 Hey, and thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited that we get to have this conversation. I'm Angela Brown. And for those of you that are just joining us for the very first time, I run one of the largest training companies in the world. And I'm proud to say that because we've been in business for about 31 years. But over the last 31 years, we've worked with a lot of families, like thousands of families. And one of the things that we've discovered over the last 30 years is that there are people who hoard food. Now, what does a food hoarder look like? Well, the good news is they look like you and me. These are everyday normal people that range in all different areas of brilliance. These are people that are creative. They are resourceful. They find food that is maybe expiring and they find a way to stretch it a little bit longer. Maybe they cut off the edges of something that's expiring or they are able to put something inside a soup so that it masks the taste. I mean, these are really, really creative people. And I love the fact that people are resourceful and that they're stretching a dollar a little bit further. So while we are in an era right now of being aware of our money, and I say that because we are kind of in recessionary times, I really want us to focus on what is our food program and how are we using it to help us and not hurt us? And so I'm really excited that we're sharing this time together today. And I do wanna make a huge announcement. This is something that we're so excited to share with you. Over the last two years, our company Savvy Cleaner Training which trains house cleaners and maids has grown so much because of our hoarding and our decluttering processes that we're now spinning off into a new direction. And this is the last show that we will be broadcasting on the Angela Brown Ask a House Cleaner YouTube channel. Hoarding World now has its own YouTube channel. And so all of these shows starting today will be over on that YouTube channel as well. So if you are not subscribed and if you are not, or if you're thinking about it, but you have not joined us yet, join us over at Hoarding World so that you will be notified every time we have one of these shows. Now, one of the things that I do wanna mention is that we once had a 12 week series and it was really beneficial and it helped us in so many ways. And from that we were able to create a book that's almost finished, that's for you, that's a resource manual that helps us through all the things we've covered so far. But this is the beginning of the next 12 week series. So as we begin and we move forward, all of this is gonna be happening over at Hoarding World. So please come join us because I would love for you to participate and love to get your feedback and love to get your comments. But this is where we're gonna be answering those comments and also over in our Hoarding World YouTube, not YouTube but our Facebook group. So that's where we're gonna be. All right, so let's jump in today and I wanna talk for a second about how do you know if you are a food hoarder? Now, it is a great question and it comes from a place of, maybe you did not learn about food. Maybe you did not learn about food management growing up. I know that I did not learn about food management growing up. I'm one of 19 children. And growing up, here's the really peculiar part of it, we had lots of food, okay? Lots of food and every meal, there was lots of food for all of us and then as soon as the meal was over, we would start preparing the next meal and it took us two or three hours to prepare the next meal and then it was time to eat again. The problem is this, when I moved away from home, I only knew how to cook for 21 people. I did not know how to cook for one. And so I fell into a situation of hoarding food only by default, okay? It wasn't that I wanted to be a hoarder or that I was careless or that I had mental issues or whatever. It was just that that's all I knew. It was environmental, that's all I knew. And so as a result of that, what I did was I would go out and I knew how to stretch a dollar. I would take my resources and I would buy as much as I possibly could. I didn't just buy one apple. I bought the whole bag because for a dollar and a half more, I could get eight more apples than if I just bought a single solitary apple, right? But I wasn't eating all the food. I wasn't eating enough for 20 people. And the first year that I lived away from home, I gained 86 pounds. And the scary part of that was I gained 86 pounds because I was trying to finish all my food. I did not want my food to go to waste. So how do you know if you're a hoarder? And the answer is, did you come from an environment that supported finish all the food on your plate, right? Don't waste any food. So you probably grew up with a huge respect for food and making sure that you finished your food and that you stretched a dollar and that you had enough food to last and maybe you came from a place of scarcity. And if this doesn't apply to you what we're talking about today, please don't judge it. Just start thinking in the back of your mind. Do I have a food program? What is my relationship with food? And does this apply to anyone else in my family? Because maybe I'm not speaking to you today, but maybe I'm speaking to someone that you love that's a family member that we need to have this conversation with. And I wanna stop for just a second. And I wanna say hi to all of you guys. It is so excited to hear. Jilly Bean, good to see you. Cutie Tay, I've got several people here. Starter, Seed, Shan. I've got Tony Rose, AJ Vintage. You guys, this is so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me. I know it's right before Christmas and this is a special time that you were able to join me, so thank you. So ask yourself the question, how do you know? In this picture that we're looking at right here and I did this on purpose so that I could make myself tiny on the screen and I could make my pictures big. This is a person that understands protection of food. They have all of their food processed in a way that it is free from ants and rodents and mice and bugs of any sort. This is a really great way to store your food and it's in clear jars so that it's easy to access. The thing that we're missing on this particular picture is we're missing, I'm gonna say masking tape because there's no dates on any of this stuff and I don't know how old this stuff is. So we're gonna talk about some of these things and then we're gonna share some resources so that you can figure out, oh, yeah, I have containers like that in my pantry too. What do I do next? How do I know when to rotate them? How do I know how old the stuff is? We're gonna start talking about some of those and this is gonna be an ongoing conversation. This is not something we're gonna learn in one day. This is just the opening of the conversation. So I really want us to pay attention to the fact that because this is an ongoing conversation, we have to have ongoing tweaks to our program, okay? So lots of people, like I said, never learned about food and it's because nobody taught them, okay? So there's no fault to anyone. Nobody's being shamed or blamed but what do hoarders look like? Food hoarders look like this. They come from all walks of life. They're all ages. They're all socioeconomic areas. These are people from every walk of life, right? These are old people and young people and people that have no money and people that have lots of money. It hits everybody and it hits everybody because there's a mismanagement of food. So I just want us to be aware of that this can happen to anyone and it doesn't mean if you are a food