Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (16 page)

If you feel ashamed or guilty after you splurge on treats to tame your emotions, you may eat even more to cope with
these
negative emotions that arise. This can turn into a very troublesome cycle.

There's a large overlap between
emotional
eating and
mindless
eating. Mindless eating means you're eating food without enjoying it or even noticing what you're doing. Do you have any experience with eating a box of candy—without even tasting it—when you're under a work deadline? Have you ever emptied a pint of ice cream on autopilot while you were caught up in a nerve-racking TV show? That's emotional, mindless eating.

Not everyone who eats because of emotional triggers is overweight. All sorts of people do this, no matter their body weight, Dr. Goldbacher says. And it's not necessarily harmful to enjoy a cookie here and there when you're feeling down. Emotional eating only becomes a problem when it has a negative effect on your life, Dr. Taitz says.

As you progress through the 6 weeks of the
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
program, I want you to start living your life more deliberately. I want you to bring new objects into your home only when you have a good reason to do so. I want you to only keep possessions in your home that truly belong there. And when you eat, I want you to eat for a specific purpose.

If you're suffering from a moment of sadness, or you're so excited that you must celebrate, I'm not going to tell you that you must get through this moment without food. But I do want you to be deliberate about what you're doing. I want you to be in control of how much you eat. And I want you to fully enjoy the taste and the texture of your food without feeling guilt and shame afterward.

In the next chapter, you'll find strategies for eating mindfully, including when you're in the grip of strong emotions. Right now, I'd like for you to fill in the following chart, which will give you a better sense of how often you rely on food during emotional moments.

Specific situations—like feeling stress during holidays—can act as triggers for emotional eating. So can certain feelings, like anger, boredom, or frustration. Identify three situations and three feelings that commonly lead you to eat as a coping mechanism.

EMOTIONAL EATING TRACKER

Situations

1._____________________________

2._____________________________

3._____________________________

Feelings

1._____________________________

2._____________________________

3._____________________________

Simply being aware of these triggers can help you take a
huge
step toward positive action. Some people deal with these moments not by eating or buying, but by going for a walk or organizing a drawer or other small area of their home! Try different ways to distract yourself, and when you feel a strong emotion coming on, use a new approach.

Looking Ahead

Very soon, I'm going to introduce you to the 6-week program that will start reversing the impact that all these emotions and attitudes have had on your weight and your home.

But first, I'd like to take the next chapter to discuss a powerful mental tool that can supercharge the program and boost your success over the coming 6 weeks . . . and for the rest of your life.

Chapter 4

CLUTTER AND FAT ARE NO MATCH FOR YOUR MIND

Y
our mind is a powerful tool. You can summon the names of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people when you see their faces. You can learn to use bewildering new gadgets, from VHS recorders to self-scan supermarket checkouts, as they change over the decades. Perhaps you can detect hidden jokes in Shakespeare's verses or follow Stephen Hawking as he explains the mysteries of the universe.

As smart as it is, though, your mind isn't always easy to use. It can want different things at the same time. It propels you into situations that you know aren't good for you. It swings between logic and emotion. The choices it makes aren't always predictable.

If you're overweight and cluttered,
your mind led you to be that way!
Some people never learn how to create a healthy partnership with their mind. That's too bad. When they let their mind meander through life, they don't necessarily wind up where they want to be. They also miss big stretches of scenery along the way.

In this chapter, I want to talk about a tool that's as simple to describe as a hammer. It's called mindfulness. You can use mindfulness in different ways in your life, just as you can do different things with a hammer. If a squeaky board in your floor is annoying you, you can fix it in a few minutes with that hammer. Or you can use your hammer to build a beautiful home.

Mindfulness isn't about controlling your mind, but simply watching what it does so you learn how it works. By tracking its movements, you can:

Break the cycle of consuming foods and buying possessions because of emotional triggers

Find more joy by becoming more accepting of your life and discovering more inner contentment

Learn to avoid the poison of depression and anxiety that your mind tries to sneak into your life

Mindfulness can help you limit all three components of clutter:

You can better examine whether you truly want to bring new clothing, new furniture, or a new knickknack into your home.

You can become more aware of how tidy your home is (rather than letting clutter blend into the background).

You can better assess, without emotion, whether it's time to get rid of any of your possessions.

In some ways, your mind is like a toddler. It demands to get what it wants. It won't tolerate you ignoring its tantrums. But it's likely that your mind's demands have led you to become overweight in a cluttered home. And if you don't change your relationship with your mind, you'll stay that way. Let's not let that happen.

The Science of Mindfulness

Historically, spirituality and science haven't always coexisted peacefully. But they do—in a way—in PubMed, the online database of medical studies. There you'll find that a central practice borrowed from an ancient religion has become a well-researched treatment for physical and emotional problems.

It's called mindfulness (or mindfulness meditation), and researchers have investigated its use in the full spectrum of ailments that can strike our bodies and minds. They've studied it for joint-replacement pain. For addiction. For sexual desire in women. Researchers have looked at the benefits of mindfulness for cancer patients, African American men with high blood pressure, and Marines about to be deployed. That's just a tiny taste of a few months' worth of mindfulness research.

Mindfulness has great potential. I believe it can help you reduce the burden of most—if not all—the problems that brought you to this book: a cluttered home, out-of-control weight, and mental distress.

Mindfulness has come a long way, both geographically and in social attitudes, to get to this place of acceptance by mainstream scientists. Over the last half of the 1900s, Buddhism—which previously occupied a toehold in American culture—gained more of a foothold. Turmoil in Asia brought refugees and their practices to the United States, along with returning GIs who had become interested in the beliefs they encountered overseas. By the early 1980s, American psychologists and physicians were inquiring whether mindfulness meditation, a practice that lies at the core of Buddhism, had any health benefits.