was the widest ring I had ever owned.
Hearing the jeweller tell me what ring size I needed was a big embarassment, after all, I used to be so proud of my slim fingers when I was at school, and now I had to have a ring that was, size-wise, a man´s ring. 

When my weight, finally, started to go down again, I soon had to put my ring  on the middle finger to keep it from slipping off.
And that was where it mostly stayed for the next years.
It´s been half a year now that I have truly been meaning business with my weightloss, and I have watched that ring getting more and more loose along with my clothes. For some time already, I have been wearing a somewhat smaller in diameter ring as a stopper, to keep my wedding band where it was.

And now the stopper, too, has become loose.

I have decided to take the plunge and have my wedding band resized so that it fits my ring finger again.

That also means I am commiting myself to not regaining the weight I have lost. That ring is going to be so tight that it will not fit me any more if I regain more than a bit.

It´s a strange feeling not to have that ring on my hand- I am one of those people who *always* wear their wedding rings. 
But, I am looking forward to the end of the week (when I´ll get it back from the jeweller´s) and seeing it where it belongs again.

Oh, and what if I continue to condense myself? well, I´ll put it on my middle finger again. So, this is not the end of my weightloss journey by any means.

to be continued....

Julia