Your Struggles with Food Are the Same as Your Struggles with Money. Address One and You’ll Fix the Other, For a Drama-free Life with Double the Joy and Ease

Self-awareness and Self-acceptance are the Starting Points

If you have drama around weight, I bet you have it around money.

Weight loss coach Brittany Kolb and I were comparing notes and had an aha! moment. The habits and thoughts that sabotage us from having a healthy relationship with our bodies also keep us from stewarding our wealth well.

We get in our own way in more than one area of our life!

Brittany helps her clients lose weight and keep it off. As a money coach, I do the opposite.

I help clients earn more, grow fatter purses, and keep their wealth. Self-awareness and self-acceptance are the bedrock of transformational change.

We use food and money in ways that don’t serve us well:

1. We eat pints of ice cream when we are heartbroken. We also go on a “retail therapy” shopping spree. We use food and money to numb our feelings.

2. We go on restrictive diets to lose weight. We go on restrictive budgets to save money. Both are so punitive we don’t stick to them and feel even worse.

3. We eat junk food. We buy tchotchkes we don’t need. Then one day we wake up 40 lbs overweight or broke and wonder what happened.

4. We don’t take pleasure in our food. We hoard our money, rather than enjoying it. We deny ourselves joy because we deem ourselves unworthy.

5. We exercise compulsively, hoping to shed the pounds or we become workaholics, hoping to accumulate wealth. What are we running from that keeps us on the hamster wheel of misery? Our true, imperfect selves.

6. We try every fad diet that comes along. We try every investing fad. Both don’t work for long and can do long-term harm to body and net worth.

At the core, these patterns are driven by a lack of self-acceptance, feeling like we are not enough, or fleeing all the uncomfortable feels.

Break one habitual thought pattern in either food or money and you’ll find you’ve broken it for the other — it’s all being driven by the same engine. When you take care of your body and your wallet, the drama will fade, I promise you.