Now that I don't have to keep cycling through the same handful of shirts and 3 pairs of pants that fit, I can't seem to stop shopping. My mental math tells me I have bought close to 30 articles of clothing in the past 2 weeks (including one skirt and one dress!), and I've also rediscovered a bunch of former oh-honeys and things I outgrew on the way up the scale that now re-fit me. Between the new clothes and the old ones I've brought back into rotation, I've run out of closet space. So... I got to clean out a bunch of stuff. I have quite a pile going. Hopefully, I can donate this stuff to Goodwill and they can clothe some other fat girl on her way out of fat-girl clothes.
The closet purge made me recall the giant duffel bag full of gym clothes that has been sitting on the floor of my closet since... um... the dawn of time? There are enough clothes in there for me to stay clothed for weeks without repeating. Seriously. In rifling through the bag, I found 13 sports bras alone. Some of the stuff in the bag had been in there too long and is already too big for me. Apparently, I am a fitness clothes hoarder. Who knew THAT was a thing?
(none of the sports bras are pictured here; those are all shirts and pants)
Anyway, a huge portion of my day yesterday consisted of me trying on old stuff from my closet and from my Mary Poppins-esque bag of work-out clothes, and making room in my closet for the new buys.
What might be the best part about having reached a more human size is that I don't have to keep things just because they fit. I also don't have to buy clothes just because they fit. I have options now, which means I get to wear things that reflect my taste. I don't have to wear the god-awful rejects from the Lane Bryant couldn't-sell-it sale rack because the proper size is so hard to find; I get to actually choose clothes I like from a variety of stores! (AND I get to stop setting foot in Lane Bryant. No offense to anyone who enjoys shopping there, but for me, that place is a den of soul-crushing sadness with shame-faced shoppers avoiding eye contact with each other while trying to find the least ugly, least overpriced shit they could deign to wear in public that wouldn’t automatically reveal itself as something bought from a big-girl store. [Or maybe that was just me.])
Approaching normal sizes has taken the desperation out of shopping and made it fun instead of a daunting chore. I'm having to constantly fight the impulse to go purchase more to wear, because somehow I'm still losing rapidly enough that even the things I've bought since dropping my first 40-50 pounds are loose on me. I'm sure the good people at American Express will be making me customer of the year any day now.
Girly side activated.