Day 233. 151 pounds lost.
My signature item(s) in my closet for almost 6 years were yoga pants made by Old Navy. I must have had at least 10 pairs; they were all the same. They were a 31 inseam, 7% spandex and modal, 2 pockets, and boot cut around the ankles. I can tell you all about them because they were pretty close to the only things I wore. I learned every single way to dress up or down these black yoga pants. Around the house, it was yoga pants and tank tops. When going out, I’d throw a sweater on over them and wear a pair of nice shoes. Bam! Here’s the real reason I had so many pairs: I literally could not find anything else that fit right. At my highest, I was a size 36-38 womens. There’s not a whole lot of anything that fits right at that size. Nothing is comfortable.
About two years ago, I went online to Old Navy to purchase MORE yoga pants so I could keep new black pairs all the time. To my absolute horror, they were all sold out of my size. For weeks, I kept checking the website, and they still hadn’t been restocked. I was annoyed. All the pairs I had were starting to fade. “WTF Old Navy, get your sh*t together” was all I thought for weeks.
After two months they finally posted a notice on the website…. “This item has been discontinued.” As I stared at the monitor, I could only cry. What the hell was I going to do? After several days of panic, I decided that I would just make these ten pairs work. I would take extra good care of them, and I could make them last forever.
One by one the ten pairs of pants started dying. One pair I had on while I was painting. I was wearing an apron being extra careful, but I accidentally bumped into the wall, and there was huge paint spot on the right. “Shit”….. that sucks. The second pair caught the rough edge of the door frame to the bedroom. I heard the rip “cchhhkdkdk”……. “oh god”! Some of them had been washed so many times that the fabric literally wore through. Many a night I spent on my couch in the living room repairing holes on the upper parts of the legs desperately trying to keep the only thing that fit together.
As of today, there is one pair that still lingers around. They are ten sizes too big but for whatever reason I kept wearing them. Everything has happened so fast over the last 7.5 months that sometimes my brain struggles to catch up. Somewhere in my head, my subconscious made the decision that I needed to cling to this last pair. Buddha said, “You can only lose what you cling to.” Sometimes we hang on so fiercely that our sense of self-becomes hopelessly intertwined with the things that were part of our life. In my case, it was these damn yoga pants.
It took going upstairs and looking in the mirror with this huge pair of pants on my body to convince my eyes that I didn’t need them anymore. I don’t have to fear that I am going to be naked anymore– but there was a time this fear was real.
*smile*.
*tosses the yoga pants in the trash and throws on some ACDC*
BOOM.
Lovingly,
Bean
