“You know what would be a good idea?” Either of us might ask it of the other. In those days, it was a question that had several answers, some of which are not printable. Mostly, though, the “good idea” would be:
Me: “I didn’t eat any more than you did!” Him: [looking at me incredulously. Points to himself, then to me, then to himself, then to me]. Me: [suddenly realizing that I am almost precisely half his size, therefore I just ate twice as much]. He used to make me “whole grain” homemade waffles every weekend. Or, I should specify, A waffle, because they were the size of an entire dinner plate. When he started doing Weight Watchers, we found that these waffles were 22 points each, and I get 21 points a day. I would eat this 22-pound waffle and then go back to bed and sleep for three hours, which I think is how bears work. You know, bears, those animals with a weight range from 180 to 1500 pounds? We once had a mild quarrel when he was helping me move out of my apartment, and I was cleaning out my fridge, and there was a jar with three maraschino cherries in it, and I ate them all rather than call him over and share them. (And I kind of choked on the syrup, so it serves me right, I guess). We had another mild quarrel when I had filled both the chest freezer and the fridge freezer, and the doors wouldn’t really close any more. Him: “You have to stop cooking.” Me: “No!” My solution was to start sending the overflow to various hungry bachelors in our acquaintance. Then we started having more people at our open house, so I had a channel for my fixation on feeding people. Our relationship began in a paradigm of being overweight and knowing it, planning and working to “do something about it,” yet also really, really enjoying recreational eating. I introduced him to Nepalese, Vietnamese, and Ethiopian cuisine. He made me dozens of pancakes and waffles. We went to the gym together, sometimes for 90 minutes a session. We went for long walks, generally to a restaurant, where the 100 or so calories we burned would poof back into existence like a freshly reborn phoenix. We denied each other nothing. If either of us suggested “a treat,” the other was for it. On the rare occasion when one of us was trying to “be good,” it might last for that instance, but then it was almost like spending a voucher. The next time a choice point came up, it was back to indulgence. Something interesting about this is that he is an Upholder and I am a Questioner, yet this dynamic of “giving each other permission” to overeat seems to work across tendencies. It’s probably near universal for Obliger couples, who are the most vulnerable to caving in under peer pressure. Counterintuitively, I tend to be the bad cop, because if I stop thinking something is a good idea, it loses its appeal, and I won’t do it anymore. Upholders seem to operate more along the lines of “as long as I am upholding everything in my rulebook, everything else is fair game.” When I realize that I have a loophole, I feel embarrassed, like I forgot to put on pants, and the loophole pulls closed. “Whoa, I have never turned down an opportunity to overeat, even though I always eat sensibly at home.” To me, that feels almost as dodgy as the cheating partner who claims, “It just happened.” Oh, I tripped and fell and suddenly I had a box of a dozen Voodoo Donuts, where they only take cash and you have to wait in line for half an hour? That “just happened”? We’ve both learned to acknowledge our desire to eat stuff and then discuss it. Part of what changed our dynamic around food was that we made a formal agreement before we got married. We vowed that we would both commit to take care of our health and to be accountability partners. We agreed that we would take each other’s direction if either of us felt the other needed to see a doctor or other health professional. We’ve lost 100 pounds between us, and we discussed keeping our weight within a healthy range, too. We know full well that we each have our own independent tendency to overeat and steadily gain weight, and that we have the ability to reinforce those tendencies when we work as a team. A sort of competitive eating team, trying to win a bronze medal at least, which is darn tough in the US! Another thing that changed our food paradigm was learning more about nutrition. I am the driver of this effort; in the world of dietetics I am what is known as the “nutritional gatekeeper.” In many families, that gatekeeper is the one who keeps buying pies and cases of soda and bringing home steaming hot paper sacks of fast food. In some households, that gatekeeper is a preschool-aged picky eater, bound and determined to get rickets or die trying. In our marriage, it’s me, the Questioner with the insatiable appetite for nonfiction books and articles and documentaries. He read a few of the books and watched a few of the movies and went to a couple of the seminars. We mutually agreed to double, then double again, our vegetable consumption. If anything, he genuinely enjoys eating vegetables even more than I do, and he’ll gladly eat just about anything. (He hates winter squash and eggplant, but he has been shifting on those and trying them occasionally, because we both think picky eating is poignantly sad). Something else that changed our food paradigm was my sudden, completely uncharacteristic obsession with distance running. To say it came out of nowhere would be understating the case. We both had a membership at the same gym for a while before we started dating. Sometimes we would work out together. He noticed that I was up to 4.5 mph on the treadmill, on a fairly steep incline. He asked, “Why don’t you just start running?” I tore him a new one. I went off on how much I hate running, and how he obviously hadn’t been paying attention about my fibromyalgia, and how I did things at my own pace (always), and how he needed to mind his own business and not lecture me until he was fitter than I was. (Athletically, he was fitter than I was, at least at the time). Naturally, he was right. I was too caught up in my perception that I always know what is best for myself, which is what makes me uncoachable. He was speaking from three decades of experience as an athlete, training as a team, playing as a team, and working under the tutelage of a knowledgeable leader. He knew how to assess people’s body mechanics, fitness level, experience, and innate suitability for different sports at a glance. I knew nothing about any of those things, and I wasn’t prepared to accept his expertise. I’m stubborn, but