Yes, Yes it Does Actually

This weekend I read Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? by Australian organizational guru Peter Walsh. Walsh is also a "FOO" or "Friend of Oprah" making his word gospel. I had seen Walsh on Oprah a year or so ago talking about this book and tackling some real world households and it was fascinating.

The book, while a quick and easy read, is rather bloated for a manual on how to divest yourself of clutter and weight. I found a lot of repetition and a lot of basic truisms that seemed like filler to me: "The weight didn't appear over night, it won't disappear over night."

Walsh does give his readers credit for knowing quite a bit before opening the book. He acknowledges that anyone dealing with weight loss issues is probably very well skilled on what they should eat and how much, they just can't get control of the situation. That is where the organization comes in.

Walsh gives some very good advice on rearranging your kitchen to utilize it to the utmost for preparing good healthy food. Chapters 5 (The Kitchen You Create), 6 (The Food You Stock) and 7 (The Meals You Prepare) were the most useful to me. A lot of the rest of the book is psychological analysis of why people gain weight and collect clutter and while interesting I have already been working through that, I didn't just realize I need to lose weight, I have known for about 25 years.

I feel this book is really geared more towards families with homes and not single girls in apartments (thank god I don't have a whole garage to organize!), but I did take enough away from the book to have a good plan for cleaning and organizing my kitchen over the upcoming long weekend. I also got some good ideas on meal planning that I hope to put into place for the next month.

All in all worth a check out from the library!