Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (3 page)

The way we've interacted with others

If your home is littered with items that don't bring you happiness or peace of mind, it's probably because you focused on the immediate pleasure that your purchases might bring you; you couldn't pass up an unbeatable bargain; or for whatever reason, you thought incorrectly that you just
had
to have them.

If you weigh more than your body can comfortably carry, it's not because you made a series of deliberate choices to take in more calories than you burned off. Instead, you made a pattern of decisions that felt good in the moment. You ate to comfort yourself when you were uncomfortable or just bored. You distracted yourself with television or the Internet because it was easier than getting up and moving around. In that moment, you chose the easier option rather than the one that would have been healthier for you.

I'm here to share two very important truths that I share with every client I work with:

1. You're not overweight and cluttered because you're a bad person or a weak person.

2. It's not too late to change.

In fact, here's the good news. You can let go of the stacks and bins of material things that have overstuffed your home. You can let go of that layer of excess padding under your skin that bulges tightly against your clothes. You can make mindful choices that more accurately reflect the life you want. But first, you'll need to examine the way you interact with the world around you. You have to identify the habits and small daily choices that led your home and body to become overstuffed, and you have to let go of those, too.

As you cultivate a new way of living with less household, physical, and mental clutter, I predict that you'll enjoy improvements across
all
these areas, seeing a new home, a new body, and a fresh outlook emerge.

Every
January on Facebook, I host a program I call the 31 Days to Get Organized challenge (#31Days2GetOrganized). I set daily 10-minute tasks and provide short videos every day that show people how to root the clutter out of 31 areas around their home. After the 2014 challenge, a reader named Carol told me that she noticed a surprising side effect. (Or at least it was surprising to
her
. I've gotten used to readers and listeners discovering this benefit.)

“I lost 8.4 pounds! What's remarkable is that the success I had in one month is almost what I had during the entire previous year at Weight Watchers. I still did my usual exercise and my usual eating. What else changed in January? That's the only thing I changed!” the 56-year-old Michigan resident said.

She was moving around more as she dug through drawers and hauled out needless stuff, which provided more physical activity. But she also kept telling me about the sense of freedom, lightness, and energy she felt from decluttering. These improvements in her spirit carried over to her body.

“The older I get, the less I want to be bogged down with
stuff,
” she said.
“
Now I don't have to step over piles of clothes in the closet to get to the workout drawer. I feel more energetic, and I don't feel trapped. Before, I would just feel overwhelmed knowing I should be doing something about my home. I think that caused me to be still, watching TV and overeating. I got rid of my inertia and got stimulated!”

That's the type of feeling that inspired
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight.
This is the first-ever step-by-step manual that helps you deal with the physical clutter that's invaded your home, the food choices that have led to extra pounds, the lack of exercise that has left you less fit than you'd wish, and the lack of focus that keeps you from living the fullest, richest life possible. The 6-week program in this book will give you the tools you need to look deeply into your household and into yourself, and then make the changes that will create a healthier, happier new normal.

Look afresh at your unwanted heirlooms and abandoned hobby materials, and learn exactly why you're still holding on to them. Cast your gaze onto your body in that photo you despise and consider the emotions that immediately flare up—then look deeper. Understand the behaviors and acknowledge the choices that led to your current physical state. By following the plan in
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight,
you'll develop a new appreciation for the items you own, the choices you consciously make, the person you are, and the life you fully choose to live. You'll identify the elements of the unsustainable, overstuffed life you've been living and learn to turn away from those choices.

If
you're familiar with my earlier work, you may be aware that I touched on the connection between your household clutter and your weight in a book I wrote a number of years ago. Several factors prompted me to return to this topic.

First, in the years since the publication of that book, the science linking an overcluttered lifestyle to poor health and fitness has become especially compelling. Researchers have been digging ever more deeply into the emotional causes of clutter and obesity, and they're finding many mutual factors. This new research is simply too good not to share.

Secondly, I had an opportunity to assemble a multidisciplinary team to develop a very detailed program to un-stuff your household and your body. We built a dietitian-approved eating program that will help you make simple food choices directed at weight loss. An exercise physiologist created a fitness plan that burns calories and strengthens your body using simple movements you can do at home without having to buy
any
workout equipment.

Keeping with my desire to promote a simplified, streamlined life, I designed this program using factors that are important to me. The program adds no clutter to your life. That means no calorie-counting, no artificial rules to memorize, and no gadgets that will shortly disappear into the back of a closet or a dresser drawer.

