hello?

Warning: long, long post.

And now (16/4/08 ) even longer, because I do like to go back over my posts and add OTHER INTERESTING STUFF. Sorry.

I apologise for the porketeerial absence this week fortnight last ten days or so.

Basically, we are all horribly busy. The increasingly inaccurately-monikered Non-Working Monkey is strutting her stuff in the Canada (French); Wendy has just changed jobs and is getting to grips with the new one; top professional writer lady Anna is doing top professional writer stuff, and I’m just really fucking lazy. Or am I working my purely metaphorical nuts off? YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHICH.

Actually, you will know which. It’s the latter, I’m afraid. What I’m working on is (a) work, because, you know, I’ve got a personal trainer to feed, and (b) overhauling my life.

Sometimes you start one thing and end up changing everything. Ever done that? One minute you’re sitting in the living room thinking that it would be nice to move the TV so that the sun didn’t shine on it at midday. The next minute you’ve moved the TV and now you think perhaps the coffee table needs to be edged forward too. Six hours later you’ve moved every single piece of furniture to a new spot and suddenly you’ve got a whole new room and you can’t understand why you didn’t just arrange it like that in the first place because everything works so much better.

Well, this year has been like that for me. In fact, the last month, really, has been like that for me. I am a very disorganised person by nature. Some people are born holding a To Do list in one hand and a diary in the other. I’m not one of those. My personal living space has always been a tip. My desk at work has always been a pile of paper. I don’t lose things because I never ever throw anything away, but it takes me ages to find anything. I start things and don’t finish them. I have always found it very hard to make myself do things that I don’t like doing.

I don’t like living in a mess and I don’t like not knowing what’s going on, but as - until recently - I could never for the life of me be bothered (a) to write everything down in a diary or (b) look at the damn diary if I did, and as I never quite got the hang of the fact that if you adopt a policy of dropping everything on the floor and not picking it up later the floor will end up being LOST UNDER A TIDE OF CRAP, I found myself doing just that: living in a mess and not knowing what was going on.

But how is this relevant to weight loss, Katy?

Seriously? You can’t see it? OK, bear with me. You’ll get it.

As those of you who read my other blog will know, I went on holiday to New York earlier this year and my disorganisation really came home to roost. I didn’t book the tickets early enough, even though I was going out for a particular event that I had known about months before, so ended up paying almost £1000 for tickets that should have cost £400. I didn’t bother to do any laundry or plan my packing until the night before I went, so ended up tipping the whole of my still-damp laundry basket into my suitcase, which meant I was taking about three weeks’ worth of clothes for a four-night stay, so promptly got stung for $50 in excess baggage charges. I didn’t take any comfortable shoes with me and ended up with hideous blisters. I left my favourite handbag in a taxi with my car keys, my house keys and my work keys because I hadn’t bothered to take them out and didn’t keep track of what I had with me.

Admittedly, I also got to spend the evening with Jill Twiss, who is my most favourite American lady and really one of the funniest people you will ever meet in real life - I did try to bring her home with me for Britain, but she was all “HEY STOP ABDUCTING ME POLICE HELP” - so it wasn’t a complete write-off.

Anyway, something had to give and that something was me. It had to be me, because desks don’t tidy themselves. I didn’t want to live in mess anymore. I didn’t want to be constantly waking up in the night panicking that I had missed a deadline that I’d forgotten about. I didn’t want to be constantly straggling in late and apologising. I didn’t want to inflict my sloppy habits on the Chairwoman anymore; she is marvellously organised but, now that she has mobility issues, could no longer fight against my laziness and apathy. (I mean, don’t get me wrong: we weren’t living in a pigsty. The house is tidy. It was only the bits under my direct control that were in a complete mess; the Chairwoman managed to keep her bits of the house presentable despite being chairbound, which only makes my own slovenliness even more ridiculous than it would be otherwise.) I was tired of walking around feeling as if I was snowed under because I never actually had a running list of what I had to do.

I was also tired of being notoriously disorganised. I get away with it because I am actually quite good at my job and people like me, but there is no escaping the fact that I am known for being a hopelessly disorganised, messy, late, procrastinating hoarder of useless things. I always have been. At school. At my Saturday jobs. At my former place of work. At my current place of work.

On my way back from America I bought a book called “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?”, which I sort of reviewed for this site. There were parts of the book that I didn’t like that much, but the concept really struck a chord with me, because my attitude to eating and exercise is the same as my attitude to my life generally: that is, that I’ll not bother now and do it properly at some unspecified point in the future. I am not saying that this is true of all lardy lardsters, and I dislike that “fat=sloppy” stereotype intensely, but in my case I’m afraid that it’s more than a little accurate. Or was.

