Canavan

Here are five quick tips:
1. Clear out the clutter. (Shocker.) This will help create new energy in the room.

2. Balance your bed by adding bedside tables to both sides, even if you don’t have a sleeping partner. Opt for wall-mounted lighting if you have crowded bedside tables.

3. Add “fire” colors to your bedding with cranberry or orange pillows or a duvet cover.

4. Have art in your bedroom that encourages partnership. Ditch the image of a woman waiting at a table alone.

5. Move workout equipment or your office out of the bedroom to encourage restful sleeping and a relationship that is not “hard work.”

Bedroom bliss: Ask the experts
Source: Carolanne McKirnan, owner of McKirnan Bed and Bath, 2460 Canyon Blvd., suite L2, Boulder, 720-406-8651.
Cred: Been in business since 2004.

When you walk into a bedroom and it’s properly made, there is a sensuality there that is established immediately. Especially for women, when you see a man with a great bedroom, it’s like seeing him in a nice Italian suit.

For temperature-regulated, natural sleep that is loaded with sensual textures, choose a silk filled silk duvet. That means the outside is silk and the inside is filled with silk, too. Yum!

Look for sheets in sateen (looks and feels more like silk, but it’s cotton) or a percale texture. Both can have a sensual feeling. With neutral white or cream sheets, make your duvet, blanket or throw pillows a rich color.

Source: Gary Hendrickson, Feng Shui Design International in Boulder, www.fengshuidesign.net, 720-936-6009.
Cred: Been studying 12 schools of feng shui for more than 22 years.

Five tips for bedroom changes to increase love:
1. Have a small treasure chest (or lovely container of any kind) in the far back corner of the room (the relationships area). Write down dreams you have of how you want to behave in your relationships and place them in the container. Do the same for what you desire from your partner. Review these nightly to make those intentions come true.

2. Include photos of you and your love in your bedroom. Keep photos of your kids or family out of the bedroom.

3. Add drapes to your windows to increase the yin (softer) energy of the room. Having only blinds increases the yang, or harder energy. Having both blinds and multiple layers of drapes adds thermal, as well as acoustic value and balance to the room.

4. Stack a few books on tantra or other tantalizing, relationship-focused books on your bedside tables. (Note: Bedside tables should be of equal size to promote equality.)

5. Too much red/pink/orange in a bedroom can be damaging to the “male energy” of the house — particularly if your bedroom faces west. Metallic colors (silver, gold, bronze) can mimic the romance-fire effect because they are reflective, without damaging the male energy, which can decrease financial abundance. If you would like to try a color in your room, throw a blanket on the bed to see how you react to the vibration of the “fire” color.

— By Liz Canavan
Canavan, of Boulder, is a professional organizer with Alchemy of Order and the marketing director of the National Association of Professional Organizers.

Because we love you!
Liz Canavan is offering free, 30-minute, in-home consultations for Women’s Magazine readers who live in Boulder County. Contact her at 303-641-4760, liz@alchemyoforder.com or www.alchemyoforder.blogspot.com.

Felix

And neither do you. I think everyone knows this but no one wants to talk about it.

During the next year, I will live my life as if it were my last.

The first challenge in doing this is setting up my legacy: If I knew I was going to die soon, how would I prepare my children? I want to teach my kids that we all die and that the world does not end when any one of dies. Including me.

Why do we wait to talk about death with our kids until the last possible moment?

HospiceCare of Boulder and Broomfield Counties (www.hospicecareonline.org) can help us talk about death with children. Hospice has resources for preparing and dealing with end-of-life issues. There are Healing Circles to help after a death and a Healing With Horses program to guide children as they deal with a family member’s terminal illness.

Don’t miss an opportunity to teach our children that everything is temporary. We often are our children’s first teachers when it comes to grieving. They take these lessons and can use them throughout their lives to deal with the inevitable losses.

I imagine that if I knew I was dying, I would drift in and out of consciousness, forget to stay present. I could create a recipe for death: plan the funeral, write my obituary and have last conversations with loved ones.

But perhaps it is the dying part that is easy. It’s the living part that is difficult.
Living with the responsibility to live life fully, say what needs to be said, be the best you can be — that’s hard.

After looking at my children as if it were the last time, I want to breathe in their smell and memorize every detail of their bodies. Feel the joy and in the same moment acknowledge the pain that comes when I realize that some day my child will probably bury me.

Walk toward the pain as if it were the light. This is big. This is your only chance to get it right. Or die trying.

— By Cheri Felix
Felix, of Boulder, writes a regular column, “If tomorrow never comes,” about her challenge to live 2010 as if it were her last. Contact her at oneyeartolive@ymail.com.

