How I lost 10 pounds in a week (kind of??)

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Hi, dear friend. Jen Glantz here.

If you opened this email and thought that your girl was going to give you dieting advice, you might need a refresher on the mess that I am.

I eat pizza 4x a week and constantly Google how to eat more protein but then don't actually listen to any of the advice. I don't own a scale and honestly feel genuine love and respect for my body, especially after seeing how it changed being pregnant, giving birth, and postpartum.

So today's newsletter isn't on how to change your body, but how to spend January shedding heaviness around you.

How can you welcome change and newness if your life is cluttered by so much old? Scroll for that below.

But first, I missed you so much. I haven't sent out a newsletter in a month. I used this time to make the tiny little moments of life electric — playing pretend at the playground with Gem, spiraling inward about what I want to do next, and typing up drafts of what I want to share with you here.

I've been writing this newsletter for a decade. I always blab it's my favorite thing to do but now I want to prove that to you. I'm vowing that this year, what you read here will be thoughtful, brave, helpful, and a thrill.

Here we are in 2025. We made it. Let's figure this year out together.

👏 Instant Pick Me Ups

🛒: Things I loved so far this month:

• I’m doing a month of no Amazon. But here’s the last thing I bought on December 31st before Midnight.

• I wear my Athleta comfy sets every day. Affordable, stylish, and super cozy. Here’s what I’ve been loving the most: These sweat joggers and this zip up hoodie.

• Still obsessed with these Nikes. The elevated heel transforms my casual outfit.

📖: A book I like to gift friends when they are going through a blahhh time or need a new year pick me up.

🎵: A sweet tiny desk concert for a good morning.

🧑‍🍳: I want this year to be my healthy year but to make that happen, I have to start cooking. This is my sweet but healthy treat of the week.

⏰: Maybe stop living like you'll be here forever. You won't. Never long enough, so why do we act like we have thousands of tomorrow's left?

On New Year's Eve, I woke my family up at 6am with Swiffer dusters, Clorox wipes, and garbage bags. My husband probably thought he was sleeping in his worst nightmare.

But something you should know about me is that I've become extra anxious in my older years and no holiday makes me more jittery than the New Year.

While everyone is off resolving to be the less toxic version of themselves, I'm on the verge of a panic attack.

New Years come with change, choices, and second chances, which can be a beautiful thing, but entirely scary too. Especially because so much that happens to us in a year, happens to us. We can't predict most of it. We have to surrender. We have to find ways — often new ways — to keep moving and survive.

Can you see why I was no chill — 0% chill — on New Year's Eve?

The only way I know how to tame my anxiety is to aggressively deep clean. When I was 42 weeks pregnant, I was scrubbing actual walls in my apartment, for the fourth time that month, with soap and water, because by that point I had nested too hard and there wasn't anything else in my vicinity that needed to be cleaned.

So as my precious little family is trying to persuade me to go outside, live my life, make a pile of new memories to end the year, I am handing each of them cleaning supplies.

We must clean out the old! We must rid of the dust! We must make space in our hearts...I mean our living space for all that will enter!

It made sense to me that instead, or at least before, declaring how we all wanted to change in 2025, we had to get rid of the things weighing us down.

So here's how we lost 10 pounds before the New Year — and how we're still in the tossing mode around here.

Clean out every single closet and drawer (estimated: 6 pounds)

• You have to be in the mood for this. If you are too busy, do it in steps. First, list out every drawer and closet you have. Then pick one to do at a time.

• Have bags ready to go. One bag is to donate and one bag can be for your unsure pile. Revisit your unsure pile at the end of the clean out.

• If you seriously need to do this, set a “no online spending” challenge for yourself. Promise you won’t buy anything new unless you first finish cleaning out the old.

• If you could use a little extra cash, create a pile that you can sell. I made $1,000 on Poshmark during my 2022-2023 deep clean outs.

• I did round one of this in December and realized I need to do a second round. I went to find an outfit to wear to the ballet and stared at a rack of clothing that does not fit me anymore and needs to donated. Round two is this week.

• Also deep clean your fridge and pantry!!!!