So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve really been concentrating on remedying this, and properly. Previously I would decide that I was going to take 7 days off and COMPLETELY REORGANISE EVERYTHING. It never worked. That’s the equivalent of deciding that you’ll lose 5 stone by not eating and exercising a lot for two months, which is of course the basis of the Lighter Life diet and the Slimfast regime and we all know how well those work long-term.

What I have realised is that you can’t put off living your life properly because you intend to sort out the backlog in one go at some unspecified future point. I haven’t taken any time off to deal with the clutter or the reorganisation this time. Instead, I’ve started using my paper organiser to make lists, in each room, of what needs doing (so for example in my bedroom, I’ve written down “dressing table”, “TV unit”, “book box” etc) and when I have some spare time I deal with one area at a time. It really works. I’m dealing with the backlog of clutter bit by bit and at the same time putting in systems for the future.

And the weight loss? I’m getting there. Honestly.

I’m filing all my paperwork now as it comes in. I know that I will find other old bits of paper that need to be filed as I tackle each area that I’ve identified, and that’s fine; I have a system and the paper will just slot in when it’s found - no more piles of unopened post or shoeboxes crammed full of receipts. Everything in the house has a place, and I know I’ll find more as I go through, but that’s fine because it will just go where it lives as I find it, or if I don’t need it it will be thrown out or given away - no more old plastic bags full of tat saved from when I was ten, no matter how much I liked it then: if it isn’t pretty enough or memorable enough for me to want to look at now or to save for any kids I have then I don’t want it.

The way I keep everything tidy is beautifully simple: I only ever take out what I need for what I’m doing at that moment, and when I’ve finished with it I put it away before I take anything else out. If I throw something at the bin and miss, I get up and put it straight back in because I know that it doesn’t take long before your floor is full of stuff that missed the bin. I accept that at the moment I am probably coming across as ever so slightly Hitler Youth, but I trust that as I get used to living like an organised person I’ll start to loosen up enough to be human again. I can live with it. I’d rather be an annoyingly organised person in a shiny clean house who’s up to date with her work than a disorganised person sitting on a pile of old paper.

Fascinating, but what about the - OH ALL RIGHT THEN.

Since my house began to look noticeably tidier and less cluttered, I’ve become less inclined to snack. I say that, actually, having eaten quite badly yesterday, but it was one day out of a month of relatively sensible eating and I really can’t be bothered to have a go at myself. But whereas it’s fine to sit down in a cluttered, messy room with crappy food and apply it to your face, there’s something about a beautifully organised space that makes you want to eat properly. I don’t want to sit down on a clean cream sofa in a quiet, neat room with an orphanage-sized Pepperoni Plus. It doesn’t feel right.

See, for me, being fat and being disorganised and being untidy feel all tied up together, and I’m tired of all three. And looking back, the chain of events seems to go: started to think about eating properly in January - started to see personal trainer in February - went to NYC and was confronted with results of dreadful habits - came back here and started decluttering - started writing things down and planning stuff - starting to reap benefits of newly organised lifestyle - somehow less inclined to eat badly.

Being disorganised cost me a huge amount of money in New York. I am irritated with myself, because it seems obvious to me now that being disorganised IS expensive, and time-consuming, and stressful, and pointless. I used to think that being organised was a bit, you know, spoddy and uncool, but actually I now aspire to having a reputation for being well-organised. I wish that I had realised that being disorganised was not very clever sooner, but at least I have realised it now. And it didn’t really take very much to get myself organised once I’d realised how badly I wanted to get control of my life back. My whole life. I think that for me trying to lose weight in isolation was a mistake, because the source of my weight problem - I think - is also the source of the other things that made my life more difficult than it had to be. That’s what I mean about starting off with one relatively small change and suddenly finding that you’ve reorganised everything. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle and it feels, well, it feels really good.

So that’s what I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks: revolutionising my life. If anyone is interested in, um, sharing… sorry, I’ve just been a little bit sick. OK. Basically, I would like to throw this open to the “floor”, because I’m really interested in how people’s habits generally impinge on their weight and self-image. What I want to know is: do you consider yourself to be organised, and if so would you say that you have always been organised, or is it something that you have had to teach yourself? And do you think that your organisation, or lack thereof, is in any way related to how you take care of yourself physically?