Sullivan

January weight update: Shh, it’s top secret.

January’s lesson: One thing became very clear as I worked hard to navigate the holiday season food-fest: the numbers have become an obsession for me. Somewhere along the way, the act of reporting on my weight to the general public became more important to me than the weight loss itself. How weird is that?

Instead of focusing on exercise, healthy eating and behavior changes, I began to kneel before the mighty scale and overreact to each and every movement of the dial. And the worst thing is that emotional eaters like me can turn any scenario into an excuse to eat. The number is low. That’s great! I can reward myself with a treat! The number is high. I’m a failure. Perhaps I should have a snack to boost my spirits! Sigh.

February’s obstacle: My evil publicist and sister, Trish, took my scale away. She’s convinced that stepping on it 20-plus times a day is OCD. Can you believe that? So, my challenge this month is to work on eating healthy, maintaining my exercise regimen and creating positive attitudes toward food without knowing my weight. That may seem easy to some of you, but for me it will be like climbing a mountain blindfolded.

Reader’s challenge: Ask yourself why. Why do you want to lose weight? What are your motivators for exercising more? What is the payoff for eating better? Don’t fall into my trap of letting the tail wag the dog and allowing a distant goal to be the sole measure of success. Dig down to the real reasons to make a profound change in your behaviors — and then trust that shifting your attitudes and actions will naturally lead to the end result you want.

December weight update: 222 pounds

Total weight lost to date: 53 pounds

December’s lesson: I finally passed the 50-pound mark, so I’m more than halfway to my ultimate weight goal. Can I hear a collective “Woo-hoo!” The best news: This month I’ve really moved beyond some of the emotional issues and tough lifestyle changes that were painful in the beginning of my physical transformation. It’s still not easy, and there’s always more I can learn and improve, but this whole “healthy habits” thing is truly becoming my new way of life. I feel like I’ve crossed over some invisible threshold of wellness, and I’ll never go back to the way I was before. That feels fantastic!

January’s obstacle: I love Christmas. Not just a little bit, but to the point of probably needing some type of therapy. Once the music stops, the decorations come down, and the gloss wears off the gifts I’m prone to slip into “post-Christmas depression.”

Not this year. I’m not going to let the cold weather trap me inside — and I’m committed to facing the winter months by continuing my routine of healthy eating and regular exercise.

Reader’s challenge: New Year’s resolutions. Every year Americans make them, and every year 99.9 percent of us break them (yes, I just made up that statistic!). This will be the first year in a long time that I won’t make a new resolution to lose weight in the coming year. I’m already doing it. I hope that this January, instead of a temporary crash diet or gym membership you won’t use, you’ll really pledge to change your entire life for the better — permanently.

But it’s so much more than that. The online dashboard shows your splits — how fast you’re running over the course of a run — and audio cues tell you how far you’ve gone and your average speed.

You can program your own workouts. You can join a team of fellow runners to inspire you and to compete with. You can manually enter gym workouts, and the GPS will also track your bike rides, your ski runs, your walks.

The extremely passionate users are on Facebook, offering support and tips. Measure your week-to-week progress with a simple bar graph. Want a smaller butt? Want something to inspire you to get out of bed in the morning? Yeah, there’s an app for that.

— By Erika Stutzman

My sister had to warn my fiancé about what I like to give for “gifts,” and he wasn’t into it.

He asked me to never give him chickens that would actually be donated to someone else. My cousins seem to tolerate my unusual gift exchange. I do wonder if they feel shorted in some way when they give me gloves, and I give them a card informing them of a donation I made in their honor.

For many reasons, I like to give gifts from Heifer International (www.heiferinternational.com). To put it simply, I give the gift of bees, a chicken, pig or part of an ox to someone I will never know, who lives in a rural area and needs farm animals for their family’s livelihood. My friends and family receive a card saying this animal (or part of one) was given in their honor.

They don’t get the animal, but they receive the good feeling of donating something useful to someone in need.

Lots of people I love don’t dig this idea. They want to know where their “stuff” is.

We give each other disposable, wasteful, cheap stuff. And again this year, I am making a stand against it. Why? Because I’m obsessed with stuff — what we need, what we buy, what we keep, what we use, how things are made, how things are disposed of, theories of consumerism, realities of our fragile environment, the psychology of stuff and gifts and how twisted our displays of “love” have become.

Reasons I like donations instead of gifts:
1. No one ends up with stuff they don’t want: No clutter.
1. No trips to The Mall to exchange an item (exhausting, crowded, cold walk from a big parking lot, careless, encouraging over-consumerism).
2. No guilt-storage of an item you will eventually throw in a landfill 20 years later because it’s obsolete, broken and can’t be donated.
3. No guilt-wearing of items (bad sweaters, ugly scarves) that make us feel bad.
2. Minimal waste: Heifer has optional, printable cards. No harm to the Earth.
3. The gift goes on. Someone else will benefit from this gift, in a way that is teaching them to “fish” instead of giving them a fish.

