Why am I writing about tummy tuck jeans again? Well, its that time of year again - Christmas parties are going to start looming, Christmas present buying is going to kick in and Christmas eating will be hot on their heels. If, like me, you have a more curvy figure, one that doesn't have a pancake flat, hip-bone poking out type tummy, you may find getting an outfit together for said Christmas parties not so much fun, as you wrestle with silly designs in an unforgiving changing room with an annoying flappy curtain threatening to show off you underwear to random passers by. Read on to discover why I even bother, why so many outfits don't work on women, why it all gets worse as we indulge in the festive season and why I rate tummy tuck jeans to get us through this period in better shape.Hopefully you will know you are not alone, and the reasons why I still think this brand is a good idea.

Some cultures positively celebrate the arrival of a rounded tummy as a sign of fertility, maturity and higher standing in the world. Typically, I live in a culture that yo-yo's between promoting celebrities with their bones showing through their skin, and occasionally throwing in a cheerful new piece about how big is beautiful, usually bizarrely surrounded by adverts for slimming products and diets. It does make you wonder why bother with things like tummy tuck jeans at all, why not just shout to the world, hey, this is me, like it or lump it. And then again, I go into my wardrobe and realise I do want a look that minimises the bits I'm not so sure about. The cycle seems to be never ending, and I have to say I'm not a plus size lady, just an average size but with a runaway midriff and tummy that have plans all of their own, like a renegade state. For those of us who are in this position or maybe the plus sized women amongst us, some days we may care about minimizing the tummy, some days we may not, but most of us do try at some stage to wear things that seem to at least hang well on our non-pencil shaped bodies and therefore look at least we bought the correct size.

I've pointed it out before and will do again - in my opinion, there is a woman who most trousers and jeans are designed for, and she lives on Celebrity Unattainable Diet Street, a million miles from my home. This woman has no curves, she is all angular styling, and she certainly doesn't ever have that thing going on where the renegade tummy ignores my pleading to stay in my jeans. There are so many styles cut for her, she can swan about in low risers, do that silly lifting knees like a demented horse catwalk walk in skinny jeans and she has no trouble showing off boot cuts, in fact any cut at all. And she looks nothing like most women I know, and that includes the yoga-mad ones and the gym ladies. So many clothes are unrealistically designed for a catwalk figure, yet sometimes its easy to forget and feel its something you're doing wrong when it looks weird in that changing room. with the hazardous curtain. To top things off, many of us find we put on a little weight over the festive season, yet with cuts that only hang right on this imaginary woman, suddenly its like our wardrobe doesn't belong to us anymore.

A little more alcohol than usual, a little more rich food, a few more chocolates than we normally might and it can easily tip the scales up a few pounds, hardly rocket science. But from a starting point where the fit was for someone a lot frankly bonier around the pelvis, it can get harder and harder to get into things, as though some alien force has shrunk the wardrobe overnight. It hasn't, its just a lot of stuff in there was designed for well, someone else. The old tummy tuck jeans can come in handy around this time.

All the Not Your Daughters Jeans range are blessed with a high waist, yes, a high waist, meaning the tummy is more likely to obey the call to stay 'indoors', inside the fabric. Back to why should we care, on the days I'm feeling more liberated about my non-concave belly (I'm not 17 anymore, for goodness sake), I'm still grateful for the fact my knickers won't automatically shoot out from the back of low risers even if I don't care what the front looks like. And unlike some of my optimistically named shape wear knickers, I don't feel squashed in, meaning I can go for that next mince pie in greater comfort if the occasion simply demands it. I'm not advocating non-stop unhealthy eating, I just want to be realistic and accept I can't live my whole life on an endless diet - there will be times when everyone is having holiday foods and I want sometimes to join in the great celebration of it all. So I'm going to be choosing the NYDJ jeans and maybe some of the smarter 'trouser slacks' (we just call them trousers in London) and relying on the waist, with the built in tummy control panel to get me through, no underwear waving at my work colleagues at the office party, tummy neatly contained and me not feeling like I can't wait to get everything off just to breathe again.

We seem to swing to extremes as a society - there's the constant message to be thin, jostling for space next to the headline-grabbing stories of women who became seriously ill or even died through extreme dieting, next to articles reminding us Marilyn Monroe was never a size zero. There are alarming statistics for the rise of eating disorders and phrases that used to be thow-away lines such as "You can never be to thin or too rich" take on a sad, sad meaning. In the meantime, I'm walking the middle line, on the days that I want to minimise I'll accept that, on the days when I'm more annoyed about those media images of stick-thin 'perfection' I'll be happy with keeping my underwear private in my high waisted tummy tuck jeans.