Go through texts and missed calls, clear your inbox, delete contacts & apps (estimated: 1000 pounds of mental weight)

• It’s hard to think clearly when your digital world is a mess. Clean it out.

• Start with your phone. Delete all your text messages — except the threads you want to keep. Move to your missed calls. Delete that list. I have 379 missed calls and am reminded of this whenever I open my phone. I cleared all of them so I don’t have to think about all the people I didn’t call back in 2024.

• Inboxes are so personal. I’m an inbox zero girlie. If you are not, clean yours up in any way that makes sense so you can take a deep breath when you see it.

• I also deleted 15 apps on my phone. If I don’t use it, I don’t need it clogging up space.

• Head to your phone contacts. Delete people you simply don’t know or talk to anymore. I loved this:

  overheardnewyork

  

  A post shared by @overheardnewyork

Set limits on toxic people in your life (estimated: 76000 pounds of mental weight)

• I made a list of all the toxic people in my life (luckily there aren’t many). These are people who are not only energy and time hogs — but they simplify don’t reciprocate in the friendship. It’s important to recognze the people in your life that are constantly dragging you around.

• Even more, it’s important to set limits to how often you will entertain their drama. It can’t consume your every day or week. I made a rule that I will only answer their calls/text 1x a week to free up energy.

Release abandoned projects (estimated: 300 pounds of mental weight)

• Listen, we need to have a heart-to-heart about those half-finished projects taking up space in your closet and your mind. You know the ones — that sweater you started knitting in 2020, the scrapbook from your college years that's still empty, the furniture you swore you'd refinish. Be honest with yourself: are you actually going to finish these? If the answer isn't an immediate "YES!" followed by actual excitement, it's time to let go….for now.

• My friend had craft supplies from 2018 sitting in her spare room. TWENTY EIGHTEEN. She finally admitted she wasn't going to make those DIY wedding centerpieces (she’s not even planning a wedding?) and donated everything to a local school. The relief was instant.

• Those to-do lists from last year? Delete them. All of them. They're just ghosts of good intentions haunting your Notes app. Start fresh — but this time, be realistic about what you're actually going to do.

• The "someday" projects are the worst offenders. You know, the ones that make you feel guilty every time you look at them? That guitar you're going to learn to play "someday," that language app you'll "definitely" use? If they're just sitting there making you feel bad, it's time to say goodbye.

• Here's your permission slip to move on. Seriously. You don't have to finish everything you start. Sometimes the lesson is in letting go.

• But if something is making your heart sing, listen to it. That might be the only sound you need to figure out what to focus on this year.

Clean up your social world (estimated: 250 pounds of mental weight)

• Time for some brutal honesty about your social media. That wellness influencer who makes you feel terrible about your pizza habit? Gone. The DIY mom who seems to make everything from scratch? Bye. If looking at their content makes you feel like garbage, hit unfollow. Your mental health will thank you.

• Those Facebook groups you joined in 2021 that now just spam your notifications? Leave them behind. You don't need 47 notifications a day about things you stopped caring about two years ago.

• Your friends list probably has more names than your high school yearbook. Time to clean house. If you wouldn't say hello to them in real life, why are you sharing your life with them online? Consider editing this.

👏 Pick Me Up for the Week

The truth is that the appeal of a "New You" doesn't have to do with exercising more, making more money, or accomplishing any other concrete change. Rather, it's about obtaining a sense of security and control over life. With a new year beginning, we want to finally feel that we're in the driver's seat when it comes to our health, finances, personality traits, and so on. We want to rid ourselves of the feeling so vividly described by the English novelist Arnold Bennett that the years slip by and slip by and slip by and then we have not yet been able to get our lives into proper working order. - Wall Street Journal

👏 Progress Report

• I have so many life updates to share with you — from meeting the new person who moved into our old apartment to finishing my C00o0ol Little Thing. I’ll start updating you on these next week.

• I’m creating a lot of new perks of this newsletter — some free and but most for those who pay $6 a month. Perks will include: monthly workshops, 1:1 vent sessions, free goodies, and a bonus post a week. More on this next week too!

• You can support the newsletter, if you’d like, for less than a latte (a NYC latte). Thank you!!!