Tweak: Eat Dinner at the Table
This Tweak is going to be a little bit painful to write because I am going to bare my soul and talk to you about some of the times that cause me the greatest regret as a mother. And as parents know, our shortcomings as moms and dads are the shortcomings that are the hardest to accept. But we learn and we do better.
Nowadays my family eats breakfast and dinner together at the table almost every day. I think this gives us the chance to touch base as a family, creating a stable routine as our day ramps up and winds down. We have a lot of fun, laughs and sometimes some serious conversations. But this wasn’t always the case. Read more
The Top 6 Non-Reasons for Clutter
CNN and Real Simple have published a fantastic article about clutter today. It’s not one of your typical “how to get your not-really-cluttered house a little more uncluttered.” This article really gets to the roots of our rationales for keeping the stuff we don’t love and don’t need. And it provides help with replacing these non-reasons with more useful ways of thinking about clutter. Read more
Did Fat Acceptance Help Me Lose Weight?
In 1998 I became aware of the idea of “fat acceptance” and it may have changed my life. I say may have, because it was not until a couple of years later that I started making even the tiniest positive life changes that eventually led me to where I am today, over 100 pounds lighter than I was at my heaviest weight and finally living in a clutter-free, functional and peaceful home.
Have you heard of the fat acceptance movement? It is a loose affiliation of individuals and organizations uniting around the idea that fat people are unfairly targeted for discrimination and hatred in our society. Of course, any of us who are or who have been fat know the truth of this like we know our own names. The revolutionary idea, to me at the time at least, is that this is not okay. Being reviled, discriminated against and treated poorly simply because we are fat is not okay. And, conversely, it’s okay to be fat. Read more
Tweak: Make the Bed
When I was a kid, nobody ever made me make the bed — ever! So it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that my bed was made perhaps 30 times in my childhood. As a kid I never really saw the point of making the bed — after all, as my kids sometimes point out to me nowadays, it’s just going to get slept in again in a few hours.
However, if you were forced to make your bed as a child and you don’t do it now as an adult, you may feel resistance to starting. Maybe the idea of having to make your bed makes you feel a little bit rebellious. But perhaps you feel like you “should” make the bed. If this describes you: Back away from the Make the Bed Tweak now and go find a Tweak that sings to you! Come back to this Tweak when you feel in your heart that a bed-making habit would be an expression of the nurturing and care you’d like to show yourself. The Tweaks are not about “shoulds” and I want you to choose Tweaks that give you a sense of joyful anticipation. Read more
Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist
Karron Maidment runs UCLA’s intensive treatment program for hoarders. She has written a really interesting article that contains many insights gained from treating hoarders in the program. I’m going to outline some of the article highlights in this post; it’s well worth the time to read the whole article if you are interested in more.
The UCLA treatment program concentrates on helping hoarders with discarding clutter, organizing kept items, preventing incoming clutter and introducing alternative behaviors. Therefore, I’ve boiled down the article’s strategies into these four categories. Read more
Decluttering Emotionally Charged Stuff
My son (who is 16 years old now!) has a dwindling collection of kitties (figurines) that he collected in his boyhood. A couple of weeks ago two of his kitties, a pair of black porcelain cats, mysteriously appeared on my desk. I inquired and he told me that he just really didn’t want them anymore.
Well, I didn’t really want the kitties either, to be honest, but still my heart kind of ached at the idea of getting rid of things that once held meaning for my used-to-be-little boy. The kitties spent the last two weeks on my otherwise uncluttered desk. Read more
Decoding Emotional Eating
You’ve probably heard that Oprah has gone public with her latest weight regain and her struggles with emotional eating. She recently said, “My drug of choice used to be potato chips. Now this year, it was organic, multigrain blue chips — but a bag of them.”
My first thought? Wow, maybe Oprah has unresolved anger issues. What does anger have to do with potato chips and corn chips? Well, people who work in the field of emotional eating have long known that we crave different flavors and textures depending on the emotional needs we’re trying to “fix” with the food. Read more