The similarities between budgeting and dieting are pretty obvious. Both are decidedly female subjects, reliable ever-green topics for women’s talk shows and magazines. Most men don’t obsess about these subjects, at least not in these terms. They may profess interest in “personal financial strategies” or “regimens for getting ripped,” but rarely do they admit to the humbler, more prosaic activities of counting either pennies or calories.
Both budgeting and dieting are governed by very simple rules and have very simple solutions, which apparently few people ever follow or believe in. If they did, the trillions of dollars spent on products and promises to get our waistlines slimmer and our bank accounts fatter could be redirected to something more socially redemptive – like curing cancer or eliminating world hunger. Maybe it is our female aversion to math that is behind it all. In the case of both budgets and diets, success comes when we take basic equations, and make them inequalities. To get richer, take the $ inflow = $ outflow equation, and make it an inequality: $ inflow > $ outflow. To get thinner, do the same thing with the calorie intake = calorie expenditure equation, but this time make the first term less than the second. What could be simpler?
If you don’t do math, then try something just as easy: write everything down. Everything you eat, everything you spend – write it down. It’s almost like the act of writing induces a caloric burn, on one hand, and stops the money burn in your pocket, on the other. You eat less and save more, just by putting pen to paper.
But there is at least one important difference between dieting and budgeting, or more precisely, between the underlying compulsions that drive us to them: namely overeating and overspending. The difference has to do with visibility. When I eat too much for too long, it shows. It makes it harder for me to walk upstairs; it makes sharing a seat on the bus or fastening my seat belt on a plane a difficult and even embarrassing activity. Not so when I overspend. I move through the world quite easily – some would say too easily – even when I am overburdened by debt or unpaid bills. It is almost impossible to know how much money people have or don’t have by the front they put to the world. Millionaires drive used Fords, and destitute dames wear Prada.
Another difference – there is a now surgical solution for excessive weight that does not exist for excessive spending, even though both are clearly hazardous to your health. Obese adults can now have gastric bypass surgery, which makes their stomachs smaller and limits the body’s ability to absorb food. If, after bypass surgery, you eat too much, you feel really sick. Can you imagine a similar procedure for overspenders? Something a surgeon might embed, maybe in your feet or fingers, that made it way too uncomfortable to shop at the mall or on the internet for more than a few minutes at a time. If you did manage to spend too much anyway, you would find yourself regurgitating all that stuff you did not need and could not absorb, or rather, afford.
I have heard, however, that gastric bypass surgery does not work, if the person undergoing the procedure does not change her attitudes about food. In other words, without revising the way a person thinks about food, no adjustment of her digestive system is going to work in keeping the weight off. Undoubtedly, the same would be true of any mechanical solution to overspending. Without really wanting what results from controlled spending, even a surgically-altered overspender would still pack on the debt.
I guess there is no avoiding it, when it comes to overeating or overspending. At the end of the day, they are simple struggles of mind over matter. And until those afflicted really focus on what does matter – health, wellbeing, and physical and emotional freedom – no program of personal discipline has a chance of success, no matter how many times it is featured on Oprah.
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