The Diet And Money Double
Whammy
Would that
there were an award for people who come to understand
the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough.
Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough.
When you have self-respect, you have enough.
Gail Sheehy
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If you are like most people, there are
two fundamental areas of your life you want to change. You
want more money and less weight. Yet, for many of us, our
lived reality is the opposite: we have too many pounds and
too few dollars. My question for today is: What is the connection
between too much weight and too little money?
You can never
be too rich or too thin.
Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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The Duchess of Windsor—a very rich
and very thin woman—once made the comment that “you
can never be too rich or too thin.” If this were just
the mindset of one woman, her words would be a footnote in
history, suitable for trivia games. But her words express
the predominant mindset of our era. To be successful—especially
for women—you need to be thinner than you are and richer
than you are.
Taken together these twin beliefs are
a double whammy. They are also a guaranteed recipe for failure.
This formula means that you can never be successful, because
you can never reach that magical point of “enough.”
No matter how thin you are, you can’t be thin enough.
And no matter how much money you have, you can’t have
enough money.
If you start with the idea that you are
neither thin enough nor rich enough, you start with the idea
that YOU are deficient. There is something wrong with YOU
and you have to fix it.
We live in a therapeutic age and are
used to identifying ourselves as problems to be solved. And
so, we start out to look for the hidden cause of our problems.
When the problems and issues concern money and food, the whole
matter becomes a tangled mass of opinions, judgments, false
promises, and failed resolutions. How many diets are there?
How many ways to make money? And so, determined to fix ourselves
once and for all, we look for a solution, resolved to make
it work this time.
I told my
doctor I get very tired when I go on a diet, so he gave
me pep pills. Know what happened? I ate faster.
Joe E. Lewis
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But the diets don’t work and the
get-rich-quick schemes don’t work, and so most of us
reach the point of being both fatter and poorer than we were
when we began. This is not the way it was supposed to work.
What happened to getting thinner and richer?
With topics as complicated as money and
body weight, I want to focus on a single critical idea as
one step toward liberating ourselves from this double whammy
of never being thin enough or rich enough.
The root of failure for many of us—no
matter what you set out to do—is contained in the belief
that whatever you are, whatever you have, whatever you do,
it is not enough.
The only way to move beyond this double
whammy is to stop trying to solve the problem of what is wrong
with you. Instead of trying to lose more weight and make more
money, you change your mind about what who you are. Instead
of measuring success by measuring body weight and money, you
liberate yourself from the idea that YOU can measured by pounds
and dollars—or kilos and euros—or any other set
of measures. YOU are not measurable.
“No
Money Limits” does not refer to an unlimited quantity
of money. “No Money Limits” means that you
are not limited by money.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
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With this mindset, you stop trying to
fix something “wrong” with you, and start to liberate
yourself from value judgments determined by limitations. There
is a qualitative difference I am attempting to identify here.
Your goal is to liberate yourself from the idea that your
worthiness can be measured by pounds and dollars. That is
the real problem with a statement that you can never be too
rich or too thin. It implies that until you reach a point
that you cannot reach, you will not be worthy. This is the
ultimate no-win situation.
I come from a background of teaching
and preaching in churches and teaching in theological
seminaries. For many reasons, I don’t do either
one any longer. If I could identify one single reason
why not is it this: The Church spends too much time
telling people what is wrong with them and not enough
telling people what is right with them.
I am convinced that what is “wrong” with most
people is that they don’t know what is right with them.
I am currently writing a book about the
connection between Christian beliefs and money. It is a huge
topic and I have many opinions about the matter. Many of us
have been taught such confusing messages about money. “Money
is evil.” “Money corrupts.” “The rich
will never get to heaven.” In fact, money is a tool
of human intention, to be used for good or evil, as you intend.
But the money itself is innocent.
If you start out on a diet and money-making
plan—whatever plans you use—convinced that there
is something wrong with you that you have to fix, you are
setting yourself up to fail.
The second
day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the
second day you're off it.
Jackie Gleason
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If you start a diet with the idea that
losing weight is going to make you thin enough to be worthy
of love—even from yourself—the diet will fail.
If you set out to make money, all the
while holding the belief that money is evil, your money-making
efforts will fail.
A much better way is to start with the
idea that you are already worthy of living an “Abundantly
Alive Now!” life, no matter what you weigh and no matter
what amount of money you have in the bank.
The whole
difference between construction and creation is exactly
this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after
it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before
it exists.
Charles Dickens
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This difference goes back to the critical
distinction between solving a problem and creating what you
love. With the mindset of a creator, you can choose to create
a healthy body and more money. The diet plan then becomes
a matter of loving yourself beyond the limitations “too
much” weight imposes upon you, and your money-making
plan becomes a means to liberate you from any limits in your
life caused by “not enough” money. Why not choose
the self-loving mindset of a creator?
For Your Abundant Success,
Kalinda Rose Stevenson
PS. For more on the difference between “money limits”
and “no money limits,” see my book, No
Money Limits For Real Estate Investors.
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