When my jeans start feeling tight I usually blame the dryer. And while I don’t believe the dryer is entirely to blame, at least I can comfort myself with the fact that I am not alone. According to a study by Weight Watchers, 72 percent of women own clothes that no longer fit them. In fact, the average gal has over $400 worth of threads in her closet that she’s just, well, too big for.

Last night was the premiere episode of my new favorite show ever—“Hoarders” on A&E. Similar to “Intervention” and “Obsessed,” “Hoarders” followed two stories of people with this OCD-related disease. Jennifer and Ron are both hoarders whose messy (ha!) ways are greatly impacting the home they have set up for their three children. Laundry, trash, and junk pack every inch of their house, causing the family to have to eat all of their meals in bed because there is nowhere to sit down or put their plates. But this couples pales in comparison to Jill, a Milwaukee woman who hoards everything and the kitchen sink, but primarily focuses her obsession on food. She’s got four refrigerators packed to the gills with spoiled, expired meat and dairy products, a pantry stocked with more couscous than your local grocery store, and, beneath all the other trash, rotting pumpkins and fruit everywhere.

It’s clear Jill suffers from a real mental illness and her recovery will be tough, but I couldn’t help but giggle at the enthusiasm the woman clearly has for food. “It was a very nice pumpkin when it was fresh,” she explains to the hoarding specialist, in reference to a barely recognizable squash. “The eggs were too pretty to eat!” she tells her sister about a container of eggs gifted to her TWO YEARS AGO. “Ohhhh! I didn’t know I had tamales!” she exclaims, after discovering a package of frozen tamales in the back of her freezer, behind a wall of disintegrating and rotting meat. Warning, this show might kill your appetite. Clip above. [A&E: Hoarders]

We all sort of gape in horror at the people on those home organization shows like HGTV’s “Mission: Organization” and TLC’s “Clean Sweep” but sometimes, the overcollection of stuff is no laughing matter. For some, the collection of stuff gets so out of control it becomes a legit compulsion and disease called hoarding. People can hoard stuff, food and even (sadly) animals. The new installation on the main floor of the Museum of Modern Art takes a closer look at one woman’s life as a compulsive hoarder—it’s a public viewing of her life-long collection.

In a study by Stanford researchers, when people were given the choice between an iPod and $100, most chose the money. But when they were given an iPod and asked whether they’d like to trade it for $100, they were more likely to keep the iPod. Clearly, the amount of money the iPod is worth wasn’t an issue, nor was how much the subjects liked the iPod, and researcher Brian Knutson calls this the endowment effect.  Basically, when something is yours, you want to protect and keep it, even if you don’t really like it. This explains why I have a junk drawer of things I don’t really want or need—I haven’t evolved enough to stop hoarding. [LiveScience]