No, my kitchen usually does not look like this |
We are doing some work in our house. As a result, the place
is an absolute mess. The kitchen is full of the dining room stuff, my sewing
stuff and who knows what else at this point. My office has the guest room
furniture. And there is dust and dirt everywhere!
When this sort of disruption happens, I have no interest in
cooking. It just seems to be enough stress just to make it through the day. The
house is a bit of a maze between the drop cloths and the various pieces of equipment.
Come the end of the day, I am ready to drop. It is just stressful to have
everything in the wrong place or not have a place. As a result, last Saturday
night we gave in and ordered a pizza. I think this is probably a violation to
the “no bread” rule but we were just kind of done in from the mess. At least we
stopped and thought about it before we ordered it. Before we started trying to
behave again, I would have ordered the large pizza with the thought that we
would have left overs. This time we ordered the small pizza and each had two
pieces. Yes, that was still probably more than we should have had but it was an
improvement. I will say that we hurried to put the leftovers in the
refrigerator so that we would not be tempted by them.
With all this mess around us right now, I started thinking
about how clutter affects our eating habits. Think about it. If your house is a
mess, it adds stress to your life. As many of us can attest, stress eating is a
real thing. Also, when there is stuff everywhere, you don’t feel like preparing
a meal.
Of course, there is a study about this…
The name of the study
is “Clutter, Chaos, and Over consumption” and it was published in 2016. The
purpose of the study was to see how cluttered, chaotic environments – such as
messy kitchens- influence snacking behavior. In case you don’t want to read the
study, the results suggest that a chaotic environment can have an impact on
food intake, particularly for sweet food. Amazingly, they didn’t find that a
chaotic environment increased the consumption or carrots or crackers.
There is also a study that indicated that people in an
orderly office would be more inclined to choose healthy snacks. You can read an
article about both these studies.
The first episode of Clean Sweep
Have you ever heard of Peter Walsh? He is the guru organizer.
I saw him first on a TLC show named “Clean Sweep”. He has a book out entitled Does
this Clutter Make my Butt Look Fat? The book talks about the relationship
between lifestyle and eating. In the book,
“Peter helps you address how the clutter in
your kitchen, your pantry, and your home is directly related to the clutter n
your body and negatively affects your ability to lead a full and healthy
life.”
Wow, that is a lot for a book to do…
While I have just mentioned a few references here, there are
many that can be found. Does this sound like it could made a difference for you?
I just wanted to give you something to think about. Do you think that by
cleaning or straightening out your kitchen, desk or home, you might feel more
empowered to take better control of your eating?
I’ll let you know next week if things are better around
here.
Thanks for reading!