Dear Shopping Savage...

Dear Shopping Savage,

I am a 26-year old single woman. I recently underwent the lap band procedure to help me lose weight. As ecstatic as I am about the end results, I'm not that excited about losing most of my wardrobe. While I'm losing weight I still want to be cute and fabulous without it costing me a fortune. What do you suggest I wear during the interim sizes between where I am now and where I want to be eventually?

Sincerely,

Lost in Lap Band Land

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Dear L.L.B.L.,

Just because you're losing weight, doesn't mean you have to lose all of your closet...at least at once. For the first few months, I would suggest you wear any empire waist dresses hanging in your closet. This will allow for movement, breath-ability (which, if you have any bandaging or compression garments to wear, as well as soreness, you'll thank me later) and could be worn even when you start to drop dress sizes. But once these dresses become too large to wear even after belting them, then my next suggestion would be to move onto the wrap dress. Again, this style offers the same allowances as the empire waist dress, but with the added bonus of being "adjustable" to fit your (shrinking) size.

At the end of this stage you should be just over a six-month hump and down several dress sizes and overall inches. Now you should feel comfortable enough with your new size in reinvesting in a few go-to pieces again (Women's Wardrobe Basics Checklist). You can generate an extra clothing allowance by selling clothing pieces (and even accessories) that are now just too large for you to wear to any local consignment stores or on eBay.

Even pieces that you may have recently purchased will, as the weight continues to come off through proper diet and exercise, need to be resold. The benefit of this is that the newer and more current pieces will probably yield you back close to what you paid (or at least a good portion of it) and you don't have a closet full of in-between clothing that you can't wear.

Cycling out your bigger pieces will remind you not only of how far you've come, but also that you don't have a choice but to maintain the weight loss because you don't have any larger pieces to fall back on (i.e. fit back into).

Another good use of consignment stores is that they're not just good for selling your items, but for also buying new (or gently used) things. It's true what they say, one woman's loss is another woman's gain and in this instance you've got the best of both worlds - you're trading weight lose for an even bigger closet gain.

Need sartorial advice? Email me: ShoppingSavage@gmail.com