Ep. 11- Spring Closet Clean Out.
April 18, 2024
It’s spring! Are you starting to pull out your summer clothes?
I want you to embrace the warmer seasons with confidence.
You will learn:
The importance of having clothes you LOVE
What to do about your clothes that don’t fit
How to feel good about where your body is now
Today I am doing a spring closet And this is inspired primarily by one of my clients who just did this. She got rid of three giant IKEA bags of clothes that are now too big. So I know some of us have the other problem where all of our clothes are too small if we're struggling with binge eating, which is what we're going to be mainly talking about today.
But because my client has worked with me now for We're approaching, our fifth month. We're going into our fifth month. She has lost some weight naturally from this process. It wasn't her major goal, but it has happened. And so she did a big closet clean out of everything that was too big so she can have things that fit.
For most of us around the world, it is also getting warmer. If you are in Australia, amazing welcome. I know it's getting colder for you, but for all of us, In the other side of the world, it is getting warmer and that means the clothes are coming out that are a little bit smaller and shorter and showing less skin.
This is my second day wearing a tank top of the season. Yesterday we had our first warm day in Colorado, so I brought out the skirt, brought out a tank top, and as we're doing that, we can have some drama come up. So, how do you feel about pulling out your summer clothes?
When you're pulling out the summer clothes is all the drama coming up about your body. And now maybe you suddenly think you need to lose 50 pounds because it's summer. Which is funny because I think people always know what our body looks like.
Like they can see just because we have a sleeve on, doesn't mean they can't see any part of her arm. Like most people know the general shape of her body already. So taking off a sleeve doesn't all of a sudden show them something brand new that they had no idea existed. That was the shape of your arm.
But if you are constantly binge eating I Know what it's like to be changing this Size of body a lot, right?
I used to keep all different sizes of clothing because my body was constantly changing I was trying to lose weight, but I was also gaining weight, but I was still at this current weight So I had like three different sizes at all times a pants Maybe you have even more than that if it's been going on for a really long time and you're like I want to keep all of these sizes around in case I change my body size more.
And what's so nice about achieving food freedom and listening to your hunger and fullness is that you're going to generally stay the same size. You're not going to fluctuate up and down all the time. Yes, our bodies are going to change throughout our lifetimes, which doesn't mean you're never going to have to buy new clothes, but once you can find how to listen to your hunger and fullness, you're going to stay within this natural weight range, and you're not going to have to go up and down.
But I do know how hard it is to feel like you're in this body that isn't really yours, it's not aligned with what you want, you feel like this isn't your natural weight, and so you want to have all these different clothing sizes to make sure you have ones that fit you. So if you're going through that, you know, it's okay to have different clothing sizes, but I want you to consider how you feel and what you think as you open up your closet every day.
You can see my closet, whoops, right here. I have my lovely dresser right here. How does it feel for me to open that now is so empowering, so freeing. I am in love with all my clothes. I love the way my closet is organized, but that might not be the case for you. And it definitely wasn't always the case for me.
So how do you think when you walk into your closet? Because going into your closet is something you do every single day. It's always how we start our day is opening up our closet. Choosing some clothes, putting them on.
So if that is not a fun experience for you, that's going to be really hard because it's something we do every day, so we want it to be an enjoyable experience for us.
It sets the tone for the rest of the day. So when you open your closet, when you open your dresser, does it make you feel the way you want to be feeling? Is this how you want to start out your day? And if it's not, we're going to work on it. Because if your closet is full of clothes that do not fit you and you do not like, it's going to be a really negative experience, not only to start your day off with, but to continue your day.
So you open up your closet and you feel like all of these clothes are too small for me All of them squeeze me in weird places. I don't like any of these colors. These are all super outdated I don't feel confident in any of my clothes. You put them on you're already judging your body. You're already saying wow. I really need to lose weight Wow, this jacket does not fit at all then as you continue throughout your day, you've already had this like first experience of judging yourself and shaming yourself and getting angry and frustrated and just not feeling confident. And that takes you through the rest of your day.
So then maybe you get to, let's say, lunch. Thinking about how this impacts your life, you get to lunch, you're making a food decision, and you're like, I really need to lose weight. So maybe you try to be restrictive at lunch and you're like, I need to fit back into these old clothes. Then the day continues on.
Maybe you start to overeat a little bit and then you say, you know what? Screw it. I'm already overweight. I've already gained weight. Let's just continue eating. And you are also thinking, you know, I really don't like myself. I don't really respect myself. I hate how I look right now. Nothing feels good on my body. And when you're in this place, it's really hard to make a respectful decision to ourself around food.
Making good food decisions, I think, is the best form of self respect because it's honoring what our body tells us. When our body tells us, I'm hungry. We want to give it food. And when our body tells us we're full, we want to stop.
That is what honoring and listening to our body is. But when we have already beaten ourself up all day, we're feeling really unconfident, we don't really like who we are, it's really hard to respect ourself too and to stay in line with those signals.
So we know how we're feeling currently when we go into our closet. Now I want you to consider how you want to feel instead. What would be the ideal emotion that would come up for you when you open your closet every day. Maybe it's joy. Maybe it's empowerment. Maybe it's confidence. Maybe it's relaxation. Whatever you want to feel, we want to get really intentional about that so we can create that for ourselves.
And how we're going to create this feeling when we open our closet and get dressed in the day is not by changing our body in this instant. Because if we are trying to change our body and lose weight, that is something that happens over a very long time, many months, if we want it to be sustainable.