I’m not dumb, and gradually I started listening to him and being more open to advice. The other thing that changed was that I finally decided to look up the “healthy weight for my height” and do whatever it took to get there, at least for a while. I had never been at that healthy weight, and I had no idea what it felt like. I figured I would find out, and if I didn’t like it, it could be temporary. I know how to gain a pound a day. If I felt weak or frail or dizzy or whatever, I could be back to “normal” in a few days. What happened was that I tried it and I loved it. Every message our culture has to send, it is sending toward “people like me,” warning that we are in severe danger if we do such insane, self-loathing things as use the scientific method to experiment on what feels best for our bodies. Things such as using metrics, like weighing in every day and tracking what we eat. Things such as eating a salad when we want a salad, or turning down free cake. I’m being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee next week because I refuse to eat bacon. Anyway, my examination of our cultural dynamics around food changed my position on a lot of things. We now have this continuing dialogue thread that has kept us more focused on the intellectual side than that “mouth wants flavor” thing we used to have going on. It was up to me all along. There are a million things I can do as a “treat” that don’t involve poisoning my organs with excessive, biologically inappropriate food intake. There are also a million things we can do as a couple that don’t revolve around licking a spoon. Just because a large part of our relationship involved overeating for a long period of time doesn’t mean we lost anything after that changed. We still love to eat, and we still go out. Not as often, but then we both love to cook and we often prefer our own version of a dish to a restaurant’s version. We’ve learned to love eating things that are better for us, and leave us feeling good after the meal instead of groaning through a food hangover. What we’re doing is exploring uncharted territory together. We’re becoming stronger, more aware, more capable and active people. We have newfound physical stamina that allows us to enjoy doing things we would have ruled out in the past, such as living in a tent in Iceland for three weeks. When we turned our backs on the frozen Oreos, it opened up new vistas of adventure and excitement. It turns out that recreational eating is a flimsy substitute for the good life. We’re downsizing to an 881-square-foot house. Before we begin the full-scale packing and hauling, we follow a process which I’ve decided to call “anti-packing.” This is a mystery beyond the ken of ordinary folk, who relocate only rarely, and are thus confounded by the effort involved. Overwhelmed, they throw everything into dozens of boxes labeled MISC and figure they’ll sort it all out after the move. This is why self-storage is a thirty-billion-dollar industry and why ¾ of garages can’t accommodate an automobile. Read on, if you are lucky enough not to be in the midst of a move, so your next relocation will be easier. The minimalist stance is that we own only what is valuable to our lifestyle. We start with first principles. Standing in an empty room, what do we need to add? What do we use? What makes our life comfortable? Note that this is the opposite of default mode, in which we stand in a full room and grudgingly ask what we could conceivably remove. This is also why default mode is to move to a larger home every time we feel we can afford it. We think we don’t have enough space or enough storage, rather than that we may be spending too much time and money carrying home too many items for the available space. Space is a valuable thing in its own right. Calculate the cost per square foot in your home, and it may be a little unsettling how much it costs every month to keep an extra bookshelf or tub of fabric. My husband and I have learned that we prefer sleeping in the smallest room that will fit our bed. (Cozy!) We’ve also learned that we don’t need three bedrooms for the two of us, although it’s far easier to find a rental house with three bedrooms than with two. A larger house takes more work to clean. It also tends to draw excess possessions to it, in the manner that a black hole draws things into itself. We’ve elected to change course and pilot the little spacecraft of our marriage in the opposite direction. Our tendency has been to overbuy and overstock several categories of things. We have a running joke about paper towels, because when we were still only platonic friends, I helped my husband clear his garage, and we found four cases of paper towels. We laughed really hard at the excess of this. A couple weeks later, he found yet a fifth case. Anyone with a Costco membership knows the temptation of buying family packs and cases and economy size jars of everything. If you have the space, why not? We both also have a default tendency of buying books. Our real problem, though, was that we were both independent bachelors when we started dating, and we both brought all our furniture and housewares to our first shared home. Other than buying a new bed in place of our two old beds, we had double, triple, or quadruple everything. The house was big enough to fit it all, and conflict was avoided. Minimalism is about making decisions. We decide we want to live a certain way. We decide the details. We decide to take action and make the necessary changes. For a pair of newlyweds, this involves exploring everything about each other’s taste preferences and shaping a lifestyle together. Again, most people do this by default, never speaking up even when there is something that makes them shudder every time they lay eyes on it. Nothing about a dream life happens by default, inertia, unspoken opinions, delay, passivity, or going along to get along. He’s challenged me about the out-of-control pantry and I’ve challenged him about his decade-old collection of junkyard motors and robotics parts. (Mine: costs money; his: has potential to earn money). We hear each other out, always remembering that the important thing is to enjoy each other’s company as much as possible. It’s our relationship with each other, not our relationships to our stuff and each other’s stuff, that matters. Anti-packing is identifying things from the current home that will not be going to the new home. Anti-packing means saving the effort of packing, hauling, schlepping, and unpacking as much as possible. The