Practicing non-attachment, except when it comes to clothes.

Have you ever had one of those weekends where you are just so super-productive and motivated that you find you are marvelling at yourself? That was me, this weekend. I don’t know if it’s a Spring Cleaning Urge or a Nesting Without The Pregnancy thing, but I just had that feeling that I needed to Do All The Things. I probably would have accomplished even more, had it not been for the necessity of meal preparation and sleep. I had one of those wash the windows, scrub down the kitchen cupboards, clean every possible surface kind of weekends, and I’m still riding the wave a little bit.

The boys and I cleaned out their drawers and donated everything that they didn’t like or didn’t fit, and then Jake and I cleaned out his bookshelves and toys. Let me tell you, that kid is a good purger. Maybe he was just in the same mood as I was, but we have bags and bags of donations, with a sparkling clean room to boot. I have started to do the same for Mark’s room, which is much more difficult as he has slight pack rat tendencies.

Well, I can’t fault him too much. I was at a gathering with friends over the weekend, and we were talking about the Kondo Tidying-Up Method. One of my girlfriends (HI JO) cleaned out and donated three-quarters of her wardrobe. She told me she has something like four t-shirts and five tank tops now, and upon hearing this my face looked exactly like this:

I mean, I tried the Kondo method for my wardrobe and it turns out that everything I have “sparks joy.” YES I DO NEED TWENTY-FIVE BLACK SWEATERS WHAT OF IT? When I did go through the process again recently, I ended up getting rid of a couple of pairs of shoes and two workout t-shirts that I SWEAR gave me body odour. I am not kidding – they were made of some kind of “sweat-wicking” bamboo, and every time I wore them I actually smelled like some teenage kid’s gym locker. Right now you’re probably thinking Sure, blame the t-shirts, but it’s true! Any other t-shirt I wear just smells like deodorant after a workout, but these smelled like actual body odour. Not wanting to smell like some kind of feral hippie, I gave up and donated them.

I just had a thought – what if that’s bad karma? What if someone else now has those shirts and is wondering why they suddenly have BO? What if this is a monkey paw situation?

Well, it’s too late to do anything about it at this point.

The point is, I love my wardrobe. I feel like I’ve been cultivating it for years and I love every garment in it. This was the entire motivation for my twelve pound weight loss since August. I know I haven’t been talking about it much, but last summer I had put on a “few pounds,” and that was in addition to a “few pounds” that had been slowly creeping on with time. It’s funny; if you saw me every day you might not have even noticed, but my clothes  were gradually getting tighter. My right hip was bothering me a lot, and that was affecting my yoga practice, which in turn was probably negatively affecting my weight. My energy levels were lower, but it was gradual so I didn’t really realize it. It wasn’t until after I came home from my in-laws’ house after consuming way too many Palm Bay coolers, and snacking mindlessly, that I really noticed. I had been wearing stretchy skirts for most of the summer, so it was a bit of a shock when I put on my jeans and…well, they buttoned up, but the button was a potentially deadly weapon, if you know what I mean.

Then I got on the scale and I saw a number that I hadn’t seen since Jake was a baby. That was a bit of a wake-up call; it’s so easy to slowly put on pounds, and there are obvious health implications to it. I thought, if I gained five (or more) pounds every year, things would start to add up and none of my clothes would fit. Also, as we all know, with weight gain health, energy, etc., suffers but MY CLOTHES.

I’m happy to say that those “few pounds” and more (TWELVE!) are now gone; it was a combination of much more mindful eating and also adding in three cardio exercise workouts a week. I have dessert only once or twice a week, I don’t snack after supper, and I have a spinach smoothie every day. I have so much more energy now – even on weekends that I don’t decide that I need to clean the whole house top to bottom. I still have wine on the weekends, because life isn’t worth living without a glass of Cabernet, in my humble opinion. I mean, I have to draw the line somewhere.

The important thing? My clothes fit again. I don’t have to re-buy my wardrobe and my favourites are still my favourites. Which is good, because if you don’t want to part with any of your clothes, you need to be sure those clothes fit.