Do you keep that old pair of jeans you used to fit into? Or maybe the little black dress that you wore to a Christmas Party once?
Items of clothing that are hanging in your closet, that you see every morning, that remind you of how you once looked.
Maybe you keep them because you hope to one day fit back into them 🩷 You think that they are inspirational or maybe even motivational. You keep them because you want them to be clothes you look at and they help you get "back there".
We totally get that, we used to do the exact same thing and we discussed in detail about how it effected us on this podcast episode.
Until we realized that those clothes are the exact same thing as weighing yourself everyday. They take you out of your internal feeling and put you into the external.
You could have woken up feeling so damn amazing. You feel rested, you body feels good, you feel positive.... then you walk into your closet and those feelings are stolen away by those old pair of jeans.
Now you hate your body again. You miss the "feeling" those jeans gave you. You feel defeated.
Seeing your old clothes and the feeling you had while wearing them makes you feel like you can’t have that same feeling now. That you can’t be confident, happy, sexy in your body right now.
It shifts you into restriction mode- even if you don’t realize it (it could be deep in your subconscious). So you spend the day second guessing what you eat and how much you eat. Disconnecting you from your intuitive eating skills.
The mental restriction then triggers increased cravings and hyper-desire to eat. And girl, when you paired that with feeling emotional - it is a recipe for over eating!
What I think is most important is how those clothes shift you out of focusing on your internal self to basing your self worth on your external body. Healing from low body image, self-esteem and confidence is about learning how to love yourself from within.
Unlearning all of the programming society has taught you about what you should look like, how you should dress and how you should act. And instead being your TRUE authentic self.
For me (Shayna), after I healed my relationship with my body- those old clothes weren't appealing anymore. Because they represented my life when I was trying to fit into the box. When I wasn't my true authentic self. My style changed to match how I wanted to feel, and that is when my self confidence truly came. So those old clothes didn't contain those old "feelings" anymore.
So what should you do with them? We suggest packing them up and putting them away, for now. We aren't saying that you need to donate them or throw them away- just get them out of your closet.
Give yourself the ability to get dressed in the morning without distraction and clothes that steal your happiness.
And as time passes and your body image is healing, then you can revisit those clothes. Who know, maybe you will be like Shayna and they won't appeal to you anymore!
Whatever the outcome, you will be happy you let yourself free of the grip they had on you!
Listen to us talk more in-depth about body image and cleaning out your closet on Apple podcast or Spotify.
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