Making Your Kitchen Svelte

There are connections behaviorists have somehow put together over the years.

For instance, smoking and drinking can go hand in hand for a lot of people. But clutter and weight problems? One expert says there is a link and the way to start attacking the problem is by putting your kitchen on a diet.

In his book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?, author Peter Welsh (consultant for TLC’s Clean Sweep TV reality show) suggests how clutter in the home stands in the way of a more healthful lifestyle. He advocates clearing clutter and tossing out the useless appliances that get in the way of healthful food preparation in our kitchens.

Welsh made the connection between clutter and weight problems when readers of his first book, It’s All Too Much, began telling him how they also had lost weight as a result of getting organized. He believes that in essence, your living space is a reflection of your own body.

He writes about our urge to consume more – spending too much, buying too much, and eating too much -- while surrounding ourselves with so much clutter. overwhelms our bodies with caloric clutter consisting mainly of sugar and fat.

Much of Welsh’s focus is on the kitchen. “If you walked into a new restaurant and saw a messy, disorganized kitchen and dining area, you’d turn around and walk out the door,” he writes. “You wouldn’t eat dinner in a place like that. So why would you do it at home?”

He hopes to motivate you to grab a garbage bag and start tossing out non-essentials to get your kitchen’s weight under control. This begins with a quick purge of things you don’t need, such as anything that isn’t used for food preparation, storing, serving or cleaning up. Dispose of duplicates and broken items or items stained or chipped beyond use.

Deep cleaning requires fortitude. You may have to part with your hardly-used egg poacher, your crumb-laden toaster oven, some muffin tins or the fondue pot you received as a wedding gift in 1975. He advises readers to be ruthless by stripping away the excess ‘fat’ from their kitchens just as you would want to strip it away from your hips.

These are a few of Welsh’s guidelines to a skinnier kitchen:

• Donate anything you don’t want to carry down (and then up) 5 flights of stairs.

• Realize how little counter space you have and clear it off

• Organize your food so you can locate it and go one better by arranging it so that you can tell when you need more of something.

With his latest advice, Welsh offers the tools to get past excuses, face the issues, and make the change to a better life.