This is not a sales pitch so you, too, give from Heifer. I don’t own Heifer International or benefit in any way from it. Instead, I want you to find a charity that you believe in as strongly as I do Heifer. Something that is meaningful to you or your family. I’m advocating the idea of giving “no-thing” this holiday season.

I know I must sound like a Grinch, but my motivation comes from a deep desire to live with less and feel more. Give thoughtfully and from a meaningful place. That is a gift I’d dig.

Special offer for Women’s Magazine readers
E-mail me your anonymous photos of the worst or best gift ever received and/or your favorite gift to give — and why. And I’ll post these entries on my blog the week before Christmas.

For every entry, I will give you an in-home assessment and let you know how I can help with your clutter problems. Boulder County residents only.

— By Liz Canavan
Canavan, a professional organizer in Boulder, will be sitting alone at her Christmas celebration this year. To contact her or ask her advice on how to clear out your own clutter from holidays — past or present — e-mail liz@alchemyoforder.com. Check out www.alchemyoforder.blogspot.com.

December weight update: 227

Total weight lost to date: 47 pounds

November’s lesson: As you can see from my lack luster weight loss (5 pounds), this month was hard for me. Although I’m almost halfway to my goal, I’m only now beginning to really tackle the emotional issues that drive my food addiction. Cycles of overeating followed by starving myself sabotage my efforts, so shifting these behaviors will be critical in the long run.

I’ve had to take a fresh look at when, why and what I eat and try to find balance. I’m realizing that my need to be on the “perfect” diet with no bad days has lead to fluctuations between bingeing and deprivation. Until I deal with the real issues that lead me to overeat, any weight loss I achieve will only be temporary. In essence, I am redefining my relationship with food; learning to eat foods I love in moderation and not feel guilty about enjoying them.

This process is far slower than I hoped it would be, but getting to the root of my weight problem is worth the effort, and will pave the way for a healthy happy life long-term.

December’s obstacle: This Christmas I’ll be changing my family’s holiday traditions from a two-week contest to see who can fit the most cookies in their mouth to celebrating the real meaning of the season. I’ll be passing on more to my children than just a bunch of recipes: a new way to look at life.

Reader’s challenge: In America, we tend to turn every occasion into a “food fest.” Socializing, holidays and celebrations are all inextricably linked to eating, and that makes November and December a collective period of weight gain for the entire nation. This year I’d like you to ask yourself, “How can I celebrate without overeating?” And if you’re a parent, “What traditions am I passing on to my children?” Will your holiday season revolve around food — or something more profound?

Think it’s going to be hard to stay active and fit now with the coming winter season? Think again. As much as we Coloradans — and especially Boulderites — love to swim, bike and run in the spring and summer, we also live in a region with amazing opportunities to enjoy snow sports. Most of these winter sports are right in your backyard — or not far from it.

I have come across many women who are intimated by the winter sports. When I first moved to Boulder from Philadelphia, I, too, was unsure and a bit intimated by skiing steep slopes and trying new sports.

But with encouragement from my Colorado friends, I’ve learned to love alpine skiing and skate skiing. I want all of you ladies to give it a try, too.

Good winter sports to start with are classic cross-country skiing, skate skiing and snow shoeing. Of these, snow shoeing requires the least skill, but don’t underestimate the great workout you will get. Cross-country skiing requires a moderate level of skill, but after a few days of practice or a lesson you’ll get the hang of it. Skate skiing requires the most technique, but is worth the investment. It’s the most fun and best workout I’ve ever had in the snow.

You don’t have to get on I-70 and drive all the way to Summit Country to enjoy these sports. Eldora Ski Resort, just up Boulder Canyon, is only 21 miles from Boulder. Eldora offers women’s Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a popular Eldora tradition. No matter what your ability level or physical conditioning, this program has it all. You even receive a continental breakfast and a gourmet lunch after the four hours of instruction.

In addition, most Summit County and Vail resorts offer beautifully groomed Nordic trails with gorgeous views. So stay fit and active this winter, and most importantly have fun.

– By Andie Bernard
Bernard, of Boulder, is the director and head coach of Tri Babes Training, www.tribabestraining.org. Send your fitness questions to coachandie@gmail.com.

Weight update: 232 pounds
Total weight lost to date: 42 pounds
October’s lesson: After a tough September, October is all about getting back on track. It’s too easy to live in the past focusing on my mistakes or to daydream about future glories. The present is where all the hard work is done.

