After the gastric sleeve, you will be losing a ton of weight and need new clothes; now, what do you do with the old ones?
For us, we gave ours away to the Salvation Army at one of the clothes drop-off points outside of our local Tesco’s; all in all, we probably got rid of 10 big bin bags between the both of us and 5 or so other bin bags that just went in the bin, like T-shirts that might have had a stain on them, colors worn, etc.
This was not all at once; our first trip was about 3 months after surgery, we gave away about 5 bags, then at 4 months we gave away 3, at this stage we also purchased all our new clothes as we were starting to run out.
In our case, we could afford to delay buying new clothes because, over time, as our weight yo-yo’d, as we lost and regained it, we had a decent amount of clothes in various sizes. As we finally lost the weight, gradually we started fitting into these clothes once again, delaying the need to buy new ones.
In our fifth month, we donated another 2 bags, and we probably have 4 more bags of clothes to donate for clothes that are still fitting but just, another couple of weeks and they will be gone, once that’s done all our clothes we owned pre-surgery will be gone, 5 months post-surgery.
We have kept on a couple of clothing items more for a comparison, as part of the process of losing weight, you lose it so fat that your mind takes a while to catch up, and when we look in the mirror, we feel we are still larger than we really are. So, we have things like a pair of jeans where putting those on makes it so clear how much progress has been made.
You can do other things if you don’t want to donate, for example, sell them on like vinted and make some money; some people we got surgery from have made upwards of £700 doing this. For us personally, it’s too much of a hassle, so we opted to donate.
Other things you can do would include:
- Donate to animal shelters
- Use as craft materials
- Give them to Friends or Family
- Turn into cleaning rags
- If you like to sew, you can alter them so they still fit
- If your Into fashion, use them to create new clothes and try out your designs without having to use more expensive materials
Just a few other things you could do with them!