hoarder, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you. What it means is, hey, we need some new lessons on food as we move forward, okay? So that's what we're focused on today. So I wanna ask the question, what is a hoarding food addiction? What does that look like? And what it might look like is gonna be different for every person because we all have different buying habits, spending habits, cooking habits and what have you. Like I said, I grew up in a house with 21 people, 19 kids. And so when I moved out on my own, what that meant for me was that meant I don't cook very well and when I do cook, I'm cooking in a great big stock pot that's gonna make enough for 30 meals. And so I can't eat it all before it goes bad. And so if my belief is that we don't waste food, then I can't let that go to waste. So what does that mean? For me, what I learned really quickly is that meant repackaging my food. So if I was gonna make a great big stock pot of soup, what that meant is I had to repackage them in smaller containers so that I could eat those smaller containers and just put those in the freezer, bring out one little container at a time and heat those up. Because even when I got married and now there are two people, I was still cooking for 20, right? Same problem. It didn't help any that there were more people now, only one more person, right? My habits were still set for 20 people. And so is that okay? Is it okay that I still shop at Costco, although I'm only shopping for a couple of people and not 20? And the answer is it's okay if you learn to manage that. And the food hoarding comes in when we haven't learned a management system. All right, so what are the signs of a hoarder in your home when it comes to food addiction? And it looks like, oh, there's food lying around. It looks like there's food that's going to waste. It looks like we're not eating all that we have. You might open the door of the refrigerator and there's a bag of apples in there. And yeah, you did get a savings on it, but there might be six of those eight apples that are now starting to go mushy, they're starting to go bad. If you find yourself cutting parts of food off because it is bad or you take like a head of lettuce and you're like peeling it down to the nubs just to try to get rid of the wilted leaves so that you can find something that's salvageable, you might be a food hoarder. And so what does that look like? Starseed said, hey, I switched over to this new channel via the link and live chat. Hey, thank you so much. I think the Hoarding World channel has one subscriber at the beginning of today, so more subscribers is good. Hi, Lisa, hi, cutie Tay. So good to see you guys. And thank you so much for subscribing. This is awesome because we can carry on these conversations. So take a look around your house and ask yourself the honest question. Do I have a program with food? And then I want you to ask yourself the question. If you were gonna explain your food program to someone else, is it something that you're proud of? Like, hey, this is how we do food at my house. Are you proud of that system? And if you're not proud of that system, let's get you to a place where you're proud. Let's get you to a place where you feel fantastic about the food that you have in your house. Here's the reason why. The people that I work with, and this is true, most all of the people that I work with, okay? That I have for 30 years are really, really smart, intelligent, creative people. And if that's true, the way to feed your brain for smart, creative, intelligent people is with healthy food. And so I'm not gonna judge you on the types of food that you have in your house. But what I do want you to ask yourself the question is, is the fuel that you're putting inside your body, making you the best version of yourself. And I find a lot of people, especially during the holidays, they kind of get to a place where they're eating lots of sweets and they're kind of cheating on their diets and they're kind of like, I don't know. They kind of start feeling lethargic. They feel tired, they feel discouraged. They feel like, oh, I gained a few extra pounds and I should lose weight. So there's a whole bunch of stuff like that that's happening and it comes back to a lot of times, what are you eating? And so I want you to get to a place where you're saying, wait a second, I'm proud of the food program that I have. And it's sustaining me. If you guys went out and bought a really expensive vehicle, you would put premium fuel in it, right? And so we are beautiful, creative, talented people. And what are we putting inside our bodies? If we're like cutting bad stuff off the food and we're just kind of like scrambling and scraping by. And this happened in my own house. This happened this last week and I'm really embarrassed to tell you but I'm gonna tell on myself here. My husband bought a bunch of stuff for salads so we can make salads at the house. And he bought this little container of tomatoes and we did not eat it. We ate other things instead and the tomatoes went mushy. So he went and he bought a new thing of tomatoes for the next week's salads. Then he said, hey, listen, we should use up the old tomatoes first. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. They're mushy and they're bad. We let them go bad. And now we're gonna eat the mushy ones so that they don't, you know, we don't waste money and what have you. And then the new ones that you bought right now are gonna go mushy and bad before we eat those. Then we're just on this rotation cycle of eating mushy bad tomatoes. Let's not do that. Let's throw out the mushy bad ones. Let's start on the good ones. And then let's not buy any more tomatoes until we've eaten the ones we have, right? And that's the concept. Can we stop buying stuff just because we buy it every single week? Buying something every single week doesn't mean that it's necessarily good, right? So I wanna make sure that what we're using is the best version of us and is it healthy for us and are we proud of it? All right, I have to ask this question. I've run into this multiple times and I'm embarrassed to say there are a lot of people who hide food and they hide it from their kids or their spouses or they're like, oh, don't tell anybody that I bought myself a bag of chips. I bought myself some Twinkies. I bought myself something fun. And then they hide it in strange places because they don't want the family to see it or find it. And they're like, oh, nobody in my house is doing laundry. I'll just put it inside the dryer and I'll hide it in there. And then, you know, we went to a lady's house to do some clothing and we found a whole bunch of treats inside her dryer. Her clothes dryer and food inside her dishwasher. And she stored her bread inside her microwave. And I'm not judging her, but what I'm saying is there are a lot of people that hide food around the house. And if you are the kind of person that hides food, we need to have a conversation because what that tells me is that there's something that you're hiding from or that you're not comfortable having this food in front of your family or that it's a food program that you're not proud of. And so are you hiding food in places that really traditionally you're not designed for food? And that's the question. And so I just, I wanna throw that out there because that is a sign that you may be a food hoarder. And so I just want us to pay attention to the fact that it is possible if that's your situation. All right, so the next thing that I want to ask is do you panic, bye. During the pandemic, this became a huge issue for many people. And we ran into this again and again and again and again where people were buying