These five rooms in your home represent the areas in life that drive stress eating and an untidy relationship with food.
Basement/Family
This surrogate storage facility houses old decorative pillows or all those Good Will to-donate clothes— things to be dealt with later. Disposing of those random paint cans, pictures and exercise equipment can induce guilt—or just the challenge of proper disposal. And so it is with childhood. Even with the best therapist or parents, events or experiences processed through the intellectual understanding of childhood can create an emotional understanding gap. Like water to a home’s foundation, certain childhood experiences can create insidious structural problems. Many with weight problems, use food to provide primal comfort for these insecurities that have not been properly processed and organized. By cleaning, re-organizing and often, re-cementing this foundation, you’ll assure a comfortable acclimated home and body.
Bedroom/Self-Care
Typically the last place given attention to, the Bedroom symbolically represents self-care, and how far down on the list it is for most women. Meant for restoration and respite from the world, the bedroom often does the opposite-creating feelings of a sketchy-neighborhood Motel 8. Dangerous thoughts of to-dos, an uncomfortable “skinny” and “fat” sectional wardrobe, and the TV drowning out this discomfort, leave you sleepless. It’s time to stop hitting the snooze button on your life. By redesigning your bedroom into a relaxing, nurturing and inviting space, you’ll create the sanctuary necessary for restoration.
Living Room/Confidence
Your living room, like your body, is your face to the world. When company arrives, it’s the clean living room that the outside world sees (not the messy office or laundry strewn bedroom). To read any generic women’s magazines or overhear any girls night out, you’d conclude weight-loss provides a glowing, tidy confidence. And in a culture where women’s thin body parts are reduced to selling everything from tabloid magazines to jewelry to cars, is it any wonder that being thin feels like winning the lottery? A guaranteed endorsements from society, peers, and co-workers. Then why does weight return? Why aren’t all thin people happy? Feeling powerful in what you contribute to the world has more of an effect on confidence then a dress size. By developing core confidence and understanding your strengths, you’ll create a statement piece that reflects your strongest self and dramatically changes the tone of the living room.
Kitchen/Relationships
Dinner parties, holidays or casual drop-ins, the crowd always lingers in this symbolic heart of the home. Intimate conversation and connection feed the soul. With sour company or loneliness, the hole in your heart gets stuffed with a pint of organic Tahitian vanilla bean ice-cream. Your true needs and the relationships you crave are numbed. When kitchens are stocked with pre-packaged foods and pre-packaged ideas about food, weight and relationships will repeat the same cookie-cutter results: isolate, binge, repeat. By transforming your kitchen into a cooking design center, cooking becomes creative, easy and relaxing. In discovering a more vibrant, creative, and relaxed version of yourself, friendships and romances heat up.
Office/Career
Whether you are an executive, a mom, or self-employed, your job consumes the majority of the day. Yet much like office space, this space in your life receives the least attention. As job boundaries expand to anywhere a blackberry, laptop ,or child can balance, the boundaries of your stomach and butt also expand. By infusing your job with your personal ambition aesthetics, office space is transformed from a generic Office Depot catalog image into an inspired boutique workspace with meaning, purpose and comfort.
