Tidy up your eating habits the Marie Kondo way

We all know that a clean home creates a clear mind, but have you ever thought about how a clean kitchen can influence your being beyond just creating good hygiene?

It wasn’t until we discovered Marie Kondo that we started to re-evaluate how our environment can even impact our eating habits.

If you aren’t already acquainted, let me introduce you to Marie Kondo – The star of Netflix’s “Tidying Up” and author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, this neat little lady has rightful won herself the title of the Declutter Guru, demonstrating the life-changing art of tidying up.

We love food here at Morlife so when Kondo stepped into our favourite room (the kitchen) to teach us a thing or two we were all ears and were pretty surprised to learn the link between a clean kitchen and clean eating choices. A study by Environment and behaviour journal found that messy kitchens could in fact influence snacking behaviour, making us vulnerable to unhealthy food choices. Here are our top KonMari tips to decluttering the kitchen to tidy up your eating habits...

Let’s start with Kondo’s golden rule:

Only keep things in your home that spark joy

Start with sectioning the kitchen; touch each item individually and ask yourself if it truly sparks joy. You’ll probably find that the coffee machine you bought on sale doesn’t even make coffee the way you like it or that you don’t use the 4 types of chili in your cupboard, because well, you don’t even like spicy food. This leads us to our next tip..

Listen to Elsa from ‘Frozen’ and let it go…

Do you have more than one draw in the kitchen cluttered with unnecessary utensils, pots and pans or condiments in the cupboard that you don’t use / expired in 2010 that you just can’t seem to part with because you feel like they could come in handy one day? Chances are they wont. Thank that fry pan you haven’t used in 6 years for its time and set it free…

Out of sight out of mind

If you walk into a kitchen with a cookie jar on the counter, you immediately want a cookie, right? The same goes for appliances on the counter top – if you have a milkshake maker out and a juicer in the cupboard, you’re probably going to be more inclined to make a milkshake than whip the juicer out. Only keep out appliances that influence you to make better choices and that are absolutely necessary.

The vertical way of life

Forget everything you’ve been taught about folding your clothes and stocking the fridge. Kondo has opened our eyes to the world of vertical stacking, she believes that stacking house hold items and clothing vertically helps avoid having to rummage through your items or messing up your clothing to find that one shirt, everything is more visible,  accessible and more spacious. She even goes to the extent of standing her carrots up in the drink holder section of the fridge door; piling produce in the fridge crushes the items and decreases their shelf life. Try cutting up your fresh produce and stacking them in containers to make it more convenient and easier to grab and go; hopefully persuading you to munch on a celery stick over a bag of chips.