(Picture taken at City Lake by my husband Jim)

I’ve been reading a book called “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat.”  I was attracted to the book first of all because of the title.  What a great title!  But it was ultimately the subject matter of the book that made me want to read it.  It’s written by Peter Walsh, who is the very charming British host of the TV show Clean Sweep.  I love that show.  I love to watch how the crew is able to take a disastrous couple of rooms in random people’s houses and declutter them, have a yard sale, and reorganize the things that go back in the room while repainting and sometimes recarpeting and giving the people rooms they can actually use and be proud of.  Everytime I watch the show, it inspires me to get up and clean up.  If you’ve ever watched the show, you know that music that goes along with it.  Bom-bom-ba-bom-bom. Bom. Boom!  I love it.

It seems that Walsh believes that having a lot of clutter in our houses, and in our lives for that matter, can also cause us to gain weight.  And likewise, clearing the clutter from our homes can help us clear the pounds from our hips.  He makes the observation that others have made before him, even if not quite so charmingly:  excess clutter in our homes (often caused by buying things that aren’t necessary and hording them) as well as excess weight (often caused by eating vast quantities of unhealthy foods that aren’t good for us) are just symptoms of underlying unresolved issues.  And until we get those underlying unresolved issues taken care of, then we’ll continue to clutter up again even after we de-clutter and we’ll also continue to gain back the weight we’ve worked hard to lose.  It’s like treating a disease by only addressing the symptoms and not doing anything about the underlying cause.  It is only successful for a while, and then the disease rares up again and the symptoms come back, often worse the next time.

Here is an excerpt from his book explaining what he’s talking about:

“As I learned in cluttered houses across the country, when you’ve collected too much of anything, including fat, you can’t get rid of it without facing the underlying issues. To lose weight, to achieve the body and look you desire, you have to consider the many aspects of where and how you live. You have to consider the life you want to live. You have to look at your body the way you look at your house and say, ‘Do I honor and respect this body? Does it reflect who I am?’ If your goals aren’t clear and your thinking isn’t focused, you can’t break the habits that stand in your way.

To deal with the fat that clings to your hips, you need to look beyond the number on the scale. If that’s your focus, you will never lose weight. I know that this flies in the face of common thinking, but consider this: Every year, we spend nearly 40 billion dollars on diet books and programs. It’s estimated that 45 million of us diet at some point every year and yet we keep gaining weight. If diets are the key to losing weight, why is that with the increasing number of diet books the pounds just keep stacking on? Why, if so many of us diet at least once every year, are two-thirds of us heavier than we should be? As far as I’m concerned, most of those diet books are full of empty promises and short-lived results. They encourage us to spend hours weighing, measuring, and scoring what we put in our mouths. They fill us with a sense of failure and guilt. And each diet book contributes one more piece of clutter to our homes, adding to our already increasing weight—both on our bookshelves and on our hips! More diet books, more weight—a paradox.”

I think he has a really valid point there.  And I especially like the questions he asks me as I read:

“Do I honor and respect this body? Does it reflect who I am?”  

My answers are yes, I do honor and respect my body and it does reflect who I am.  It’s not a perfect body, but neither am I a perfect person.  But my body is getting better as I make healthier choices that honor and respect it, and it is every day becoming more of a reflection of who I am and who I intend to be.

Deb