Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (39 page)

I want a relaxing place where I can check in with my family.

I want this to be a place where I take 10 minutes to relax in the morning before I go to work and 30 minutes to decompress in the evening.

I want to be able to focus on what I'm eating in this room and to be able to express gratitude that I once again have enough to eat today.

I want a space that welcomes guests, is fun to cook in and easy to clean, and says “I value sharing meals with family and friends.”

I want to explore new styles of cooking, so I want my kitchen to support a lot of experiments.

As you can see, creating a vision requires an idea of how you'll use your kitchen and dining room, how you want to feel in these spaces, and what these areas will look like. These are closely related, and one affects the other. Make sure the
appearance
and
contents
of the room support the activities you're planning to do here.

When you're defining your vision, make sure you cover the specifics. If you want the entire family to eat together in the dining room, do you mean every night? If your kids do their homework in the dining room or kitchen, when do they need to clear out so it becomes an eating area again? I can't tell you what your vision should be, but if it's possible, I would highly recommend that you
only
use these spaces for cooking and eating—and that you
only
do your eating here.

This is also a good time to make sure that your family is on board with the plan. A shared place needs a shared vision, both for creating spaces that work for the family and to provide a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.

Do your kids want to eat in the den while they play video games? Does your spouse plan to keep buying the nacho chips, ice cream, and beer that you're going to have trouble resisting while you're trying to lose weight? If you or a household member uses the dining area for crafts or puzzles, those need to be minimized. If you're eating gingerly so you don't disrupt a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, your focus is not going to be on your food. Get agreement on what everyone in your home is willing to do, and seek compromises that keep them happy but also help you succeed during the next 6 weeks and beyond.

I want you to be mindful of what you eat, because this is a secret weapon against body fat that too few people know how to use. You're not going to be truly mindful of what goes into your mouth if:

You're cooking or eating during other activities. For that reason, I'd recommend that you rid your kitchen and dining room of televisions and computers. Ban smartphones from the dining room unless someone's expecting a life-or-death call.

You're distracted by other stuff that doesn't belong. Kitchens become a catchall for household debris: piles of bills, unread magazines, homework, and stuff that doesn't seem to have any other home. During the next week, move all this stuff out of your kitchen.

With all this in mind, please take some time to create your vision for your kitchen and dining room by jotting down your thoughts on paper to these prompts:

KITCHEN VISION

This is what I want
from
my kitchen:

How I want to
feel
in this space:

DINING AREA VISION

This is what I want
from
my dining area:

How I want to
feel
in this space:

Task 2:

SEPARATE THE “BENIGN” FROM THE “MALIGNANT” ITEMS

Every week, once you've established your vision for the space we're focused on, the next step will be to identify all the “malignant” clutter in that space.

The stuff you own has power—the power to take you to another place and time, to remind you of events long past, to overwhelm or depress you. Malignant clutter poisons your point of view, your habits, and your behaviors. It makes you feel bad about the decisions you've made. It makes you think less of yourself. It makes you second-guess yourself. It gets in your face, undermines your confidence, and calls you a failure. It reminds you of lost love, missed opportunities, or times past that you wish you could move on from. It's harmful, and rooting it out must be your priority.

Task 2 is to carefully inspect your kitchen and dining areas and list all the
malignant items—or better still, gather them in one pile. These things can bring up all kinds of emotions. The idea of throwing them out might be hard, even when you can see they're bad for you.

So you don't have to get rid of them right now, if you don't want. You have all week to first get used to the idea. Right now, I just want you to identify these items and set them somewhere unobtrusive. Our goal over the week is for you to become aware of the malignant clutter, to reflect on its place in your life, and to prepare to deal with it in a way that helps you wrestle back the power that it holds over you.

It's up to you to decide what's benign and malignant in your household. But I'd suspect that the kitchen and dining room items that might make your malignant list include the following:

Junk food.
A small amount of snacks might be okay. But if your kitchen is stuffed with cakes, candy, and ice-cream bars—and it's all making you fat, and you can't stop eating it—it needs to go! Ideally, you'll develop the ability over the next 6 weeks to enjoy these foods sparingly. But for right now, I suspect that if it's there, you'll eat it. So the less junk food you keep in your home, the better.

Processed foods.
Get rid of boxes of salty, shrink-wrapped, premade meals. For the next 6 weeks, I'd like for you to put a little more time and attention into preparing food for yourself and your loved ones.

Unhealthy cooking tools.
Toss out deep-fat fryers and any other cooking implements that require heavy doses of fat, and devices that you only use to prepare a food or snack that contributes to your excess pounds. Does your cake ball maker beg you to make doughnut holes every day? Perhaps it needs a new home.

Plates, cooking gadgets, and utensils that represent some type of failure.
Perhaps it's the set of dishes that you thought would help you become a beloved kitchen diva like the one on TV (but didn't). Maybe it's the kitchen items you purchased during a previous marriage or during a particularly difficult period of your life. Odds are high that anything you bought from the TV after midnight is not something that makes you feel good about yourself.

Objects that cause you pain.
These may come from a place of love, but they hurt you. Perhaps they're empty chairs around the dining room table now that your kids have gone to college. Maybe it's a stack of inherited cookbooks that you never use but feel too guilty to give away. Now is a good time to pull these out and set them aside so you can figure out what to do with them.

For each piece of malignant clutter, ask yourself:

How did this get here?