food because it was out of stock. Then there, this fear set in where people said, there may not be enough. I better hurry and stock up on everything I can. So they went through and they started buying boxes of noodles and spaghetti sauce and things that were, we call them perishable non-perishables because they're not gonna perish immediately like some oranges or apples, for example, but they will expire over a period of time. And people just hoarded these things they bought up as much as they could and they stuffed their pantries and they stuffed rooms of their home. They stuffed boxes that are now sitting on the floors in the hallways of their home. And they said, well, that's my food storage. And they wrote it off as food storage. Hey Debbie, good to see you here. And AJ, it's so good to see you guys. Debbie says it's like hiding your drug or alcohol. That's true. When you hide food, it is an addiction and it is an issue. It's something that we really need to seriously think about. But did you buy panic food? Now this happens a lot, I know in my town, we never get snow, right? I mean, Charlotte, North Carolina, we never get snow like one day a year. So there will be rumors of snow. And if you go to any store, any store, like all the bread and all the milk, all the eggs, everything is gone. How long is it gonna snow like for a day? Like why is everyone hoarding all this food? You know, it's a panic buy or if you have relatives. Now I'm guilty of this. This happened over Thanksgiving. My family came for Thanksgiving this year all the way across the country. And I was like, oh, they're gonna be here for several days. I need all this food. So I went out and I bought lots of food and we did eat lots of food. But what I discovered was at the end of the holiday when everyone was going home, I had gobs of food, right? I had way, way, way, way, way too much food. I had purchased way too much food in anticipation of the relatives coming. And that's another version of panic buying when you just buy more than you actually need. And if you did the math on it and you said, okay, I have 12 people that are gonna be here for three days. So three meals times 12 people times through three days. You're talking, you know, 36 meals or something. You're not talking gobs. You know, I don't need stuff for four months. And so what I did do is I bought some to go boxes and I sent everybody home with all the food they could take home because I don't have room for it and I can't store it. And I wasn't gonna be able to eat it, right? So then we ended up spending all this money. Oh, I saved so much money because I shopped at Costco. Let me check. No, you didn't. You ended up wasting a lot of money because you bought a bunch of food you didn't need. And then you had to give it away because it was too much, right? I have food hoarding tendencies and I grew up that way because of the way I was brought up, right? Here's how I was brought up. We grew up on a farm and as I grew up on a farm, we had orchards. Yay, we were self-sufficient. And the cool part about that was every season of my youth, we did like 2,000 quarts of peaches, 2,000 quarts of pears, 2,000 quarts of applesauce, tomato salsa, cherries, apricots. It doesn't matter what it was. We just kept bottling, and bottling, and bottling, and bottling, and that was awesome. We had all the food we could possibly want. The problem is this. Do you have food you cannot manage? Because at the point my parents are right now and they're in the 70s, nearer to the 80s side, they still have all these orchards. Surprise, surprise, but the apples don't stop growing every year. And so what happens, and I'm not pointing fingers at my parents, but lots of people find themselves in this situation where once this was beneficial to them, but lifestyles have changed. And as lifestyles have changed, they no longer have the manpower to do the 2,000 quarts of pears and peaches and applesauce and grapes and berries and all that stuff every single season. They just don't have the manpower. And then what happens is stuff that they canned or bottled 10, 12 years ago, they now need the jars for that again. So now they're dumping out what was at one point good food so that they can can and bottle new food. And so what happens is they're now recycling the food storage without ever having eaten it. And that might be a sign of food hoarding if you have food that's coming into you that you do not know how to manage. And I don't mean that you don't know how but that your life has changed and it no longer is a good use or a good resource for you. It might be more beneficial to put out a for sale sign out in the front of your apple orchard and let people come pick apples and make a day of it. And then they pay you by the bushel that they take home. That might be a more advantageous way to get the best use out of the apples rather than spending all this time and energy canning all this applesauce that we're just gonna dump out and do it all over again just because that's what we know. Again, that goes back to the environmental issues of how are we raised and what is our belief about food? Starseed Shan says, out your parents' food turned into a wasting problem. It did and you know, they still can a lot of fruits and vegetables and I love my parents for this because we still have lots of kids and grandkids but the beauty of what they're doing now is they're giving it away as gifts to their kids and grandkids for their own food storage. And so I love that they're still willing to do that but I'll share this with you. There's a certain age at which doing that at the level they were doing it becomes unsustainable. You just can't do that forever. It's too much time on your feet, it's too much work, the hours are too long and you don't have the manpower to do that much volume with two or three people in the house that you did when there were 20 people in the house that could help out, right? So you either have to pay somebody to come help you do that and then it becomes an expense or you end up wasting the food or the apples sit on the trees and then they go bad or you bring them in and every apple you eat is like what happened with us with the tomatoes. You're cutting the bad spots out of the apples trying to hurry and eat them and you just can't eat them in time, right? So that might be another sign that maybe you have hoarding issues with food. Here's one that gets most of us. I know I'm guilty of this too. You go inside the grocery store and they say buy two, get one free. Oh, wait, whoa, I only came in for one but now I'm gonna buy two because if I buy two, I get a third one for free. Like, whoa, that's a great deal, right? I love great deals. I have fallen victim to what most of us have which is special deals and clearances and savings and sales and all that stuff, right? I love a good sale. This happened to me last week. I went inside I was gonna make some mac and cheese for a party that we had and I wanted to buy a block of cheese and they said buy one, get one half off. And I said, wow, that's a great deal. So I bought two hunks of cheese when I only needed one. Now, what happened is I used the one I was supposed to use for the mac and cheese and the other one is sitting in my fridge. Okay, maybe I'll eat it but the reality is I didn't need it. I would have been better off just to have bought the one block of cheese that I needed for the recipe. So my question to you, do you buy special things for recipes and then after you make the dish or maybe you didn't make the dish, you have extras, extra spices, extra eggs, extra whatever that you're not using. This also happened to me over the Thanksgiving holiday I bought milk for a