Area helps woman lose 4K pounds

SANDPOINT — Patty Fadhouli only lived in Sandpoint for about a year, but during that time she lost 4,000 pounds — of material things.

Fadhouli moved Sandpoint to work at Coldwater Creek in 2013, just months before the company shut down. She worked for an accessory retail company in Houston prior to being hired as by Coldwater Creek. As the moving company began delivering boxes to Fadhouli's small, rented townhouse at Seasons, she was surprised to see so many boxes arriving.

One of the movers then informed her that she had 6,000 pounds of "stuff."

"I realized that what I had been doing was using shopping as a kind of therapy," Fadhouli said.

Fadhouli was using shopping as an outlet to create beauty, seeking beauty in all the "pretty accessories and pretty things."

"When I got to Sandpoint I looked at the beauty of where I was compared to the beauty of what I was buying," she said. "There is almost no comparison and it really kind of put things into perspective for me."

She said it didn't take much or very long to gain that perspective once she laid eyes on Lake Pend Oreille and the Cabinet Mountains, which she could view from her townhouse. She always wanted to be a writer and a real estate investor, and she always had a love for photography and charity work. In Houston she felt as if she was too busy to do any of those things but Sandpoint reminded her that she was capable of so much more than trying to become thinner and looking for a husband. She was always working or going from one social engagement to the next, she said.

Before she left Sandpoint, Fadhouli had shed two-thirds of her clothes, shoes and accessories. She donated to places like Goodwill and Bizarre Bazaar in Sandpoint, as well as donating to an online site called Fashion Project.

At one point before she left Sandpoint, Fadhouli ended up staying with a friend on Third Street in a room the size of a closet.

"I have to say, during that period of time that I was living in the closet, it was one of the best summers of my life," Fadhouli said. "I was riding my bike all over town — it was one of the most magical experiences I ever could have had."

Along with shedding pounds of material items, Fadhouli began to change her lifestyle. She learned yoga and how to ski, which she referred to herself as the most unlikely person to ski because the thought of hurtling herself down a hill was most unpleasant. But she did it and she learned the fear was "all in her head." She likened her experience in Idaho to a sabbatical in the sense that it grounded her and helped her to change some of her habits that were not working for her.

"My whole experience in Sandpoint really was getting away from my hometown, Houston, which is a big city, and living in Idaho really helped transform my whole perspective and view on things," Fadhouli said.

Fadhouli took what she learned from her experience in Sandpoint and recently submitted a presentation to South by Southwest (SXSW), an annual conference, music and film festival held in Austin, Texas. The title of her presentation is "Get out of a rut, reinvent yourself and lose 4,000 pounds (of stuff) in the process."

She described her presentation as a "self-help session on how to figure out what you are doing with your life, and if you are not where you want to be, how do you get there?" In the presentation, Fadhouli asks questions like "How did I get here?" and "When you are 80 and you look back, what do you want to say you did with your life?"

She said SXSW received about 5,000 presentations a year but only choose about 1,000. Presentations submitted to SXSW can be viewed and  voted for at www.sxsw.com/news/2016/panelpicker-community-voting. The link to Fadhouli's presentation is http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/63106.

The 41-year-old is now back in Houston working as a director of marketing for an architecture and design firm. She is working on purchasing a second townhouse, working to start a blog and hoping to present at the SXSW conference in the spring.

"Houston has a lot to offer, but it’s large, sprawling, flat city," Fadhouli said. "I will say though that getting stuck in a rut can happen anywhere, whether it’s a big city or a small city, or even the prettiest city in the world. It’s a universal problem. You have to create goals, write them down, create baby steps and set deadlines. You also have to know where you are spending your time, your money, and your energy, and if how you are using your assets are aligned with what you are saying your goals are. Then you have to determine if anything is holding you back, and how to eliminate it."

When asked how she decided what to part with Fadhouli said: "The first thing I asked myself was — do I love it? If didn’t love it, I couldn’t keep it."

A few more tips from Fadhouli on how to shed material pounds and increase happiness:

• If I loved it at a moment in my life, but I wasn’t using it currently, I also couldn’t keep it. I had to break my sentimental attachments to material things. When you are gone, who is really going to care that that shirt was your favorite shirt in college?

• There could be a homeless person that could make practical use of an item that you are simply hanging onto for emotional reasons.

• If we are talking about the big picture of life — if your hands, your closet, your life are full, there is no room for new opportunities.

• Some people hang onto things out of:

1. Fear of not having enough; and 

2. False sense of stability and control.

If you get to the root of those and realize that as a country, we have more than enough and that faith gives you stability, not stuff.