Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (9 page)

“I can tell you unreservedly that yes, materialism is related to happiness. People who are
more
materialistic are
less
happy,” Dr. Roberts says. It could be that people who are in love with stuff are unhappy because they're trying to find meaning in their possessions, which is the wrong place to look. Or perhaps unhappy people tend to buy stuff because society tells them that objects will cure their sadness.

I don't want you to get rid of all your stuff and go live in a hippie commune
or a monastery. I don't want you to wear worn-out clothes. I don't want you to be deprived of the joys of modern living.

Here's what I
do
want you to have after you go through the 6-week program in this book. I want you to:

Be surrounded by objects in your home that you value and cherish

Have a home that meets your needs, not a home that serves as your boss

Feel a deep sense of gratefulness for all the good parts of your life

Feel good about how you look and feel

Have strong relationships with your loved ones that bring you peace and security

Think and act in ways that move you closer to the vision of the good life you've set for yourself—and no longer make choices out of sadness, stress, boredom, or inattention, or under pressure from the media or the people around you

But all these things only scratch the surface of what you can gain from this program. That's because the clutter in your home and the emotions you attach to it have a tremendous impact on your life that we have barely even discussed. When you develop a mindset that allows you to gain control over the clutter and your associated emotions, your new power can also spark improvements in your waistline and your overall health.

This program is called
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight.
Those two concerns in your life are closely linked together. When you fix one, you're in a great position to fix the other. In the next chapter, I'll explain why.

Chapter 2

THE SCIENCE LINKING CLUTTER AND WEIGHT

I
received an interesting e-mail recently from David Tolin, PhD, the hoarding researcher I introduced in the last chapter. He's an adjunct professor at Yale University and the coauthor of the classic book
Buried in Treasures
(an image that applies to the lives of not only people with hoarding disorder, but often even standard-issue people with too much stuff).

Dr. Tolin sometimes invites people with hoarding disorder to lie in an MRI machine to see whether their brains are somehow different than the brains of people without this disorder. In his e-mail, he mentioned that for his most recent study, he and his team had to switch to a larger MRI scanner because participants often couldn't fit into the standard machines.

Clutter and excessive weight make a perfect match for each other, and they often trample through people's lives hand in hand. In a sense, they're really the same problem: Household clutter gathers in piles on your tables and bulges out of closets because your home was only built to carry so much stuff, and your possessions go over the limit. And if you weigh too much, you're carrying more fat than your body is designed to hold.

In addition, they both represent an imbalance. You brought too much stuff
into
your home but not enough
out.
So it's cluttered. If you're overweight, you took too many calories
in
but didn't burn enough
off.

Over the years, I have noticed that very often when I knock on homeowners' doors, the people living in these cluttered homes are struggling not only with the volume of stuff in their homes but also with the physical weight on
their bodies. Please understand: I'm not suggesting that cluttered people are automatically overweight, or that all overweight people are struggling with clutter. It's not that simple. But my experience tells me that this clutter-weight connection is no coincidence. In some cases, one problem may encourage the other to develop.

The chaos in your house nudges you toward making poorer eating and exercise choices.

If you're out of shape, you may become too easily fatigued and winded to tackle a big decluttering project. If your home is heavily cluttered, it may literally hold
tons
of extra stuff that you'd need to haul out. Decluttering is definitely a physical challenge.

But often, I think, other factors fuel the growth of clutter and body fat at the same time.

As you're standing in the checkout line to pay for items—groceries to eat or clothes to hang in your closet—you're buying them for reasons you don't realize.