recipe, a whole gallon of milk for a recipe. We don't even drink milk in our house. And then after the recipe, which is like this much milk, I had like a whole gallon left and I couldn't give it away. Nobody in my family drinks milk. They're like, yeah, I don't want it. Now I'm lactose intolerant. Then I'm stuck with this whole gallon of milk. Like what was I thinking? Why didn't I buy something small, right? So there might be signs that you need to revise your food program. Now I need this as much as anybody which is why we're having the conversation. But as we change our relationship with stuff, changing our relationship with food is also important. That's gonna keep us on track as we move forward. So do you buy in bulk and then never eat the food? Now, boy, I hate this one because I'm a huge Costco fan. And for those of you that shop at big box stores, it could be like Sam's or Costco or BJ's or some of the other big stores. And that's for here in America. I think overseas it's Tesco and some of the other big places. But do you buy in bulk? Now, I have been buying food at Costco for 20 years, right? I grew up buying big bulk stuff. That's what I knew. That was my comfort zone. And so what I had to do is I had to say, wait a second, if I'm gonna buy stuff from Costco, it's not usable when I get home unless I repackage it. In order for this to make sense for me and for me to get a savings out of it, I have to have room in my freezer. I have to have either room in my cupboards and I have to have the supplies to repackage the food so that I can use it. Jilly Bean says, AJ, the sad thing is now I don't even know how much I actually have. I don't wanna clean them out to sea. I missed AJ's comment, which is... That's my issue right now. My freezers are full. Yeah. So my freezers are full as well, but right now I do have a system and the system works for me. So what I do is I cook one day a month. I buy my stuff at Costco. I put everything out on the cupboard and I have nine crock pots and I lay all the crock pots out. And then I make soup and I do mashed potatoes or mashed yams. I do beans, I do a whole bunch of things and then I repackage them. And if you don't repackage them, they may not be useful to you, right? So here's what happened to me yesterday. I went to my freezer. I was gonna take some pictures for you. Excuse me. And I found this bag of beans in my freezer. Now, I haven't been doing the grocery shopping for the last couple of years due to the pandemic. Other people are now doing my shopping for me, but I was surprised to find this. There's a great big bag of beans. I was like, whoa, who put these beans here and how does it work? I opened up the pack and what I found were five smaller packs and each pack was like this big. It was enough for five people. Okay, they're not five people that are gonna be eating a meal and it's frozen. In order for me to use this, I have to heat it up or I have to thaw it out. And then I either have to cook half of it for the people that are here and then put the other half, what? I'm gonna, they've already thawed out now. I'm gonna refreeze them because now what happens is I have to repackage it anyway, okay? So in order for this to be usable for me, what I need to do is immediately when I get home from the big box store is I need to open all these packages. I need to open all the beans or open the rice and make sure that it's in smaller packages. Now, this is what I do do. I do buy the, I think it's called the Normandy blend at Costco. It's a great big bag of vegetables but I can't eat the big bag of vegetables. And if I don't properly repackage it, it's not gonna be useful to me or anybody at the house. So what I do is I dump it out in a great big bowl. I scoop it out and put it in smaller Ziploc bags and each of those smaller Ziploc bags will serve two people for a meal. And you can just pop them right in the microwave and you can heat them up and steam them and they're good to go. The big bag is not useful for me, okay? And so if I just have the big bag, like I had the big bag of beans, nobody's gonna thaw out a great big old bag of beans if only one person is eating dinner. And a lot of times I find myself the only person eating dinner, right? Have you ever had this happen? And I want notes in the comments. If this ever happened to you, let me know, this happened to me too. You go to make a dinner, somebody in your house is like, and I want it. And so you've already fixed this big meal. They don't want it. You gotta make leftovers. You gotta put it inside your fridge. And then they go and they make themselves something else, right? If you have kids that are teenagers or above as an adult, it's gonna happen a lot where it's like only one person is gonna eat, okay? Only one person is gonna eat the meal. Somebody's like, I'm hungry right now, I want something. And what are they gonna do? They're gonna go into the fridge and they're going to find the easiest thing to eat, the easiest, the easiest. And so if you have leftovers, if you have stuff that's prepackaged, if you have stuff that's in the freezer, they can grab out and throw in the microwave. Yes, they'll do that. But the chances are they're going to go eat junk food or they're gonna open a bag of chips and they're gonna eat right out of the bag. If you eat stuff right out of the bag, you might have a hoarding food problem, right? There's no program in place. So if your food is not prepackaged in usable portions, and I'm gonna say in one or two people, for one or two people, that's it, one or two people, it's probably mispackaged for your family unless you have small children and you do make sure that everybody sits down at the table and you eat simultaneously. Lisa says, wow, that's organized to have nine crockpots. What's really unfortunate, Lisa, and this one's for you, we did a clutter corner not too long ago where we pulled out all of our small kitchen appliances and I was sure that I had nine crockpots. I actually have 18 and they're smaller in all different sizes and I do use them but I use nine of them on a regular basis. So I say nine, I have nine, I actually still have 18 and I use them for parties and whatever different size crockpots but I use the nine on a regular basis, so spooky. Okay, so this is, I wanted to show you this. This is the process that I use and I say, have your food prepared for one or two people. The little containers that you see are eight ounces and the ones with the blue lid are four ounces and you'll see that there's red tape on the top of that particular package that's there in the freezer. The little containers I label with painter's tape and I have red, blue, yellow and green and that means breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks so that anybody in the house can go make a snack at any time by opening the freezer. We talk about, is it usable? Are they usable size portions? They can say, oh wait, here's a dinner food, here's a lunch food, here's a breakfast food, here's a snack food and they can grab it out, heat it up and they're good to go, right? So that is the reasoning behind having small packages of food. They do not stack well. They do not stack well little containers that are around at the bottom. So one of the things that we do do is we put them inside the big gallon Ziploc bags. I can hold in this gallon Ziploc bag in this picture you see here, I can hold 10 small little containers that are four ounces of avocados or beans or yams or whatever it is, it could be soup or whatever and I put the soup in the eight ounce ones because they have the screw on tight lid so that if you heat it up or if it is in the freezer, if it expands a little bit it's not going to fall