After a busy weekend

When the decluttering bug bites, one should keep up the momentum. Which is exactly what DH and myself did yesterday.

Actually, getting started was the hardest part of decluttering. Especially when it came to clothes I had worn gladly and often, clothes that did make me feel good, in spite of the excess weight I was carrying.
The best cure for that kind of sentimentality was our full-length mirror. Putting those clothes (they were mostly jackets and blouses) on and seeing that there was so much room inside there that I could have hidden a soccer ball underneath them. And, looking at the sizes of these garments and realizing I am, by now, down five full sizes from the biggest clothes I had! Which does translate to even more than it would be in ordinary sizes  because the size differences get bigger with rising sizes due to vanity sizing.
I did keep the biggest pair of pants/trousers I found. That is probably something everyone who ever lost a lot of weight does. Perhaps, when I get to goal, there will be one of those "wearing one trouser-leg like a skirt and stretching out the other so far that another person would fit in there"- pictures of me, too (don´t expect that to happen anytime soon, though- I´m notoriously shy:))
Until then, just putting my present jeans (which are cut in the same style so can be compared perfectly) on top of those old pants to see the difference gives me a well-needed motivation burst every time I´m in danger of falling off the wagon.

I did, this time, decide to be absolutely ruthless in throwing out the garments I hold partly responsible for the fact that I took so long to wake up to what I was looking like.
And for the really hard decisions?  I used a trick that helped me get beyond the sunk cost fallacy (aka "this item hasn´t been worn often enough to justify what it had cost me").
It is actually one simple question that makes things very clear immediately.
If I did not already own that item, would I buy it today if I were to see it in a shop?
When you´re talking about clothes four or five sizes too big, that´s a pretty dumb question. After all, it´s not the question whether I would buy it in my present size again, but whether I would buy it exactly as it is.
When I think of it like that, the decision gets very easy.

So, I now have a closet that has plenty of room for the clothes I own now and which all fit me. 
One thing I hadn´t thought of before was the fact that smaller clothes do take up less closet space than their bigger counterparts, too, at least when folded. Thus, it is a lot easier now to see what I have in there.
And this helps to see what things I do not need to replace. Another side effect is that I am, that way, less likely to lose an item from sight by having it slide behind a stack of something else.

And, last but not least, the almost unworn eviction candidates have taught me a lot about what I should probably not spend money on again. Throwing out clothes with the price tags still attached after five years is not something I want to do again.
What these were? What someone jokingly called "someday best". As in "someday I am going to be the kind of person who wears this". Or, "someday I am going to go swimming again".
Clothes for a person I am not who does activities I don´t do.
Clothes that are little more than declarations of good intentions.
Even if I got them on sale, they were the most expensive clothes I ever had, if I translate their cost to cost-per-wearing.

In the future, I´ll try to be a more conscious shopper when it comes to clothes, too. After all, I love how roomy my closet looks now. And  I have found that the adage about most people wearing only about twenty to thirty percent of their clothes most of the time had been applying to myself, too. So why not restrict myself to exactly those thirty percent anyway? It´s frugal, and it´s ecologically friendly.
And it helps to keep the place tidier, too, by forcing me to do laundry more often, and by being able to hang clothes away without having to squeeze them into the closet.

So, an all-around winning situation.
And, on the sneaky side of things, if I let myself go and regained the weight, I´d be quickly out of something to wear. And that, hopefully, would bring me back on the wagon.


Julia