If your house is a mess, the chances are your eating habits are too, says a new book

2011-11-14

Surveying her kitchen, Josie feels like screaming. Sunday’s papers and a load of junk mail are still strewn across her table. No one’s unloaded the dishwasher. Her son’s guitar, minus three strings, is cluttering up the doorway, and her husband has dumped his toolbox on the work surface again.

Josie, a busy primary school teacher, smiles ruefully as she surveys the all too familiar scene of devastation.

What happens next will also be terribly easy to recognise. Confronted by this avalanche of clutter, Josie gives up on cooking dinner and nips out to get a takeaway instead.

‘We eat unhealthily far more often than I’d like,’ she says. ‘I’m a couple of stone overweight and although I hate it, I just can’t seem to do a thing about it.’

Working with thousands of clients like Josie to de-clutter their homes, offices and ultimately their lives, I’ve come to a remarkable conclusion. Clutter makes you fat — and the instant you start to get rid of it, you slim down.

 

 

As I reveal in my new book, my premise is simple. If your lifestyle is frantic, it’s likely your diet is suffering. Clutter accumulates because we are out of control. Likewise, weight accumulates because we don’t control it.

Many of us have it. The old magazines piled up in the hallway, the boxes of shoes shoved under stairs, a loft overflowing with old toys... the thought of clearing out all that clutter is exhausting, so, although we hate it, we carry on living with it. Just as we carry on with our old eating habits, even though we know they are unhealthy.

But in my experience, weight issues are caused by lifestyle — clutter, chaos and fat are inextricably linked. Your home is a reflection of your state of mind, as is your body.

If you dump yet more junk mail on the dining room table to ‘sort out later,’ and grab a bar of chocolate to ‘keep me going’ as you juggle the competing demands of family, work and friends, then your life needs a major re-think.

Your home is cluttered because you’ve lost control of it. And if your kitchen is out of control, it’s highly likely your eating habits are as well. Because what you weigh isn’t just about calorie counting or doing stomach crunches. What you weigh is about how you live.

The first step towards losing weight is re-evaluating your lifestyle and your environment. If your home is in turmoil, if you can’t find your trainers because they’re behind the dog basket, you aren’t going to go to the gym.

If your son’s football kit takes up your kitchen work surface, then you won’t be chopping vegetables on it. A cluttered atmosphere just isn’t conducive to cooking and eating well. It’s chaotic and disordered — or, put differently, it’s simply unhealthy.

One of my clients, I’ll call her Lynne, makes the link between de-cluttering and shedding weight like this: ‘As I kept working on unloading the clutter of my life, literally clearing out years of unwanted stuff from my home, I noticed that I was also eating more healthily.’

Lynne told me that surrounded by clutter she had felt out of control, and the loss of control was reflected in her diet. Once she began to clear away the clutter in her home, she stopped mindlessly eating anything that came to hand.

If our homes reflect who we are, a cluttered one means it’s unlikely its owner will be organised and disciplined about food.

But if the feeling of being out of control is utterly overwhelming you, it is possible to get things back on track. Start by systematically working through the clutter in your life and you’ll see immediate results.

I’ve always promised my clients they’ll feel better about themselves if they de-clutter their homes.

Clearing your life of accumulated detritus means people feel free and in control of their environment. I’ve never promised anyone they’ll lose weight. However, for many people, that’s exactly what has happened.

As more and more people contacted me with the same story of weight loss, I realised that filling your life with ‘stuff’ you can’t possibly use or want doesn’t stop at the front door. Clutter invades every aspect of your life.

Even keeping hold of clothes that are now two sizes too small is psychologically bad for you. Far from acting as a motivator to shed the pounds, those size-8 trousers hanging there year after year actually make you feel guilty.

Keeping old, uncomfortable clothes is about avoiding change. You have some vague idea that ‘one day’ those trousers will fit again and, in the meantime, you just carry on as before.

Gadgets in your kitchen that you never use push the same mental buttons.  De-cluttering isn’t about re-arranging your wardrobe; it’s about throwing things away and starting again — much like healthy eating isn’t just about ‘going on a diet’; it’s about changing your relationship with food for ever. 

We are facing a national obesity epidemic. Half of British adults are overweight and obesity rates are skyrocketing. One in every 11 deaths in the UK is now linked to carrying excess fat and the main culprit is heart disease.

We live in a culture which actively encourages us to have too much of everything, from the restaurants that serve enormous potions to the advertisers who tell us our wardrobes can never be too crammed with shoes we don’t need.

Their message to justify this clutter is that more is better. But it isn’t, it just weighs us down physically and emotionally.

To lose the excess weight we carry, we have to re-think our homes and our lifestyles. We have to think: ‘Is the life I’m living helping me to create the body I want?’ Planning and routine are the key to clearing clutter and a healthy diet. To start, you need a plan for your kitchen.

If you haven’t used an item for the past year, get rid of it. Send it to a charity shop, give it to a friend, it doesn’t matter — just get it out of your house. Clear out all your drawers and cupboards, and de-clutter  the worktops.

Ask yourself honestly if you really need that lemon squeezer. If the answer is no, throw it out. 

Clear space in the fridge and cupboards by getting rid of out-of-date food. Half-used bags of flour, old tins of soup, those lentils you’ve had since 2008, they’ve all got to go.

Making your kitchen light is a step towards making yourself light. Organise your kitchen so it’s efficient. If you’ve got six colanders, get rid of five of them. You need only one.

Have pots and pans in a place where you can reach them easily. Clean the cooker and work surfaces. Remove anything that doesn’t belong in your kitchen.

Clean your fridge. Force yourself to have a good hard look at what’s lurking in there. If it’s fattening, unhealthy, wilted or encrusted with the grime of many years, it needs to go in the bin.

When one of my clients, Liza, uncluttered her kitchen, she told me that she became less focused on food.

‘I was performing a cleanse on my kitchen and as I worked I began to perform a sort of cleanse on my body,’ she said. ‘Normally I’m obsessed with food, but as I cleared the rubbish out of my kitchen I didn’t want to tuck into crisps and chocolate at all, which amazed me.’

Once your kitchen is clear and uncluttered, you’ll find it a far more attractive space to cook in. If you enjoy spending time making a chicken casserole in your new spick-and-span kitchen, you won’t pile on the pounds. If you keep ordering takeaways, you will. It’s as simple as that.

Plan meals in advance and shop for them in bulk so you’ve always got a store of healthy ingredients to hand — you’ll be amazed at how plain sailing cooking becomes.

It’s about planning and routine. It’s about making lists and sticking to them. Buying what you need. Don’t impulse-buy a box of Danish pastries. Don’t impulse-buy a swanky looking ice-cream maker.

Neither of them will improve your quality of life. Don’t allow clutter back into your kitchen in the guise of ‘treats’ and ‘snacks’.

If you de-clutter your life, you gain control and you give yourself a chance to lead a happier life. For many people, happiness involves being slimmer — not skinny, not thin — just staying at a healthy weight.

So, in answer to the question that forms the title of my book, yes, clutter does make you look fat. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.