apart, right? It's not gonna explode, it's not gonna leak whatever. So that's how we have that and that makes it usable for our situation. But I recommend if you don't have a program like that that you create one because if you have food and it's becoming outdated or it's becoming spoiled because you're not getting around to using it, then what money did you save even if you bought it on sale, right? Now there are a lot of people and this happened to my family a lot because we had a lot of food that was fruit and vegetables. I cannot tell you how many times I'm probably the most savvy at resaving food probably should be tossed or something, you know what I mean? If we had something that was expiring I could stretch it just a little bit further. I could cut out mushy parts of an apple. I could cut off parts of an avocado. I could cut off half of a banana. If it started to go bad, I could use the rest of it. But what if you were able to repackage it and use it before it went bad? And that's my question. We're looking here at some moldy cheese and people say, oh, well, cheese is moldy anyway. What's the big harm? What if we would have shredded this moldy cheese before it went moldy, put it inside a Ziploc bag and put that inside the freezer? That way we would have shredded cheese if we ever needed it for something and just use a little bit of it if we needed it instead of having a whole block that then goes bad that's not used, okay? So I just want us to start thinking differently about what is our food program and is it serving me because I'm a superhero and I need superhero food, food, fuel, food, right? If I don't have superhero food for my body, what am I feeding myself? And if I'm always settling for the moldy, almost bad, kind of bad, kind of taste bad, almost botulism like food, what does that say how I feel about myself? What that says is, wow, I'm so resourceful. But guess what? I deserve nice, healthy tasting food. I do. And so if I can just change my program a little bit, I can have that without wasting more money and without throwing away food. And I really want us to think about not throwing away the food. And then what kind of food are you eating? Do you have lots of perishable, non-perishables? This is a bunch of prepackaged food with a lot of preservatives in it. And by the time you look at all the ingredients, you're like, whoa, this isn't really food at all. This is just flavored chemicals, right? What do you have? And does it go bad? During the pandemic, we had people that were buying, these are single people whose homes we've been in, and they're buying 10, 15 pounds of noodles. Okay, well, they'll last for a long period of time, but when you go to cook noodles, you don't cook three pounds of noodles at a time if you're a solitary person that lives in a house. And so what happens is they would open the top of a noodle box, they would make some noodles, and then the rest of the noodles are in a cardboard box. And then suddenly, without their permission, there are rodents that come in and they start gobbling up things like noodles. And I hate to say it, but the things that we have in our pantry, even though they might be packaged in the boxes are fancy and it looks great. By the time that you go to use that stuff, it might have already been visited by someone else, a rodent or something, right? And once we have rodents and stuff sharing our food with us, it's no longer sanitary to eat. I don't want to eat in it if that's the case. You deserve better than that. And so if you're not gonna use all three pounds of noodles, grab a gallon jug, like a glass gallon jar, maybe an old pickled jar or I don't know, could once have had something else in it, put your noodles in there and put an airtight lid on it so that nothing else can get to it and label it. One of the things that we do, and here's a strategy for you, cut the front of the box off and tape it to the side of the jar so that you go, oh, these are noodles. Grab a piece of masking tape and write the date on it. I put this inside my pantry on 12th, 22 of 2022. So that from then on, you'll know that, oh, at the end of November, the end of December, right near the end of the year, I made these noodles inside this jar so that never again, like that first image that we saw where we had glass jars that were beautiful, looked like it belonged on Pinterest, but I don't see any dates, okay? If there are no dates on it, how many years old is this stuff inside that clear jar? How many years? And the reason I ask is because we've gone into a lot of homes and we asked people that have saved stuff in really nice jars and they got Pinterest-looking pantries. How old is this stuff? And they go, well, it was before the pandemic. Okay, so can we add like two years onto that? Cause we know that it was like two years and they go, well, it was probably a lot longer than that. Okay, was it five years? Well, probably longer than that. And when we start looking at the dates on stuff, what we're finding is that not just do they have perishable foods, but we're looking at stuff that has really old dates on it. Some of this stuff that has expired four, five, 10 years ago. We went to a house, I'm not kidding. We went to a house and they had expired food that expired in 2002. So we're talking 20 years ago. They had canned goods from 20 years ago. We got lots of comments that are coming in. Kristen says, comment was about stuff being in the hall as a sign of hoarding depends on small packages are also easy to share with neighbors. I love that you brought that up, Kristen. It is easier to share with neighbors if you have repackaged food and it's smaller, but if you have stuff that is not being used let's say that you panic bot during the pandemic and you have stuff. One of the suggestions that I recommend is that you do in fact find somebody to give it to and get rid of it so that you can start the cycle over. I don't want you eating 20 year old food because the food that you bought today is gonna last for another 20 years. I don't want that to happen. That's like the tomatoes that we bought, but let's eat the bad tomatoes so that we don't waste food. And then by the time we get to the good tomatoes they've gone bad, don't do that. Let's clear this slate, let's start over again and then let's put a program in place moving forward, right? We deserve that. We deserve that for ourselves and for our health. So do you have canned goods or bottled goods that have expired? We talked for a minute about canning cherries and applesauce and salsa and all that stuff every season. If you're canning 2000 quarts of stuff every season are you using it all? And if you're not using it all, oh, that's my food storage. I've heard that so many times. Okay, food storage for what? Food storage for what? What are you saving? What are you saving the food for? And if you are saving it, is there a rotation process? If there's a rotation process, that's fantastic. That's great, right? Let's find a way to rotate that. My question is do you have a weekly meal planner? If you're one person, how many meals are gonna eat a week? Probably two or three a day, right? So how much food do you need to buy? And if you're not following a food planner, and this is a strategy, let's create one. You can create one. There are so many apps that are available. And I will leave links to apps that are available that you can use that help you with grocery shopping and that help you with food planning so that you can plug in how many people are eating, what are we gonna be serving? And then you can figure out some of your dishes, your favorite dishes. If you're cooking the same favorite dishes every single week, what do we know about