Read Online Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight by Peter Walsh - Free Book Online

that a higher percentage of them had ADHD compared to the general population. (These studies, however, weren’t set up to prove that one caused the other.) In another study, researchers compared men who’d had childhood ADHD with men who
didn’t
have childhood ADHD. The men who’d had ADHD were significantly more likely to be obese (about 41 percent compared to 21.6 percent in the non-ADHD group).
    And women who remembered having more ADHD-like symptoms in childhood—such as inattention, poor impulse control, and hyperactivity—have been found to have a higher risk of obesity in adulthood.
    I’d like to recap two main points here, since they’re crucial for confronting—and conquering—your clutter and your weight in this program:
    1. Anxiety, depression, and ADHD may raise people’s risk of hoarding and becoming overweight. Since hoarding and regular excessive clutter aren’t necessarily far apart, this research very well may apply to you, dear reader, even if you don’t have hoarding disorder.
    2. You don’t need to have a full-fledged, diagnosable case of depression, anxiety, or ADHD for this to apply to you, either. Milder relatives of these problems—respectively, feeling blue, stressed, unfocused, or impulsive—can affect your purchasing and eating habits.
    Knowing whether any of these issues are lurking in your mind will put you in a better position to confront them and separate them from your eating habits and your attitudes toward acquiring and hanging on to possessions.
    In the next chapter, you’ll put your mind to the test to see what kinds of factors may be driving your clutter and weight. Make that
several
tests!
    WHERE ARE YOU ON THE CLUTTER SCALE?
    The degree to which we accumulate clutter can be thought of in terms of a sliding scale on which most of us can locate ourselves. I’ve found it useful to think of the different stages of the scale like this:

    Each of these stages on what I call “The Clutter Scale” is marked by increasing levels of clutter, more difficulty discarding things or letting them go, more severe trouble in relationships with family and friends due to clutter, increased social isolation, and increasing mental health issues.
    No single factor can predict whether a person will struggle with clutter, though many factors may come into play: genetics, family history, environment, social conditioning, and one’s upbringing. Sometimes a childhood trauma associated with personal belongings can play a role.
    I vividly remember a woman I worked with who found it impossible to let go of anything that came into her home. She told me that as a child, her family had moved across the country. Her parents guaranteed that she would find all of her belongings in their new home, but when they proved too expensive to move, her parents threw them away. In many ways, that grown woman was still the traumatized 8-year-old who’d been betrayed. As an adult, she made sure that no one—including herself—would ever separate her from her things.
    Some people just never learned the simple routines of maintaining a home when they were kids. Once, working with a young family, I asked why they threw their laundered clothes into the corner of theirmaster bedroom. The wife said this was how she was raised. She was surprised—and a little amazed—when I showed her how to fold clothes and iron a shirt. She’d never before seen or done either!

    Organization is a skill like any other that must be modeled and taught from an early age, or else kids are more likely to struggle with clutter later on. Many of my clients have confided that their clutter has gotten worse with age, and that an intervention when they were younger might have caught the problem before it became extreme.
    Consider a small lesson contained in my Clutter Scale, which you can see once we plot the scale on a graph along with age.
    It’s not