That's not something that's going to happen tomorrow morning. And so in the meantime, We want to make sure that we're doing things that can help us feel good now in this moment right tomorrow Not in three months It's okay If you have a weight loss goal But it's gonna be much easier to meet that weight loss goal if we start feeling good now We start respecting yourself now. We start loving the way we are right now.
So, the first thing you're gonna do is find clothes That you love in this current body. Some of you might think that's impossible. It is not. Okay. There are hundreds of thousands of stores in person and online. Okay. There's not a shortage of clothes in this world and there's not a shortage of clothes within your budget.
So a lot of people will say, well, I just don't want to spend the money on this right now. I don't have extra money to buy clothes. Yes, you do. You can spend $10 going to a consignment store to find yourself a pair of jeans that fit good. Okay, you don't have to buy a brand new closet with all designer clothes.
You can make it work within your budget. I went to Kohl's the other day and I had a coupon and I went to the sale rack and I found some nice Levi jeans for like $30 that ended up being like $25 Which is great. They're amazing jeans. Love them. Now I have them, right? It doesn't need to be expensive, but we want to find clothes that we love right now.
Now if you know you're at a bigger body than you're meant to be, so if you've been binge eating for a long time, if you know you've been gaining weight from the binge eating and you suspect that if you stop binge eating you would be at a lower weight, it's okay to keep some of your favorite smaller clothes.
That is fine, but what you don't want to do is have an entire closet full of these smaller clothes. Just pick out your maybe top 10 items that you love, maybe you spent a lot of money on, that you want to keep, put them in a box and put them away. So you're not looking at them every day and thinking, man, I feel horrible because I'm not at that size right now.
And I would really like to wear that dress. Okay, just get it out of your mind. When you get to that size, you will have those clothes available to you, but you don't need to be looking at them every day because that's just going to make you feel shitty about yourself.
The second thing we're going to do to start feeling good about getting dressed and being in our clothes is to change our thoughts about our body as it is right now.
So I want you to think about when you're going to get dressed in the morning, So, what do you tell yourself about your body? What thoughts come up? If they're really negative ones, we want to shift those. And when we're shifting our body thoughts, we don't want to go to something that's extremely positive if we don't believe that about ourself.
So what most people will do is they look up like body affirmations and they'll put on their dress that they don't really like, that they don't feel confident in. They'll go to the mirror and they'll say, I am beautiful. I am worthy. I look great. But the problem is you don't believe any of those things.
So it doesn't work. You still feel the same because you're like, well, these thoughts are like way up here and I feel way down here. So we want to find thoughts that are in this middle ground that are neutral. So when we're getting dressed in the morning, some thoughts that you can use instead are, this is my body.
That is a very neutral thought. Right. These are my arms. These are my thighs. They're not good arms or bad arms or fat arms or skinny arms They're just arms, period. Putting a period at the end of your sentence not letting your brain run on with all the drama. Some other things you can do to change your thoughts is remind yourself that your body is one very very small aspect of who you are as a person.
So a lot of times we filter our entire world through how we look because that's how we're trained as women and also as people who are in a diet obsessed society. And we want to get rid of that. We want to remind ourselves that when we're getting dressed in the morning, it is really not that big of a deal.
It is just one small decision that we're making and there's so much to us and who we are as people Besides the what size shirt we're wearing that day and how it looks on our body. Okay, we're gonna change our clothes And then we're going to change our thoughts, because both of those are things we are going to do that don't require us to change how our body is right now.
Remember, weight loss is happening over a long period of time. It's not going to happen tomorrow morning. But we can start feeling good about our body tomorrow morning, right now. And that's going to make it so much easier for us to do all of our eating goals. Because we've started our day with self respect and self love.
So, when we're getting dressed in the morning, we also might be thinking about What other people are gonna think about us, right? Like, they're gonna think I'm fat. They're gonna think I don't look good in this. But the only reason we think other people are having those thoughts about ourself is because we think them about ourselves.
So if someone came up to me and is like, I hate your purple hair, It wouldn't bother me because I don't have purple hair. I don't believe my hair is purple. So it doesn't bother me But if someone came up to you and said I hate that shirt and you're like, oh my god I do hate this shirt. This is a horrible shirt.
Then it would really affect you But if you're like wait, no, this is my favorite shirt Like that's so sad that you don't like it. Like I actually really like this shirt Do you notice how it's only when you believe that thing about yourself? that the other people's thoughts matter. So that's why we always work on our thoughts first, because then it doesn't matter what any people are thinking.
We can never control what other people are thinking and feeling. All we can control is what we are thinking and feeling. So we create that for ourself first, and then it becomes so much easier to move about the world without worrying about what others are going to think about us.
The last thing I want to say, our clothes are meant to fit us. We are not made to fit into our clothes. Let me say that again. Our clothes are meant to fit us. We are not meant to fit into the clothes. If our clothes do not fit us, we go find new clothes. We don't need to try to fit into our clothes. We can just go buy new ones that fit us now and it's amazing and then you, everything just works so much better when we're feeling good in our clothes and we're not getting squeezed all day and they're uncomfortable and we just don't feel confident in them. It's no fun.
So, that is what I want you to do. This weekend is coming up. Consider doing a spring closet clean outs, right? Spring cleaning, it's always a big theme. Why not clean out your closet? It can be super freeing, super empowering. and help you go into the summer feeling a lot more confident.