Goal Clothes....Friend or Foe?

One of the many things that happens at work where 98% of us are women are the conversations. We are such an observant species that it just boggles my mind that we can agree and yet disagree about everything. I could get on a platform stage of a soap box the size of Carnegie Hall and break the walls down but I will step back and try to see this a few ways.

So I'm sure that everyone around this time of year has the annual Christmas parties. Some are extravagant with cocktail dresses and martinis and high heels and sneaky trips to the utility closet. They are filled with music and extravagant white elephant gifts with Christmas bonus declarations. Then there are some Christmas parties with both sides of the family getting together and everything goes wrong due to a squirrel and an untrained dog with a really lame Christmas bonus causing Cousin Eddy to go and kidnap your boss and deliver him in the middle of the living room with a giant red bow followed by an entire swat team coming in from every angle causing more damage than really necessary. Well I've never had either of those parties. We have pot lucks and leftovers for days.

I can understand that especially around the Holidays some people don't care about the amount of calories or carbs that happen and then there are some who decide to go on a diet right before the holidays. It's no secret that I've always been the biggest woman at work. But something that we all have at my place of work is our own sense of style. We like what we like and while recently some have been exiled from our dress code and from my work wardrobe, the topic of jeans come up.

Now depending on where you live, if you live in our west, dressing up can and often includes your nicest pair and best fitting jeans. Denim is practically in our blood and you don't ever let you go of them. Break out the Lord of the Rings meme,

Unless patching or sewing them back together doesn't hold both pieces of denim together, you wear the HELL out of them. But anyways, the whole point I'm trying to make is that somewhere in a drawer or in the back of the closet is that one pair. That one pair of jeans that you convince yourself if even for the smallest amount of time that you will fit back into. Miranda does it in Sex and the City, and from the sounds of it, every girl at work has one........but me.

Now don't get me wrong, I get the point of having goal jeans or goal clothes. Hanging up the bikini the first of January to get ready for "swimsuit season". And maybe the article of clothing holds some awesome memories that you want to try to reanimate? Maybe you felt the best about yourself in that particular article of clothing. Don’t get me wrong, I had them at one point in time. They weren't jeans but it was a pair of capris that I wore in Junior High......Junior high. I held onto them until I got to college and then I let them go.

It dawned on me that I didn't want to be that particular size, not because it was an unrealistic size goal, but a problem I tend to have is to live in the past. You can look at any person in my family and we will always talk about days gone by, the shoulda, woulda, coulda's and I just didn't want to do it anymore. It actually did the opposite of the motivation that so many others use it for. It made me realize that over time I have actually gone in the opposite direction of where I 'wanted' to be and I would look at the current me at whichever point in time I found those clothes and I felt terrible. Gut wrenching, Lifetime movie tear jerking terrible about the size I had become. So where I can see the point of the 'goal clothes', it is just a no go for me.

Cece Olisa from Plus Size Princess really put it into perspective for me in one of her posts about realizing that our size and our health is not on an annoying tag on the back of a shirt or jeans. It’s not about the number, it’s how we feel in what fits. Fits your shape, your personality and makes you feel like a million bucks. I don’t feel the need for ‘goal clothes’ but to each their own.