Embracing Minimalism: How to Lose Weight Without Really Trying
Shedding a ton of baggage cost me, but it was the best $500 I ever spent.
I can clearly remember the day I threw $500 into a landfill. Nearly everything I owned followed.
Actually, I gave the cash to the “JUNK” man. Instead of selling my heart to him, I handing over my $500. Technically, he wasn’t a junkman at all. He was a guy who drove a van for the fine folks at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and in return, he hauled away all the physical baggage I’d been hanging onto for three and a half years and deposited it into that aforementioned landfill. While the company he worked for padded their coffers by half a grand, Public Storage at 30 Prince Street in Brooklyn became $137 a month poorer.
Don’t cry for them, though. They had a very good run.
It was February of 2010, and I was visiting New York City from my then-home of Argentina, shortly after selling my Manhattan apartment. It would be the last time I’d step foot in the United States for nine years (though I didn’t know that at the time), and since I was a one-bedroom apartment lighter, I decided to go back to NYC to lose the rest of the excess weight I’d been carrying since becoming an expat and kick off my decade-long dance with minimalism.
I never felt so light and weightless, and losing all those excess pounds didn’t require months of hunger pangs and grueling workouts. It took clinging to all that stuff I clearly didn’t need and then dumping it to understand the health benefits of minimalism.
After moving to Buenos Aires in September of 2006, I spent the next three and a half years paying $137 a month to store a bunch of belongings I’d spent 15 years accumulating. On the day I arranged for it to be hauled away, it all officially became “junk”: a bed, two small couches, and several other pieces of furniture; a half-dozen framed posters; four wardrobe boxes of clothing; books; outdated electronics (including a virtually fossilized Palm Pilot!); assorted knick-knacks; a pile of writing clips and every magazine my work had appeared in…