that? We know you're gonna have some of the same ingredients. At which point you will be recycling some of that stuff, right? If we don't recycle the stuff that we have, then you end up dumping out good food and it was a waste all the time, all the energy was a waste. So is it possible that at a farmer's market, you could sell the canned goods that you had, all of your bottled goods that you put together that spent all the hours that you spent, right? Is there a possibility that you could create an affiliate agreement with the local grocer? You know, in the town that my parents live in, it's a really small town. Everybody brings all their fresh goods to the market. So is there a possibility that instead of tossing stuff just so you have the empty bottles, is there a way that you can recycle that stuff or that you can sell it at the market? And then the question comes, do you take inventory before you shop? If you're using a food planner, this becomes easy. Now we use, in my house we use a keep file. Do you guys know about keep? Oh, it's so awesome. It's Google keep, it's absolutely free. I'm gonna leave links in the notes as well to Google keep, there's a YouTube tutorial on how to use it. Basically what it is is a free checklist and I can share my husband, I can share this with my husband just by adding his email on it. So when he goes to the grocery store there's a little checklist and check, check, check, check, check, and then if for any reason we do inventory and we say, hey, we're running out of something, we uncheck it at the bottom of the checklist and it goes back up to the top of the list. You can use the same checklist over and over and over and over again. If you bought it at the store then it gets checked off. If you need it, it gets unchecked and it goes to the top of the list. Then anybody that does the shopping and this is where it gets good, if you outsource that to someone else, right? You outsource that service to someone else. They can go shopping for you and you can look on your smartphone or your tablet or your computer, wherever you have Google, you can look and see, oh, did they buy the items that I need? Do I need to add items to that list? You can at any time add items, at any time you can remove items but then you're not just randomly buying stuff because there's no plan in place, right? So moving forward, I don't want you to go to the store and just buy stuff because if you buy three, you get them for the price of two. That is not healthy and it's not useful, right? That's let me buying stuff for 20 people if there's only one or two people in my house that are eating it at any given time. You don't need to fix big pots of food for 20 people, right? So we need to just think to ourselves, do we have a food storing system? Do we have a process in place? Do we have something that is going to serve us for the best version of ourselves? Now, I never go hungry. I never go hungry. There's always plenty of food but the reality is I'm not inspired to go make a really nice meal at every meal. If I open my freezer door and there is no pre-packaged food that I can just grab and heat up really quick on the go, it's easier for me to either go without food or it's easier for me to grab something on the go. Now, I know many people over the pandemic especially have become fans of DoorDash and Grubhub and I don't know what all the different takeout places are but they open their fridges, they open their pantries, there's gobs of food and then they pay somebody else to bring them new food. I'm not kidding, this truly happens. They bring them new food because they don't want any of the stuff that's there. You have to make it easy for yourself to eat. So in order for me to function properly, I have to eat on a regular basis. I mean like I'm human, I run off of fuel but it has to be easy and if it's not easy and effortless, I'm either not gonna eat or I'm gonna eat junk food because that's easy, right? So don't bring the junk food home and don't put yourself in a situation where you don't have what you need. All right, moving on, I wanna pay attention to the fact that you do have a choice. You have a choice of everything that you eat and I want you to be proud of your food habits. If you were to explain your food habits to someone today, would it make you smile and go, oh yeah, I got this under control? I remember when I moved away from home, we didn't have food management. That is not something I was taught growing up and it took me until the first year after I moved away from home to realize that okay, I do have a cooking for a large family mentality. I like that, that's fine. I gotta figure out how to get it under control and it's very expensive if the food goes bad. Also I gained a lot of weight because I was eating all the food, trying not to let it go bad and I realized that doesn't work for me either. So I've got to have a food plan and for me the food plan is to cook one day a month, make all of your food for the month and put them in little tiny, resizable packaged foods, okay? So that's a strategy if you haven't used it before. Think about that, that might work for you but I do want you to know that you have a choice. When you are aware, you have choices. And so don't find yourself just calling DoorDash because you're bored, because you don't have time to fix a meal or because it tastes better, it does taste better and many of us have chosen to eat junk food because it does taste better than healthy food in many cases but if you will wean yourself off of some of the choices what you will find is that bananas are delicious, avocados are delicious. There are some really healthy food out there that when you get away from all the preservatives and the stuffings and the sauces and all that stuff, there's actually food that tastes really good. Like I eat yams that are cooked in my crock pot and there's no salt, there's no butter, there's no seasoning, there's no nothing and they are delicious because what happens is your taste buds then will adjust. This is, whoa, you're giving me healthy stuff. This is kind of cool. And then you develop a new taste for that. When I got married, my husband, no judgments on my husband, but he was a chicken fingers and french fry boy. That's all he wanted to eat, chicken fingers and french fries. And I don't blame him, they're delicious. And you put all kinds of sauces and seasoning on them. Yay, right? But over the course of time as we started scaling back from that and adding new things to our diet, he discovered he likes mushrooms and asparagus and avocados. I was like, whoa, look at you, eating healthy stuff, right? The reason I bring this up is because if you don't know you like healthy foods, you might be missing out on the best part of your life, but when you are aware, you have choices and I want you to be aware and I want you to have choices. All right, CEO says, this is incredibly helpful and it reminds me to shop my pantry. Growing up with food scarcity can really mess up how you shop for food. This is true. And my question for you is, how long can you go without going to the store? I know many times my husband and I have had contests. We're like, hey, can we eat from the pantry or the freezer for the next month or the next two weeks? And we'll make a note, we're not going to the store for two weeks. And it becomes creative like, hey, we have this, what can we put with this? How can we fix this? How can we serve this? And eating from the pantry instead of just buying new stuff because the new stuff is cool or it tastes better, right? So how does that work? There are strategies that we can use. And I don't want us to think that you are alone. You're not alone. There are