Did you know there’s a link between decluttering your home and having a healthier diet?
Our eating habits are subject to many different influences. The way we treat our homes and the way we manage our clutter has a palpable impact on our food choices and the way we treat our bodies. When you start looking a little closer, it’s not too surprising that decluttering can make you eat healthier.
So if you’re on the path to eating healthier, or if you want to clean up your diet and make some serious health changes, consider decluttering your home to help change your mindset. Here’s how decluttering can influence your healthy eating.
1 – Decluttering Promotes Removing ‘Junk’ From Your Life
When we declutter our homes, we are encouraged to remove anything that is ‘junk’ from our lives.
We keep hold of so much clutter: paper clutter, old ratty clothes, linen that has holes and is less than luxurious, half-finished bathroom items, food that is out of date… Lots of junk.
If you remove these ‘junk’ items, you’re also more inclined to remove junk food items from your pantry too. Because when you have things in your home that make you feel good, you want everything to be on that wave length, including your food.
Settling for ‘junk’ is no longer an option, whether it’s junk on your bookshelves or junk in your pantry.
2 – Decluttering Makes You More Selective
One of the principles of decluttering is that the things we keep in our life need to make us happy and have a purpose.
The same goes for our food. What purpose does your food have? How does your food make you feel?
Removing food that makes you feel anything less than fabulous is naturally going to encourage more healthy eating. It also means that we start to pay closer attention to the way our food makes us feel.
We also start to think more about the purpose of our food. We keep items in our home that serve a purpose and we choose our food based on this too. You will start choosing foods that energize you because that is the purpose of food – to energize and nourish.
3 – Decluttering Promotes Awareness and Mindfulness
As we mentioned, decluttering makes us more aware of how things make us feel, including our food. But it also means we are more mindful in our decisions.
How many times have you sat down and just kept eating mindlessly, consuming food in more of a reactive way rather than a proactive, energizing way? It’s easy to do. We sit amongst our excess of items in our house and eat our excess of food.
Being more mindful in our homes makes us start to look at mindfulness in other areas of our life, including our eating habits. Instead of simply consuming food, you will start to pay more attention to how your food satisfies you rather than simply eating everything that is in front of you.
4 – Simple Household Promotes Simple Eating
When we start to simplify our homes we look for other places to create simplicity as well, and our meals are such an easy way to do this.
It’s easy to overcomplicate the idea of healthy eating. We ‘have’ to eat a certain amount of fruit, veggies, meats, dairy etc each day in order to be ‘healthy’. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Simple meals that don’t take too long to cook and are easy to prepare are the best thing when it comes to healthy eating. And having a decluttering mindset helps you appreciate simple eating too.
Furthermore, when we create simplicity in our homes, we also create simplicity in our pantry and fridge. We don’t store food in excess and we purchase only what we need – which often means fresh, healthy food.
5 – Breaking The Link Between Buying More and Eating More
Overcomplicating your home by adding clutter and filling every corner? Have you noticed you do the same with your plate? Rather than adding enough food to our plate to keep us satisfied, we often fill our plates until they are full, regardless of the size of our plate.
It’s like the ‘white space’ areas in our home that need to be filled with clutter, the ‘white space’ areas on our plate need to be filled with food.
The same happens when we go shopping and feel the need to buy constantly. We try to fill voids in our life with ‘things’ – either the things we can purchase and fill our homes with, or the things we can consume and fill our bodies with.
Decluttering has such an amazingly positive impact on our lives, and there is definitely more awareness now of how simple living can create calm in many different areas, including our ability to eat healthy.
