The Clothing Diet

Many of us can lose control of impulses in a variety of areas in life. Once you've lost control and engaged in unhealthy behaviours, you know what it feels like. It's like a lion in your belly that's hungry for dessert even though you know you're full. Binging doesn't just involve a Betty Crocker frozen cake. Binging can involve plastic baby. Or maybe it's the same type of relationship that's going no where. We all get wake up calls (hopefully sooner rather than later) or we can choose our wake up calls and create them before crisis strikes.

The New York Times published an article yesterday titled "Shoppers on a 'Diet' Tame the Urge to Buy Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy

Last summer, Ms. Bjornsen, 47, said she was thinking about how years of easy credit had led to overspending on cars, homes and luxury goods. Then, looking in her own closet, she realized that she was part of the problem, she said. For her job, as a representative of commercial photographers in Seattle and before that as a marketing executive at fashion companies like Nike and Nordstrom, she’d spent $5,000 to $10,000 a year on clothes.

“I was buying in an egregious way,” Ms. Bjornsen said. “I was just kind of grossed out by the whole thing.”

Independently, the “six items” experiment was conceived by two friends, Heidi Hackemer, 31, a strategic business director at the New York advertising agency BBH, and Tamsin Davies, 34, the head of innovation at Fallon London, after an informal discussion about their desires to pare down their wardrobes. The idea snowballed into a creative challenge, Six Items or Less.

Now let's face it. We all can have issues dealing with the abundance that most people in North America are blessed with. Maybe human beings aren't designed to live with so much choice, spending power and plentiful food all the time. Or maybe we all just need to learn how to love what we have, what we eat and not plug the holes in our soul with shit we don't need.

Of the 150-plus-people who signed up for the Great American Apparel Diet, about half have given up. Ms. Bjornsen’s own sister quit after four weeks. And she has herself cheated twice, once when she realized she had forgotten to bring her workout clothes to the gym, a second time when her husband told her that her pajamas looked worn out and gross. Though she said she feels no guilt about those indulgences, Ms. Bjornsen said that she was looking forward to the end of the diet on Aug. 31.

She had thought about ways to make money off the diet, she said, but instead she plans to pass on the management of the Web site to continuing and future participants.

“It’s taken about 10 to 20 years to build up the idea that nothing is good unless it is new,” Ms. Bjornsen said. “Five years from now, if the diet is still going, it would be interesting to see how that changes.”