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I have to tell you that I’m LOVING my minimalist lifestyle. I have more time, more money, and best of all? More freedom. One of the best side benefits of my new lifestyle is that I have lost weight. I have lost more than 35 pounds over the past year. How did this happen? Did I make a conscious effort to lose the weight I needed to lose? Not really but I am always active and make sure to exercise daily and I try to be aware of what I am putting into my body.
So what changed? I changed and so did my eating habits. One of the biggest things I did that contributed to my moving toward the minimalism way of life was moving from South Florida to rural North Florida. We have our business on our property so we do not pay rent for our warehouse. We are able to support local charities. Because we are on 4 acres, we have 5 rescue dogs (we did have 6 but just lost our oldest guy, Houdini, at 17 years of age), a rescue cat, and 3 rescue horses.
One major highlight of moving to where we are is the easy access to farmer’s produce along with our own summer garden. When we do need to purchase something from the store, we shop locally and select organic for as many things as possible. Not only do we eat better this way, we are supporting the local mom and pop businesses in our area. We stay out of WalMart. Processed foods? Not in our house. Soda? No, we only drink water or tea. Did you know that two of the worst processed foods for your body are soda and chips? You will not find either in our home.
In addition to the changes we made unwittingly in our eating habits, I started training for 5K’s and a triathlon scheduled for June. As I am over 50, I found that many my age are not active and this often occurs from being crazy busy with your career followed by raising a family. Health and fitness is just not part of the picture, at least not in the way it should be on a day to day basis. (You can follow my journey to the triathlon on our blog HowToStayFitOver50.com.)
Believe it or not, this post is not about getting and living healthier. This post is about my almost slipping into old habits that I had thought I had moved on from. An amazing side effect of losing weight is that your clothes get too large – ta da! What a great feeling it is when you can just put your jeans on without even using the zipper let alone laying on the bed to zip them up (come on – we all know we’ve done this).
My clothes were getting really too large to continue wearing and lucky for me, knowing that I was losing weight, I saved SOME of my clothes in the sizes I would be moving toward. Notice I said SOME. The others have been given to the local community thrift shops. One thing I caught myself doing, however, was as I was bringing out smaller sized clothes to wear, I was keeping the larger size clothes. Why was I doing that? Old habit. I have always put away the larger clothes “just in case”. Well guess what? I caught that I was doing this and can happily say that as one piece of smaller size clothing is brought out into the wardrobe, I am donating a larger size to the local thrift shops. Besides I am NOT going back into those larger size clothes anyway so why do I want to save them?
Bottom line? If I had not become aware of what I was inadvertently doing with my clothes, I would have slipped back into saving things that I really don’t want nor need especially when there are so many that can use these clothes. The moral of the story is to always be in the moment and especially be aware of what we are doing. If we are not conscious of what we are doing as we are doing it, old habits start to creep back in. Don’t let them. I didn’t!
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