Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (66 page)
Read Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight Online
Authors: Peter Walsh
Play a game of hide-and-seek with the kids in and around your house, or put together a scavenger hunt in your home.
Bring in one box from the basement/attic/garage and go through it while you're listening to music or watching TV. Trust me, you'll be glad next week that you got a head start!
Rearrange all the furniture in a room or all the artwork in your home. If it doesn't look good, rearrange it again.
Task 6:
TOSS OUT YOUR MALIGNANT ITEMS
If you've been mentally working your way up to shedding the malignant items from your living areas, now's the time to haul them out of your house or, if you have room in a storage space, put them there.
Frequently the malignant clutter I find in living rooms is more annoying than anything else. It might be dad's dusty high school swimming trophies from 1985 or mom's perpetually unfinished (but super messy) craft project that's been sitting on the TV tray in the corner of the room for the last 3 years. (The conflict these items can create between couples is what makes them malignant.)
Remember, the things you own should help you create the life you want. Any itemsâno matter how they came into your homeâthat don't help you create the vision you want for your space need to leave. Whether an item causes you minor annoyance or major distress, today is the day it has to go.
Week Five
Mindset Adjustment
Become more aware of how you're using your body. If you realize that you've been sitting still for too longâsay, 30 minutes or moreâget up and move around. Set an alarm on your phone to go off every 30 minutes, if you must. Stand up and stretch. Find a reason to walk around for a few minutes. Whatever you do, avoid being motionless for long periods.
Your body simply isn't designed to work properly when you're sitting down for too long. Your blood doesn't flow as smoothly through your circulatory
system. Muscles in your back, abdomen, and legs get out of balance. Your bones don't get the physical challenge they need to stay strong. Fluid can accumulate in your lower legs. Even your brain may become sluggish.
Week Five
Fitness Activities
Walking frequency:
Go 5 days.
Duration:
Take a 25-minute walk around your block, your neighborhood, the park, or on a treadmill if you have one. Walking in place while watching TV or listening to music works as well. As you walk, plan out your decluttering strategy for the day (or the following day if you're exercising in the evening).
In addition, perform the following movements on 2 or 3 nonconsecutive days after your muscles are nice and warm from walking or decluttering. While working on your living room, put on some of your favorite music; during the chorus of each song, choose one exercise and perform it for the length of the chorus before going back to organizing.
Dance around the room
Triceps Dips
âon the couch or a coffee table that can safely support your weight; no glass-topped tables!
Sit on the couch and stand back up
The whole purpose of this program is for you to squeeze more
life
out of your life. No one in their final days says “I wish I'd sat around the house more, watching TV.” (At least, it seems unlikely.) After 5 weeks of decluttering and becoming more physically fit, I hope your energy levels and your mood are riding high.
Once this program is over and you're not decluttering so much, I hope you continue to stay physically active, since that's a crucial component to keeping your weight off. I also hope you come to see your living room as a place where you get a little relaxation after a day with lots of motion.
The Clutter Chronicles
Linda Hayes, 58
POUNDS LOST: 7.6
AMOUNT OF CLUTTER REMOVED: Roughly 7 bags
Linda had a very compelling reason to strive to succeed in the
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
test program.
Several months before she started, her son had offered to pay for a cleaning service as a gift. She was thrilled by the thought of housekeepers making her home sparkle every other weekâbut ironically, she had to declutter her home before her son would start the service. The maids, you see, will clean
around
the clutter, but they won't move it.
“One of the things my son was trying to do was get my home to where I can have people over,” she says.
The Allentown, Pennsylvania, teacher sent me a photo of her living room before I first met her, and I could see a lot of clutter (given that it also functioned as a
work area). A laptop computer and stacks of papers covered the coffee table. The couch was loaded with more papers and office supplies.
Linda was determined that she wouldn't miss out on her son's offer, so she dived into the program as a way to hold herself accountable. At the time, she faced a special decluttering challenge, one that many parents of adult children have been dealing with in recent years. Her daughter had moved back home for a time, filling Linda's ranch house with a
lot
more stuff.
The two decluttering principles Linda found most useful were to create a vision for every room in the home and to always remember that
clutter is decisions delayed.
One decision she made was to change her newspaper subscription, since newspapers were stacking up unread. She switched to three newspapers a week and read the rest online. She tackled the stacks of paperwork, throwing away some and filing the rest. She tamed her closet by tossing out old swimsuits but keeping her 22-year-old “I Survived Hurricane Andrew” T-shirt, a memento of her earlier life in Florida.
She even talked about the importance of a clutter-free lifestyle with her middle school students during a lesson on stress. She pointed out that they could place their handouts in their folders where they belonged. Or they could delay the decision to put their stuff in the right place and just shove it into their backpacks, creating more clutterâand stress when they couldn't find their assignments.
When I talked to Linda after the program ended, contractors were remodeling her bathroom, which had introduced a certain amount of chaos into her home. But “other than that temporary transition, yes, it
definitely
looks decluttered.”
Her son was also planning to have a landscaping company give Linda's yard a complete makeover. She was going to extend her new philosophy, which worked so well in her home, to her yard, too: She didn't want fancy features around her house that would require a lot of upkeep. “Instead, my word is
simplify!
I want to have less yard work so I have more time available to invite friends over.”