A client shared this message yesterday:

I can’t tell you how much I love this!

There is nothing more fabulous than a woman seeing results and claiming her right to look good and feel sexy.

Often the women I work with “hide” in clothes that are too big.

They wear these big clothes long after they release weight.

There can be many reasons for this.

In some cases, they may literally dread clothes shopping.

I totally get this.

Clothes shopping used to be a nightmare for me.

And nothing was worse than shopping for a pair of jeans. I might literally try on 50 pairs of jeans trying to find the one that didn’t emphasize all the wrong places. There were many shopping trips that I ended up in tears.

I can pinpoint when this started to change.

Around this time in 2010, after losing about 30 pounds, it was clearly time to invest in some smaller clothes.

While I was excited, those old negative thoughts about shopping  started to bubble up.

• “I’m never going to find anything that fits and looks good.”
• “Nothing looks good on me.”
• “My body doesn’t look like most women’s and things just don’t work on me.”
• Etc.

By the time the weekend shopping trip came around, I was in a full-blown panic.

Sure enough, the first store I went to didn’t have anything that I thought looked good—even though I was fitting into size 6 pants. That alone should have sent me over the moon!

That old sense of dread returned as my husband drove me to a department store, and I was tempted just to go home and order some pants online—my old standby. Why put myself through this torture?

As we walked up to the front doors, I realized what I was doing.

I was creating the same old reality with all this old negative thinking.

I was in such a state that even if I tried on the perfect pair of jeans, I probably would have thought they looked terrible. I couldn’t see anything other than what I was expecting.

So I took a deep breath and reached for some better feeling thoughts.

“They have lots of clothes here. There’s bound to be something that makes me look and feel good. I am wearing smaller sizes than ever before and my body shape has changed. Maybe I just need to try a different style than I normally wear.”

It wasn’t a huge mental shift. But it didn’t have to be. It was enough of a change that I felt a sense of relief.

That’s all it took.

My husband handed me a pair of Levi’s–a brand that had never looked good on me. I was skeptical, but I told myself to remain open to possibilities, and took them to the dressing room.

As I slipped on the Levi’s, they fit perfectly!

I turned and looked in the mirror and for the first time . . . maybe ever . . . I loved what I saw!

Woo hoo! I had finally found the perfect pair of jeans!

Me wearing my brand new pair of jeans.

I learned right there that just because I’ve had a bad experiences in the past doesn’t mean that I am destined to repeat that same scenario for eternity.

But it took me shifting my thoughts, beliefs, and expectations even just a little so that I could see the experience as new.

Now I love helping other women have similar experiences and finally love the way they look. (Even before they release the weight!)

The truth is, you are too sexy for those big, old pants that you are hiding in. Right here, right now—no matter what your weight—you deserve to feel and look good.

Shift your thoughts . . . about yourself, about your weight, about your clothes, about what other people may think, about what you deserve . . . just a little bit and notice how different the results can be.

Together we can do it!