obvious place to start is to take out any and all recyclables. We once had professional movers who packed a wastebasket with trash in it! Cleaning out the fridge, using up any containers that are less than half full, finishing off bottles of lotion or shampoo or detergent that are nearly empty, can save a surprising amount of volume in packed boxes. From the day we decide to move, we stop “stocking up” on groceries and plan meals around using up everything possible from the fridge, freezer, and pantry. Sometimes it’s possible to decant the contents of a big container into a small container, such as pouring the remnants of a gallon jug of olive oil into a smaller bottle. Over the course of a couple of weeks, dozens of jars and bottles and containers can be used up and anti-packed. While the process of consuming the consumables is ongoing, the next step is to anti-pack the largest items, such as appliances and furniture. Typically, a rental house will not have a fridge; we got lucky this time, because our old fridge has been limping toward obsolescence, and now we can recycle it and put off buying a replacement until the next time we move. My guideline is to always immediately sell, donate, or give away anything that is too big to fit in my newest dwelling. Most people will put such “valuable” items in storage due to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, paying hundreds of dollars more than the replacement cost of a new one. I simply quit seeing a storage unit as an option. Every time we have relocated, it has been to a different city, and there is no logical place for us to maintain a storage unit, even if such things were free. The cost factor, though, makes a storage unit pure, unadulterated folly for anyone who is not running a thriving business out of one. I have never heard a justification for a storage unit that made any fiscal sense to me, and believe me, I hear many such speeches. Cut it loose and pay off your credit cards or build a savings cushion. The next category to anti-pack is the decorations. Pictures and mirrors, plants, figurines, vases, centerpieces, candles, and bric-a-brac may or may not match the new place. We left a set of fireplace tools behind when we moved away from our first house together. The next two places did not have a fireplace. The current house does, although due to air quality we never dreamed of using it, and the new house does not. If we ever need fireplace tools again, it will be a minimum of four years since we let go of the last set. This is an example of how storage doesn’t make sense. If we stay in SoCal or move overseas, a set of fireplace tools would continue to be irrelevant to our life. It’s the same case with picture frames that are incompatible with the wall color or window placement of a new room. By the time I live in a place that is compatible with the décor of a past home, it may be outdated or we may no longer find it attractive. Better to pass it on to someone who will enjoy it now, rather than cling to the idea that we can somehow extract more value out of it at an unspecified future date. Personal items are probably the toughest category for most people. This category includes clothes, books, non-digital music and movies, keepsakes, papers, electronics, sports equipment, hobby supplies, toys, and procrastinated projects. There is technically a finite end to the amount of this stuff that people will accumulate, but the bounds expand with the available real estate. We don’t have to anti-pack as many personal items because we have a policy about acquiring them. When we left the Sacramento area, we decided to divest ourselves of our CDs and DVDs, and we now have precisely 5 DVDs that are not for workouts. (One is my husband’s appearance on BattleBots, and you can see why we keep that). I have struggled with my propensity to collect unread books, but I have held firm and disciplined myself, and I now have maybe 20% of the amount of books I had when we first got married. Whenever we upgrade our electronics, we pass on the previous version. We both have a lot of sports equipment, not to mention a treadmill and an elliptical, and every time we move, we reevaluate our interest in each activity. That’s the point of minimalism, again: Checking in and making sure we are extracting full value from our physical surroundings and our possessions. If we have it, it should speak for itself and justify its presence. Our new house is 63% of the size of our present house. It has four rooms rather than six (apparently bathrooms are not included in a formal room count). We’re dropping a bedroom, a bathroom, a pantry, a dining room, half the living room, half a bedroom, half a linen closet, and the coat closet. We’re picking up a medicine cabinet and bathroom drawers, a few extra kitchen drawers, a larger refrigerator, a detached laundry room, and a larger garage. Because of this, we are anti-packing our refrigerator, washer and dryer, 10-top dining table and chairs, our current couch, and probably a faded old easy chair. Also being released are the decorations I made for the apartment I had when we started dating 9 years ago. Moving frequently makes for a number of clear watersheds in the timeline. I can pick something up and remember where I lived when I got it. This helps to establish how long I have had something. I can divide the price by the number of years, arriving at a yearly cost of use. Say I have a folding bookshelf I bought for $40, and I remember that I bought it in 1995. At 20 years old, it’s cost $2 per year. When I eventually let it go, I can smile, knowing I certainly got my money’s worth. If I spent the same $40 on something I never used, keeping it just means I’m paying extra rent to store something useless in my personal environment. Not every move is a positive move. Not everyone looks forward to a new home that may be a disappointment in many ways. (BTDT). In our case, we’ve been able to wait and choose and find a place that really suits us. We love it! It’s still in the final stages of remodeling, but in our minds, we already live there. Our current house is more like a motel room every day. It’s easy to let go of attachments to material things from an earlier stage of life, when you look forward to the next stage and see it as an improvement. Anyone can feel that. It is possible to move in the direction of a better life, with focus and frugality and organization and flexibility. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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