Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight by Peter Walsh Read Free Book Online Page A

6-week program, you’ll learn to recognize when
any
of these factors are spurring you to buy or accept stuff you don’t need and then hang on to it longer than you should. You’ll learn how to resist these pressures. You’ll learn to control them instead of them controlling you.
    You’ll learn how to fill the empty spaces in your life with better things than
stuff.
As you haul the clutter out of your home, you’ll create more space. You’ll have more physical room in your home for family activities. You’ll have more time in your schedule (since you won’t have to shift around clutter just to clean house) for activities that feed your spirit.
    That’s exactly what several people in the test group who went through the
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
program told me. The changes they made over 6 weeks opened up time for exercise. They cleared stress out of their mind, leaving room for happier feelings. They rooted out sources of conflict in their marriage, creating a better place to meet in the middle with their spouses.
    â€œI 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 communeor 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,