Clutter

(If you think this reads differently today, you are quite right. I rewrote this quite a bit this morning because I felt, on re-reading it, that it was a bit ranty and didn’t really give the author credit for the things I felt he got right. - KN)

At Newark Airport - which, I notice, most Americans seem to pronounce “ne-WORK”- I picked up an interesting-looking book by Peter Walsh called “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?”, partly because I remembered Le Singe Non-Travaillant Super-Sexy mentioning it in a comment on one of my other posts. No, I’m not linking to it. Why? Because I can’t be bothered to find it. Go and find it yourself if you’re that bothered. All right then, DON’T. That’s fine. Good! Fine!

The author is a decluttererer, i.e. one of these people who makes a fortune going to people’s houses and telling them to throw things away. I would sneer at this if not for the fact that I am the Clutter Queen of North London. I never throw junk mail away and I usually have hundreds of tiny bottles of toiletries that I will never use or which have an inch in the bottom of them that I’m never going to get out of the bottle. My desk at work was until recently a nightmare and I still never file anything, although - funnily enough - I do keep my PC’s desktop absolutely spotless and everything is very neatly filed. People who send me documents via email are people I treasure forever.

Ad of course I am also fat. So I found this all rather interesting.  BRING ME A READMORE TAG.  STAT.

Thanks.  Right.  In a nutshell, what the author says is that he has noticed that when he helps people who are overweight to declutter, they often report back that they have found themselves losing weight. He theorises that the things that make us gain weight - from depression to lack of planning - are also the things that make us let go in other areas of our lives, and that by becoming better organised in household management and particularly kitchen and menu management we can help ourselves lose weight. To be honest, that’s pretty much it. The rest of the book is really about decluttering your house, particularly the kitchen, and planning what you eat, and how eating junk food is like having junk in your house, and why don’t you respect your body.

There is some good stuff in the book, but I’m going to start with a bit of a rant about the bits I didn’t like. Some people would probably do the good bits first, but that’s just how I roll.  Okay?  Okay.

The book boils down to “If you tidy your house up and get organised you may find that you are better equipped to eat sensibly, and also that you feel better about yourself and hence motivated to lose weight.” That’s difficult to stretch to a couple of hundred pages, particularly if you only devote a few pages to how to get organised - apparently you have to buy his other book for that. So there is a lot of repetition, mostly about why fat people become fat (because we eat too much of the wrong foods and don’t love or respect our bodies, apparently - why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?) and the importance of planning what you eat in advance, which is big news and in no way the lynchpin of virtually every diet ever devised ever.

Peter Walsh isn’t a nutritionist, a dietician or a psychologist, which in fairness he is at pains to point out - but it shows. I can only speak for myself, but I tend to do best at dieting when I’m feeling good about myself. For some reason feeling bad about myself and my body sends me diving head-first into the biscuit tin, and I don’t think I’m alone there. I’ve read pretty much every diet book going and I’ve also been to a psychiatrist specialising in nutrition: back to front though it may sound, you do best at dieting when your self esteem is up, not when it’s down, and when you have decided to lose weight for yourself rather than because other people think you should.  Someone needs to explain this to Peter Walsh, if you ask me, because he clearly thinks that feeling bad about yourself is essential for slimming success. Consider this, on page 35:

“Fat comes between you and your relationships… Has your weight changed significantly since you and your partner met? Do you still feel as attractive? Are you still attracted to each other or is your fat literally coming between the two of you? I don’t like to say that fat is unattractive, and I don’t have to. Society says it for me in hundreds of negative and often hurtful ways.”

See, this irritates me.  I realise that most people do not include “fat” on their list of ideal attributes in a partner.  Peter Walsh clearly doesn’t find fat people attractive, and he’s entitled not to.  He’s right, though, it doesn’t need saying.  Fat people as a group tend not to be that happy about being fat and of course no one who likes the current size of their bum is going to buy his book, so you might think he could skip the lecture.  Anyone who’s bought his book already knows they need to lose weight and why.