so many people. I'm gonna say probably millions of people who don't have a food plan. They don't. I've been inside thousands and thousands of people's homes over the last 30 years. And here's what I've discovered. Many people, when it comes to food, they're winging it. Every meal, they're winging it. And every single meal, they're reinventing the whole process of food, eating food, serving food from scratch. Every single time, they're reinventing the process from scratch. That is exhausting. That is exhausting if you get up every day and you're like, what am I gonna eat today? And you go up in the fridge and you hope that new treats or new stuff has appeared. And then there's stuff that's in your fridge. Check this out. I'm not making this up. I promise this is true. People open their fridge and they're like, there's nothing in here to eat. And there is the pantry is full of food. The fridge is full of food. There's food everywhere. And people are like, there's nothing in here. So my suggestion to you, if that is the situation that you're in, is it possible that you can talk to somebody, that you can make a strategy, that you can decide that you're going to have some kind of a plan in place so that you don't ever find yourself in a situation where either there's no food and you're dependent on the door dashes of the world or you are dependent on junk food and the drive-throughs and what have you because you didn't make a plan. Now in the house cleaning business, we have lots of house cleaners who will go to a drive-through on their way to a job because they haven't made a plan for that day. And because they didn't make a plan for the day, then they're left to eat whatever is available to them. And so if you plan in advance and it is part of your daily schedule, it's waking up and saying, yes, I do have a food plan. Yes, I do have a process that I'm going to keep track of so that I don't find myself hungry at the end of the day and I got no smoothies with me. I got no grapes with me. I got no carrot sticks with me. I've got nothing to eat. And so therefore I'm at the disposal of whatever's available in the closest drive-through that I'm passing, right? Don't put yourself in that situation. For those of you that do have extra supplies and we talk about kind of clearing the slate and making this a possibility as you move forward. If you're clearing the slate and you're starting over and you've got a pantry full of food that has not gone bad, okay? This is not expired food. This is food that maybe a panic bought during the pandemic and it still has a year or two left on it. There are a lot of churches and there are a lot of food banks that will take that food from you. And they have a program in place where they're helping people that are at a disadvantage. And I wanna leave this as a resource for you because right now, especially as we approach the holidays there are a lot of people that want to give and they don't know what to give and they don't know how to give and they don't know to whom to give. And so this is an opportunity where you can say, wait a second, I deserve healthy meals. I deserve food that hasn't gone bad. Well, so do a lot of other people. And if you have the resources and you panic bought and you have a lot of food storage and I'm talking about if you have years of food storage stuff that you've canned or bottled or whatever and you haven't used it, this is a great time for you to go ahead and donate that to a church or a charity that then can use that and make sure that there are a bunch of people this winter that don't go hungry because there are a lot of people that don't have what we have. If you are in a situation where you have been blessed with a surplus of food and you're not gonna eat at all, please don't let it go to waste, okay? I really wanna encourage you to think differently about your relationship with food. This comes down to being honest with yourself. And like I said, don't make a judgment on this today. Just think about it. Think about the conversation in your head. You know, how do I feel about food? Do I just eat everything in sight? Or is there a specific plan for me? And then ask yourself the question, is this the best plan for me? One of the things that I've had to really cut myself off of is I've had to cut myself off sweet. I don't know why, and I'll tell you this, it's kind of like a true confession. I love sugar. I love sugar. I don't know why. I'm really addicted to it like the rest of the world. It's in like most of the prepackaged foods and preservatives and whatever food that we eat. I love it. It's good. And it's not good for me. And as I start walking through the scenarios in my mind, like how does this make me feel better about myself? It doesn't. It makes me gain weight. It makes my mind foggy. I feel lethargic after I eat sugar. And if I'm not careful, it'll put me right into a food coma. And then I got to go night and night because I'm tired, right? That's how sugar affects me. And yet I can sit there and eat it and eat it and eat it and eat it and whatever because it tastes good. But logically it doesn't make any sense. And so I've had to have some real conversations with myself about like, I mean, I hate this, but I'm gonna have to kind of like cut back on the sugar. Yeah, it's the holidays, but stop giving me treats. I need to eat healthier foods. The treats are not serving me, right? So I want you to start thinking about what are the options available to you? All right. One of the things that I would like to highlight is that there is help and you're not alone, okay? There are a lot of groups that are available to specialize in food, food hoarding, food addiction. It is people that are working their way through changing their relationship with food. And if you're not a member of a group like that, there are lots of groups. There are lots of groups online. There are lots of groups on Facebook. There are professional groups that you can go to. There are probably groups in your neighborhood. There are groups sponsored by churches. The world is full of groups of support people working through the very same issues. It doesn't make you bad or ill or any of those things if you participate in a group. What it means is, hey, wait a second. I'm a superhero. I'm taking responsibility for my own health. Here's the secret. And nobody really tells you this when you grow up and it's not in the how-to manual of how to be like a cool person. Here's what people don't tell you. There's one of you. There's one of you. And how you fuel your body and how you take care of yourself depends on how you act and how you think and how you behave and a whole bunch of other stuff. And if you're feeding yourself with empowering foods, then you end up becoming an empowering person. And if you're eating crap food all the time, you're gonna end up feeling like crap all the time. I remember reading something once I really hit home with me. It said, how are you going to create a million dollar business if you are eating off the dollar menu? And I started thinking about that. And I'm like, yeah, if I'm eating the cheapest, fastest, quickest thing that I can find, how is that gonna make me the best version of myself so I can turn around and produce the best results I can produce? And the answer is you can't. You can't. What you put in is what you're gonna get out. And if I walk around feeling tired and depressed and discouraged and lethargic and almost in a food coma, those are the results I'm gonna produce. So my question for you today is what are you putting in and what are you getting out and are you winging it on your food program and are you hurting food that is either going bad before you're