Off the shelf shopping

Still smoking & drinking but certainly a little thiner

I was a weird size, I was too big for the average shop to stock my size but I was really too small for those stores for the larger person (Big & Tall etc).  This was really annoying and made it really difficult to shop in the UK, even when I could find 44" trousers they were normally for somebody 7' tall and so always needed altering.  Luckily I travel to the US quite a bit and just got in to a routine where I would buy clothes whenever I was in the country, almost regardless of whether I needed them or not at that time.  I think at the last count I had 14 pairs of jeans, almost all the same colour and style, purchased over a few years in a selection of sizes.

One of the surprising benefits of losing weight has made buying clothes more fun than the chore it always was.  I can now walk in to a shop and expect them to at least stock my size (32-34" waist as of December 2012), although now it's more a question of do they have availability……I was really surprised at how much this meant to me.  Obviously subconsciously this had been playing on my mind although the penny didn't drop until I purchased a pair of trousers recently on the spur of the moment as we were camping and I needed some outdoor cargo type trousers, we went in to a shop and had them sorted within 5 minutes.  2 years ago this would have taken 3+ hours and was at best a 50/50 chance of actually making a purchase.  Whilst I don't think I'll ever be as keen on clothes shopping as Nikki, I certainly don't mind spending an hour picking out items for my new wardrobe.

Giving away our old wardrobes was very satisfying.  Nikki and I spent a few hours going through all of our clothes, on more than one occasion, filling black bags with recycling.  I commented on Facebook at the time that somewhere in Africa are 14 pairs of my jeans being used as village halls or classrooms; they certainly couldn't use any of them for their intended purpose without some serious alterations.

The golden rule I think is to get rid of the clothes as soon as possible, you don't want to slip back into the old ways of eating and for it to be easy to grab a larger shirt from the wardrobe.