Diets don't work. Why not? Because they focus on what foods we should and shouldn't eat but completely ignore everything else that makes us fat. Peter Walsh believes the secret to successfully losing weight is focusing on how, why and where you eat. When it comes to clearing clutter (the fat in our homes) it isn't about the stuff itself, it's about the life you want to live. The same is true for losing weight: It's not about the pounds, it's about living the life you deserve in the body you want.
It's Not About the Food
As I learned in cluttered houses across the country, when you've collected too much of anything, including fat, you can't get rid of it without facing the underlying issues. To lose weight, to achieve the body and look you desire, you have to consider the many aspects of where and how you live. You have to consider the life you want to live. You have to look at your body the way you look at your house and say, "Do I honor and respect this body? Does it reflect who I am?" If your goals aren't clear and your thinking isn't focused, you can't break the habits that stand in your way.

To deal with the fat that clings to your hips, you need to look beyond the number on the scale. If that's your focus, you will never lose weight. I know that this flies in the face of common thinking, but consider this: Every year, we spend nearly 40 billion dollars on diet books and programs. It's estimated that 45 million of us diet at some point every year and yet we keep gaining weight. If diets are the key to losing weight, why is that with the increasing number of diet books the pounds just keep stacking on? Why, if so many of us diet at least once every year, are two-thirds of us heavier than we should be? As far as I'm concerned, most of those diet books are full of empty promises and short-lived results. They encourage us to spend hours weighing, measuring, and scoring what we put in our mouths. They fill us with a sense of failure and guilt. And each diet book contributes one more piece of clutter to our homes, adding to our already increasing weight—both on our bookshelves and on our hips! More diet books, more weight—a paradox.
From Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? by Peter Walsh. Copyright © 2008 by Peter Walsh Design, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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