Your Bedroom

Ideally there is no food in your bedroom. The gold standard is food prepared in the kitchen and eaten in the dining area, full stop. What we know for certain is that the more places in your home you allow yourself to eat, the more you eat — and the more rooms you make food-free, the less.

Screens do not belong here either. We tell ourselves screen time relaxes us, but it mostly zones us out. A television in the bedroom means more television watching, and people who fall asleep with it on get lower quality sleep.

Even your phone matters. The blue light from a screen suppresses melatonin, the sleep hormone. Put the phone in a drawer, or charge it face down.

As you take things out, think about what you could add. Some people put real equipment in the bedroom; a yoga mat, fitness bands, hand weights, or a pull-up bar all work. Even considering it might get you thinking about turning a spare room into a home gym.

What you see in this room both starts and ends your day, which means it does a great deal to program your brain. Your thoughts and emotions get primed here, so make it as motivating as you can.

If the food is not here you will not see it. But if you must keep cookies in the bedroom, keep them under the bed — and while you are down there, pull out those dusty walking shoes and put them somewhere visible.

Picture it: the alarm goes off, you hit snooze three times, then remember you meant to exercise. Ten minutes of hunting for workout clothes, a wrestling match with the folded treadmill, and now you are late for work and the workout never happened.

Now picture waking once, clothes already laid out, bike tuned, route planned, and you are out the door within ten minutes. The only difference is convenience.

Move your alarm clock so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. Make the bike in the garage easy to get to the road. Do not store exercise equipment neatly away — clear a space, make it visible and ready, and do not hang clothes on it.

This room sets your mood in the morning and determines how well you rest at night. Is it neat? Is the laundry put away? Is the bed made? According to Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit, making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and even sticking to a budget.

And sleep itself is critical. As Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado put it, when people are sleepy they make poor food choices and are more likely to eat more than they need.

When people do not get enough sleep they show increased levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and decreased levels of the fullness hormone leptin. They consume roughly 300 more calories a day than when well rested, and most of those extra calories come from high-fat foods. They also snack more and move less.

As Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago said, there is no doubt that insufficient sleep promotes hunger and appetite, which can cause excessive food intake resulting in weight gain. You may never have thought of your bedroom as a weight-loss battle zone, but it is.