Photo by Regina Mountjoy

Living in today sounds easy, but is an awfully hard thing to do. It means dealing with emotions that I once pushed away or covered up with food. This huge life change I’m undertaking is really about making hundreds of little good decisions each day.

Do I park right near the store or far away for a little extra walk? Do I drink that glass of wine or have water instead? The choice I make right now is the one that determines my future.

November’s obstacle: THANKSGIVING! Turkey, pie and all those glorious side dishes — yum! My obstacle this month will surely be enjoying a holiday with my family without a mouthful of pumpkin pie or an overdose of stuffing. This Thanksgiving is truly going to be about giving thanks and not about how many platters of food can I fit on the table. Taking each emotion that comes, focusing on the authentic meaning of the day, and not overwhelming my senses with an insurmountable wall of temptation will be a completely new experience for me.

Reader’s challenge: Join me in giving thanks with your heart and not your mouth. Whatever hurdles you may face this month — money, relationships, your job, your house, your waistline — here in Boulder we all have a lot to be thankful for. I hope that by taking time to reflect on your blessings and appreciate what you have, you can avoid the trap of turning Thanksgiving into a “food-fest” rather than a “thank-fest.”

Out of all the reasons to keep something, “I might use it one day” irritates me the most. Sure, you might but you also might not — and is it worth keeping in the meantime? Anything can fall into this category, which can justify keeping it all. And, as organizational expert Peter Walsh, host of TLC’s Clean Sweep, aptly titled his anti-clutter book, “It’s all too much.”

Photo by Flickr user sindesign.

Working recently with a smart and successful business owner, I noticed her collection of 20-plus spare, mismatched, paper folders.

“Why are we keeping these?” I asked.
(You guessed it.) “I might use them one day.”

“Do you find yourself using them now?”

“No, they’re worn and tired looking.”

“Is that going to change? Are they going to refresh their shape as the years go on, making them useful to you?”

She got my point, and we gave them to the Salvation Army.

My client had been storing these folders, moved at least once with them — all to realize they were not being or going to be used.

I invite you to look at the true cost of clutter. There are many emotional, psychological, even physiological costs associated with clutter (depression, ADD, arthritis, fatigue syndromes, substance abuse), but let’s talk about the dollars and cents.

Clutter takes up 50 percent of your storage space, according to the National Association of Professional Organizers.

ReMax reports that in Boulder County, a square foot of basement space can range in value from $25 to $100. Above-ground space, every square foot can range in value from $75 to $300. Of the stuff you’re storing, 50 percent of it is clutter  (a postponed decision on something that you really don’t love, need or use).

For example: We have a 1000-square-foot basement. Following the stats, let’s say half of that is clutter (500 square feet). If we live in an “average” house in Boulder County and the price per square foot is $62.50 (the mathematical average of the range $25 to $100 per square foot), we are paying (or financing) $31,250 for that unused, cluttered space. (Jaw drops here.)

Now put this example in an above-ground space, like using our living room or guest room. The price jumps to $187.50 per square foot, or $93,750.

In other words, it’s possible that someone in Boulder has paid $93,750 for 500 square feet of living space, but uses it for clutter.

Storage space costs
The closest storage facility to our home costs $81 per month for a 5-by-10 unit, or 500 square feet if the whole volume of the unit is filled. The people I know who are paying for extra storage space would be better off making the decisions to get rid of the stuff, rather than putting it in storage, which is simply postponing the decisions.

They never touch it, don’t know what’s in there, and panic when they think they have to find something inside. No wonder — it would stink to have to wedge something out of your storage unit when you really need it. The average person holds onto a storage unit for a minimum of two years, according to a New York City self-storage firm, making the $81 per month charge grow to $1,944.

Other costs of clutter:

Replacement items — When you can’t find it, you buy another one.

Cleaning time — The more stuff you have, the harder and longer it takes to clean. Time is money.

“Searching” time — The average CEO wastes six weeks per year searching for lost documents lost in clutter, according The Wall Street Journal.

Energy drain — With clutter reminding you daily to deal with it, your energy is noticeably drained.

As we enter fall this year, I welcome you to take a good look at your storage spaces and clean them out. Banish clutter and live a richer life.

Your Women’s Magazine bonus this month is a free assessment of your storage spaces. Know how long it will take you to organize after I share with you Julie Morgenstern’s equation on time and clearing out clutter.

— By Liz Canavan
Canavan, of Boulder, is a professional organizer with Alchemy of Order and the marketing director of the National Association of Professional Organizers. Got questions on how to simplify your life? Contact her at 303-641-4760, liz@alchemyoforder.com or www.alchemyoforder.blogspot.com.