Clutter, Clutter Everywhere

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!