To verify that this program actually works, I assembled a test panel of regular folks to go through the 6-week weight loss and decluttering program you'll find in these pages. When my editors and I put out a notice in the media, we received an immediate flood of responses, and we quickly recruited 22 enthusiastic (and a little nervous) volunteers. These people tended to be overweight and
way
too attached to the idea of filling their homes with material possessions. In other words, they were good representatives of the modern American lifestyle.

Several were also struggling with anxiety and low self-esteem. This didn't surprise me, as I've seen many clients carrying these burdens.

As they went through this program, the test panel members learned how to make fundamental changes to their homes and their lives. Six weeks after I first met them, I was thrilled—and to tell you the truth, even a bit amazed—for how much weight they'd lost and how much control they'd gained over their clutter.

You'll meet many of these participants in the following pages, where you'll see just how much better their lives became. Along the way, they'll talk about the parts of the program that worked especially well for them, and they'll share tips on how they got past their challenges.

While
my work has acquainted me with the wide variety and amount of clutter that can fit into a home, I've also witnessed something far more memorable: people's remarkable ability to make significant and permanent changes in their lives.
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
is the product of many years of working closely with people to declutter every aspect of their lives. It comes from a belief that people, including you, can change—if only they're shown how.

Somewhere deep inside, you have a sense of what you need to do in order to live a life that's free, rewarding, and unencumbered by stuff that doesn't make you happy. It's time to identify those changes—and allow yourself to finally make them.

Part 1

How Clutter Invades Your Home, Your Body, and Your Mind

Chapter 1

THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT MAKE YOUR HOME A MESS

I
magine a team of future archaeologists carefully examining the remains of one of today's typical homes. Hundreds of years from now, what would they think of the objects piled up in our rooms? Would they understand why we let our belongings take over so much of the space in our homes?

We don't have to wonder how archaeologists would interpret our early 21st-century homes. They're already trying to make sense of them
now
.

Earlier in her career, UCLA professor Jeanne Arnold, PhD, did the kind of work that the word
archaeology
more often brings to mind: examining bits of material left behind by ancient Native Americans. More recently, though, she shifted her focus to a very different society: modern-day Southern Californians. As part of an extended study, she and a team of researchers made in-depth explorations into 32 homes. They carefully photographed the rooms, noted exactly what types of household possessions the families treasured, and observed in real time how the residents used their homes. She wanted to find out what leads so many people to pack so much stuff inside and, once they bring it in, what they
do
with all of it.

All the families in these homes had kids. In all the homes, both parents worked. These were typical families with busy schedules and not a lot of time for cleaning and sorting. But Dr. Arnold and her colleagues didn't go out of
their way to include homes that were especially cluttered. (They accepted families into the study without first seeing their homes.) Nor did they see evidence that the homeowners cleaned up before the team visited.

They found that many of these homes were so crowded that some of the rooms couldn't be used for their intended purposes. In three-quarters of the houses, the garage was so packed with items like sports equipment, boxes of files, lumber, and plastic bins filled with clothing that the cars were parked outside. The garage was too full to hold them.

Dr. Arnold and her team took nearly 20,000 photos in the homes, some of which ended up in a book that she co-authored about the project,
Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century
. One shows a shower stall where no one can bathe because it's stuffed knee-high with clothes. In another photo, no one
can sit comfortably in front of the computer because the home office is so jammed with clutter. No one can relax on a couch because it's littered with stuffed animals. No one can sort laundry on top of the washer or dryer because they're covered with stacks of groceries.

“Something like two-thirds of households had, based on a simple visual observation, an uncomfortable amount of stuff,” she says. And by “uncomfortable,” she means how an average visitor might feel upon entering the home. Most of the families living in these spaces, on the other hand, didn't seem to be too upset about the clutter around them or even to notice it.

“Many of the men in the households expressed no concern whatsoever about the untidy spaces or having lots of stuff. Moms more often commented on it, but only some of them commented on it using language that suggested that it caused them considerable stress,” she said.

But it's hard to be truly blissful, calm, and relaxed in an untidy environment. Psychologists on the team found signs that a cluttered house could pose a threat to a peaceful state of mind. Women whose homes were more stressful—based partly on their home's clutter levels—had a pattern of changes in their cortisol levels that showed more chronic stress. Their levels of depressed mood also increased over the day.

When you truly need cortisol coursing through your system, it's great to have around. It shifts your body into a different mode—like shifting your car into a higher gear—so it's ready to fight or flee from an attacker. But long term, you don't want too much cortisol and other stress hormones flooding your system. Revving up your car for too long isn't good for the engine, and excess stress hormones in your system can, over time:

Keep you from sleeping