getting to use it or do you have a program in place? And I ask you this question. I really want you to have an honest answer. If you're not sure, maybe it's time to create a program. There's only one of you. There's only one. And you're an amazing person. Because you're an amazing person, I want you to live an amazing life and I want you to feel amazing. I want you to wake up every day and go, yes, I survived, I'm here, I live today. And then make that day the most amazing day of your life. And what's gonna fuel that is the fuel that you put in. Make sure that you stay hydrated. Make sure that you eat healthy foods. Make sure that you eat the right foods and the right amount of foods and that you're not settling because that's what's in your pantry or that's what's on your cupboard or you have stuff that's already gone bad and you're just trying to salvage it. Don't eat salvage food. Eat the food before it goes bad because you can, because you deserve it. Because you deserve it for yourself. Right, you're a superhero. All right, I've got a couple of questions that I wanna answer. AJ says, I would love a whole meal, planning, Google, keep tutorial video. Food is not my specialty and I would love one as well. Food is not my specialty. I am just a house cleaner and I'm a house cleaner who works a lot with people and these are the findings. These are the things that we've discovered and so I'm sharing with you just my opinions, just my observations because what I do know is this, when we get people on regular routines and these are regular routines of cleaning out their pantry and we have an upsell service that we sell in the cleaning business where we go inside people's homes and it's not a fun package because nobody wants to go through their pantry and go, oh yeah, I bought a whole bunch of food that I never used, right? But we go through and we help them remove food that is expired and food that has a little bit of time left on it and then say, what is the game plan for this? Do you have a rotation program in place? Do you have a food menu? Do you have a food planning guide? And then get them on the right track so that the next time we come back we're not doing the same repeat process. If every time I come to your house, all I'm doing is removing expired food. We didn't make any progress. That is not progress. That's a repeat of the old behaviors, right? I don't want you to repeat the old behaviors. I want you to come up with a new plan, right? All right, any other questions? I'm going to scan this really quickly here. Man, you guys are so great to have you here. A littlest broccoli, WC, AJ Vintage. You guys, this was so awesome that you joined me here today. I do want to let you get back to your day because I do respect your time, but I want to thank you for joining me here today and I'm going to leave the resources that I promised you in the links below and that will be over on the Hoarding World channel, not the Ask Angela Brown cleaning channel. And the reason we are breaking them up is because we do have enough conversations that we want to keep them separate so that we can serve both audiences in the most appropriate way. But as we move forward into the new year, because we're almost to 2023, I want this to be your best year ever. I want you to feel your best ever. I want you to look at people and people say, hey, tell me about your food. Probably never will, but if they did, you would stand up with your shoulders square back and you say, let me tell you about my food program and be proud of the food program that you've put in place. Not because there are a rodents and mice and there's ants and all kinds of stuff in your house. Not because food has been left out and there are wrappers all over. That's not something that's going to make you proud. I want you proud of the food situation that you have because that is your premium fuel for a premium person. All right, that's it for today. Like I said, I'm going to answer the questions over in Hoarding World. If you guys don't know, we have a group called Hoarding World. It is a Facebook group. It's a support group where you can find an accountability partner. And if you don't have an accountability partner, come on over because we would like to have these conversations with you. And as we move through the new year, we're going to be changing our relationship with stuff. So many people over there already have a head start, which is awesome. And then of course our new YouTube channel, which is our Hoarding World YouTube channel. And we're going to be bringing you more information like this because I think it's important that we have these conversations. Because like I said, nobody ever told me or taught me about food. The things that they taught me was how to can and bottle and store it and save. They didn't teach me how to process it and how to cook for one or cook for two. Life skills you need if you live alone or you have just a spouse, you know what I mean? Secrets that will help you survive. And then stop buying stuff you're not going to use. This will save you so much money. And there are stores like in my town, there's a town store called Liedl, L-I-D-L. You might have seen it. I first discovered it when I think I was in Germany. And then it moved to America. And one of the things is they have like the same kinds of foods that I would find at a big warehouse, but only for one person. So I can go in and just buy smaller amounts. Instead of trying to buy in bulk to get the savings, I can buy little amounts and get the savings for only one or two people. And so instead of buying a bunch of tomatoes that are going to go bad, I can buy just enough for this week and only eat for this week and not buy a lot that then it is going to spoil. So there are stores, there are other options, there are farmers markets where you can just go and buy one tomato. I bought one apple the other day. What? One apple. I bought one apple the other day. And I made a comment to my husband. I said, you know, I've never bought one apple. Never in my entire life have I bought one apple. I always buy the whole bag. And all I needed for the recipe was one apple. And I bought one apple and I walked out of the store. And I felt so good. I was like, oh my goodness, I've turned a corner. Check it out. I just bought one apple, right? Buy what you need. Don't buy because it's on sale, buy what you need. All right, that's it for today. I love having you guys, AJ just mentioned the fact. She said, isn't lethal owned by Aldi? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that Aldi is nearby our lethal. And Aldi is another one of those stores that I think started in Germany overseas and came this way. Aldi is another one of those stores that has huge discounts for small portion sizes where you can just buy one or two of an item instead of buying 20 or 30, right? So that is another option as well. I don't know where the stores are where you live, but check it out, check it out. And then I want you guys to keep me posted on your progress because I think I'm one of the biggest cheerleaders I know. I'm here and I'm clapping for you. And everybody that's on this chat right now live, thank you so much, but I'm gonna be following you. I wanna hear the updates. I'm rooting for you and I know you can do this. All right, that's it for today. Have a great holiday and I will see you next week, same time, same place, over on the hoarding world channel for our next Clutter Corner Live, which is gonna be another conversation that will help you change your relationship with stuff. All right, until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place and a healthier place and a happier place than when you found it.