I know I’m digressing a bit now, but the other thing that annoys me is that chemistry is much more than body size and shape.  I quite like big men so I wouldn’t be that bothered about fat, but I certainly wouldn’t ideally want to go out with someone who was shorter than me.  My friend C wouldn’t ideally want to go out with someone bald.  Another of my friend actively loathes blonde hair in men.  But we’ve all gone against type more than once, because real life is not a checklist and chemistry is intangible.  The fact is that most of the fat people I know of both genders are in committed relationships just like normal people, and not because they were thin when those relationships began, either.  The vast majority of women who post on the Weight Watchers UK forums are married or committed to men who met them as they are or when they were fatter and still think they’re gorgeous.  For all I want to lose weight, I know plenty of beautiful, sexy women and knee-weakeningly handsome men who are carrying considerably more than a few extra pounds and looking pretty fucking good on it.

Look at my gorgeous co-Porketeers, all three of whom are in committed relationships with handsome, clever men who adore them. As the only single Porketeer, I envy, respect and loathe them in equal measure.  Also, I would have hot lesbo sex with each and every one of them, if only I was a lesbian myself.

OK sorry about that.  The book, right?  Yes.  Further on, I found myself getting exasperated again when Walsh suggested, quite seriously, that you should remove all of your clothes, stand in front of a full-length mirror and do star-jumps in all your wobbly, stretchmarked glory.  Yes.  This, apparently, will “motivate you” by providing you with an “objective view” of how you look.  What?  I mean, what?  This is how you work out what you look like to other people, is it?  Maybe I’m the odd one out here, but nude star jumps?  When was the last time you did one of THOSE in front of someone else?  Where on earth does Walsh live?  I AM NEVER GOING THERE.

But seriously, I can’t believe anyone would actually suggest this in a book about losing weight. He actually says that this is the “most objective” way of looking at yourself. Oh really? Is that right? Ever heard of anorexia, Peter? Or body dysmorphia? You know, the eating disorders that make seriously underweight people look in the mirror and see an elephantine monster looking back? Why not subtitle the book “Has This Book Caused My Eating Disorder?” And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Peter, but people, and especially women, are naturally wobbly. That is scientific fact and I don’t even have to be a doctor to know it. Unless you are David Beckham SOMETHING IS GOING TO WOBBLE WHEN YOU JUMP UP AND DOWN.

Besides, we have become so self-critical and so judgmental about our own bodies that I think even David Beckham would find something to hate about himself if he jumped up and down naked in front of the mirror for long enough.

Admittedly there are other points in the book where he talks about loving your body and treating it with respect - but they ring pretty hollow after that. The way to treat your body with respect is not to make it scrutinise itself for faults in the mirror, or watch itself do star jumps in the nude, for Christ’s sake. You don’t need to be a psychologist or a nutritionist to know that the mirror is a pretty fickle friend as far as most dieters are concerned.

OK, there are things I really don’t like about this book, not least the fact that its advice can be summarised in one paragraph - but nonetheless I am grown up enough to admit that Walsh may be on to something here.  The fact is that I do find that when I am in control of my eating I am also in control of most of the rest of my life. I also find that if I start to overeat I start to let everything else go too. My eating is tied up with how I feel, and if I’m thinking “What’s the point of eating healthily anyway?”, the chances are I’m also wondering why on earth it matters whether the house is tidy or not.

I think that the things that make me overeat are also the things that make me untidy and disorganised, and I rather like the idea that if you’re struggling to control your eating directly you might be able to deal with it obliquely by concentrating on something that has more immediate and tangible results: it’s proper lateral thinking, that, and kudos to Walsh, although not nearly enough to make up for the nekkid star jumps.  If you spend the whole day cleaning and reorganising your living room, what are you going to sit down with on the sofa afterwards - a cup of mint tea or a Tesco cream cake assortment? For me it would probably be the mint tea. I have no idea why. It just would be.

So I’m interested enough to start de-cluttering, although I don’t plan to buy another of his books to do it. There’s plenty about decluttering and household organisation online. I started with The Organised Home, a free guide to de-cluttering and getting to grips with proper household management the good old fashioned way. I should emphasise that I have always been untidy to some extent, even when I was thin, and that I know plenty of fat people who are beautifully houseproud and amazingly together, so this is categorically not a slide into the whole “fat people are lazy and slovenly” cliche.

I’d be interested to see if anyone else has noticed a connection between the way they take care of themselves and the state of their house, desk, garden, whatever. Really. Share with me, people. Share.