I am enjoying my new study area so much. I actually spend time in there of an evening now, checking emails and reading publications. I don’t watch much TV and the study is a such a nice place to be now that it actually relaxes me.

Last night I was ironing a shirt for work and I took a long hard look at my wardrobe and decided that I really need to have a big clean out and not only clean out, but simplify, my clothes.

Because my weight has yoyoed a bit at times I have always kept clothes with the ‘when I lose 5kg’ mentality. This has got to stop because I have such a wide range of sizes in my clothes that it is getting difficult to find things.

Over the next few weeks I will take time in the evenings to do a strip down, by which I mean, empty a drawer, strip myself down and try on everything in the drawer. If it is too big, it goes in the goodwill bin, if it is snug it stays (as I plan to lose 18kg over the next year) because I will get back into it.

None of this keeping baggy clothes from my fat days, just in case I put the weight back on again. THAT is definitely NOT the right kind of thinking.

The aim here is to simplify the wardrobe. If I allow myself to get fat again, then it will be an expensive exercise to have to get new clothes and that in itself should be incentive enought to not put on weight !!

The other thing is that I have so many clothes that I don’t actually have a ‘style of dress’ anymore. Lots of different things have crept in that have been bought, not because I liked them, but because they were the only things I could find that would fit. As I got fatter, the option of buying classy clothes got further out of reach. I just tended to make do with whatever I could get to fit me.

Now that I have lost 10kg I am findind that I can actually fit into nicer styles. I have just bought 3 trendy shirts that have a beautiful fit which means that I can get rid of some of the ‘tent shirts’ that I used to wear.

Re-designing my wardrobe is a great opportunity to simplify my wardrobe at the same time. I have decided on 4 catagories of dress:

Business
Formal going out
Neat casual
Sloppy weekender

The same catagories apply for winter and summer. By simplifying to classic styles I should be able to do a mix and match on clothes and not only cut down the amount of clothes I have, but also simplify the ‘what shall I wear?’ decision process as well!!