Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (70 page)

Final Task

If you haven't ushered all your malignant items out of your home in the past 6 weeks, go around and collect them. Take them out. Put them in the trash, haul them to Goodwill, give them away on Freecycle, or sell them on eBay.

If you've stayed on track with the program and completely decluttered each area of your home during each week, congratulations! Your home is now free
of malignant items that make you feel unhappy when you look at them. You also got rid of all the benign clutter that was lingering around, taking up your space and wasting your time but offering nothing useful in return.

Everything that remains has a good reason to be in your home. It has value to you, and it's not exceeding the space you've provided for it. Your home now reflects the more clearheaded and physically streamlined person who lives in it.

If you fell behind and didn't finish some of the areas of your home during their allotted weeks, that's perfectly fine. Now's the time to go back and complete the job. It doesn't matter that it's taking you longer than 6 weeks. All that matters is that you finish.

But . . . wherever you are right now, your job isn't over. It's actually just starting.

Week Six

Mindset Adjustment

People often want
me
to give them permission to discard their sentimental items. This week, learn to give yourself this permission.

As you go forward, when you find yourself wanting to hold on to objects that have a special meaning, ask
why
. Doing so isn't necessarily a bad thing. But before you cling to material possessions, be sure you understand why you're doing it.

Your home is only so big, and it'll never be able to hold everything that you want. Your hands are only so big, too. If you're carrying too much stuff, you might not be able to pick up something new that your life offers you.

Week Six

Fitness Activities

Walking frequency:
Go 5 days.

Duration:
Take a 30-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 these movements on 2 or 3 nonconsecutive days after your muscles are nice and warm from walking or decluttering. Use objects you
found in your basement/attic/garage/shed, such as antifreeze bottles or detergent bottles, to do the following:

10
Walking Lunges with Glute Kickback

10
Woodchoppers

10
Biceps Curls

10
Shoulder Raises

Use your basement stairs to do

10 Pushups

10
Triceps Dips

In addition, take four to five breaks during cleaning to go up and down your basement stairs (or any other stairs you have) for 1 minute to get your heart rate up.

Congratulations! You've reached the end of the 6-week program. If you're like the test panelists who served as the guinea pigs for the
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
program, some of the rooms of your home may be barely recognizable and your body has slimmed down to a leaner, fitter version.

Savor your success. Celebrate your accomplishment with a special (healthy!) dinner or a day trip with your loved ones. But please don't use this as an opportunity to stop paying attention to your home and health. These 6 weeks were intended to be the
start
of a new phase in your life. You didn't just shake up your existence so you could go right back to your old habits. Those will just lead you back to the cluttered, unhealthy life that caused you so much pain.

Truthfully, you're not going to have an end point when it comes to staying mentally and physically fit while living in an uncluttered home. If you're alive, you're not finished.

It's time to turn your attention now to long-term maintenance. In some ways, preserving your improvements is easier. In other ways, it requires even more focus and dedication. After all, we all live in an environment that encourages obesity. And now your home has a lot more open space, which has a tendency to invite new clutter.

But you now have plenty of tools to protect yourself from all the clutter that wants to reinvade your home and body. In the final chapter, let's talk about how to put those tools to work and learn a few new habits that will help create an additional shield around you.

Chapter 15

HOW TO MAKE YOUR POSITIVE CHANGES LAST A LIFETIME

I
fly frequently, both around America and on regular trips to Australia, which means I witness a fair amount of airline-related drama. Every plane's a stage, I suppose, and there are lots of ready players.

Recently, as I was boarding a cross-country flight, a traveler put on quite the performance for the rest of us fellow passengers. At the time I found it inconvenient and annoying, although it did end up providing a useful teaching point for this book!

This passenger was blocking the aisle and preventing the rest of us from reaching our seats. As she repeatedly tried to slam her oversize carry-on luggage into the overhead bin, she shouted at the top of her voice, “I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY MAKE THESE BINS SO SMALL.” The overhead compartment wasn't the problem that day. The problem was her luggage—or, more specifically, the size of her luggage. She would have sounded much more reasonable if she'd shouted, “I CAN'T BELIEVE I THOUGHT SUCH AN INAPPROPRIATE PIECE OF LUGGAGE WOULD FIT IN THIS OVERHEAD COMPARTMENT!”

When we board a plane, we know that the space available for our stuff is not flexible. The plane is a metal container with rigid dimensions, with no magically expanding overhead bins to be found. It contains a preset amount
of space, and everything—passengers, crew, luggage, cargo, and equipment—is all accounted for in the allocation of this available space. The visual tool in every airline boarding lounge demonstrating the size of carry-on luggage that will fit into the overhead bin is a testament to how much space has been set aside for your personal items: not much.

Your home is similar. Just like the overhead bin, you only have the space you have. It doesn't expand. It will only comfortably hold so much stuff, and now, at the end of this program, you know exactly how much stuff that is.