Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (64 page)

It's a little odd to me that we've come to regard the term “sitting room” as a quaint idea from the past, something we'd hear today only on
Downton Abbey
. We now have
living
rooms, correct? But is that really true? While we refer to the space in our home where we spend most of our free time as the “living room,” the truth is that it has become little more than a sitting-down room (or even a “lying down” room).

You only have so many hours per day to give your body the thing it
must have
in order to run properly at an optimal weight. That's physical activity. Subtract 8 hours, give or take, for sleep. Take away another 8 hours if you work. That leaves you with 8 hours per day, and part of that's spent sitting down in your car, at your dining room table, reading to your kids, in the movie theater, on a date, or what have you.

That only leaves you with a few hours a day to be physically active—and those are the hours you likely spend in the rooms of your home that you've set up for relaxing. I encourage you to use the next week for not just decluttering but also giving thought to how you can better use these spaces for
moving
, rather than just sitting.

Even if you exercise for an hour every day, that only adds up to a relatively brief window in which you're moving. You still need to spend more time on your feet being physically active for the rest of the day.

Task 1:

CREATE YOUR VISION

The living room (the term I'll use, though in your home it could be a den or family room or several of these rooms) tends to be one of the areas of the home that's cluttered with the widest variety of stuff. That's because everyone, whether parents or kids or pets, tends to have an equal right to use the room, and it's usually the room where families spend the most time together. The room also has no particular function, like the kitchen or bedroom, so all the residents of the home tend to use it for a variety of activities.

In your home, you might see hundreds of books, a TV, a laptop computer
or tablet, board games, puzzles, exercise equipment, and hobby supplies in this room. These are all reasonable items to keep in the living room. However, if
everyone
is contributing a limitless pile of his or her own possessions here, the living room is going to become unlivable—very quickly.

It's particularly important to define your vision for your living room. Do you want to use it for entertaining guests? Is it important for you to bring your family together here? Do you want to have fun in this room? Or do you want to relax? Or do you want to use the room for
all
of these things?

Now's the time to figure it out, preferably together as a family. You will need to balance out competing demands. If you share your home with a spouse, partner, or children, it's quite likely that you'll need to make some compromises about who gets to do what with the living room. Jot down your thoughts on paper to these prompts:

LIVING ROOM VISION

This is what I want
from
my living room:

How I want to
feel
in this space:

Task 2:

START IDENTIFYING MALIGNANT ITEMS

Remember that malignant items make you feel sad, upset, or guilty when you look at them. Based on homes I've been in, I would encourage you to evaluate the following sorts of objects for any negative effects they have on you.

Memorabilia.
Do you have any photos on display in your living room—
even of happy times—that stir up feelings of sadness when you look at them? Do your shelves hold heirlooms that you never particularly wanted? Now may be the time to move this stuff elsewhere or get rid of it.

Exercise equipment.
Treadmills, elliptical trainers, home gyms, and free weights often wind up in the living room. As long as you've deliberately decided to put this gear in your living room—and it isn't overflowing out of the space you allotted for it—that's fine. What
isn't
okay is to keep exercise equipment here that you've stopped using.

If you're able to safely use your exercise equipment while you're watching TV or reading a book, I would recommend you start doing so. But if you're never going to use it again, get it out of your living room. It represents a missed opportunity to improve your fitness, and I don't want you to feel like you failed by not sticking with it.

Sell this stuff. Now that you're finding other ways to exercise, you might be able to use the proceeds to buy some fitness gear that you
will
keep enjoying.

Collectibles.
The living room tends to gather collections. Whether we're talking about music boxes, figurine dolls, holiday decorations, or record albums, collectibles have a habit of growing in number and taking up more room than they deserve.

Another problem: All the members of the household seldom share the same passion for these collectibles. If your spouse has a giant collection of
anything
that's crowding everything else out of the living room, and you're tired of looking at it, it's malignant. It's also disrespectful to you and can harm your relationship.