How You Handle Money Says Everything About Your Relationship With Food

I'm obsessed with money. Not in a Scrooge McDuck, evil villain, cheat-people-out-of-their-hard-earned-cash-to-get-ahead way. Just in a way that money has always genuinely fascinated me.

When I was little, I used to walk with my head down just to find coins on the ground. For my sixth birthday, I asked for a coin sorter and it immediately became my favorite toy. I was obsessed with doing chores to earn allowance that I could exchange for what I really wanted (which was, of course, a growing stuffed animal collection). I loved starting entrepreneurial ventures with my friends, even if they didn't pan out. (I mean, who wouldn't want three anonymous ten-year-olds walking their dogs?) I even studied business in undergrad with the vague hope of becoming a financial analyst or some other profession nobody can actually explain but sounds very important.

And once I switched careers, I thought I'd traded in my money obsession for something more wholesome. But what I learned pretty quickly after studying nutrition is that the parallels between personal finance and nutrition couldn't be more painstakingly obvious. Without question: how you look at, think about, and handle your money is exactly how you deal with your health.

If either of those topics makes you queasy, I promise this will be as digestible as possible. (And if you're already queasy, sit with that — because it tells us something important.)

You Have to Start With the Basics

Have you convinced yourself that the Mega Millions ticket you just bought was definitely the one? I'm not talking a little optimism. I'm talking you've already mentally booked the year-long sabbatical through East Asia and saved the broker's number for that adorable West Village brownstone. (Zero judgment. I have a signed, witnessed contract with my friends about how we'll split lottery winnings. I'm not above hopeful delusion.)

But even as you're daydreaming about your private yacht, you know deep down that the odds are, pardon my French, a pile of dogshit. So why do we chase get-rich-quick schemes when we know better?

Because they're not always as obviously insane as a lottery ticket. They're just plausible enough to make you believe you're one right move away from living in the south of France. The crypto coin your brother-in-law swears will 5x your returns. The business idea your entrepreneurial (read: aggressively charming and persuasive) neighbor wants you to invest in.

Or, the juice cleanse that promises ten-pound weight loss in three days and the skin of a baby's bottom. The vibration plate that will dissolve your puffiness and give you bones of steel. Deep down you know it's too good to be true, but the part of you that's desperate for the outcome is willing to take the gamble. You just want to get to the end as fast as possible.

Here's what actually happens: first, you waste time, money, and effort on something that might temporarily move the needle before sending you right back to where you started (or worse). But then something more sinister happens: you start to believe that because this hail mary failed, you are the failure. Maybe you were never meant to have wealth. Maybe you'll always struggle with your weight.

If you want to nail your finances or your health, you have to start with the basics. Non-negotiable. The basics are where you get the biggest return for the smallest amount of effort. And once you've nailed those, sure, layer in the fancy supplement, take a risk on crypto. But at that point? You probably won't even want to. The urge to execute on the dramatic hail mary tends to disappear once the foundation is solid.

I can't tell you how many clients I see who come to me with a supplement stack assembled with the care and attention of painting the Sistine Chapel. And these clients still aren't making any real progress. Once we strip it back to the basics, that's when things actually start moving.

What this looks like in finance: create your systems, build up your savings, set up your retirement account, and only then get more risky with your investments. (If you're curious to learn more about personal finance, I recommend Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You to Be Rich, the very definition of starting with the basics and not stressing about the minutiae. Or as he calls it, spending your energy on $50,000 questions not $5 ones. Which is also, for the record, my entire nutrition philosophy. Work smarter, not harder.)

All of this to say: simple is always better. And if it sounds crazy, it probably is. Nail the foundations first. Until then, everything else is just noise.

Your Results Compound…In Either Direction

Anyone who knows a thing or two about investing knows it works because of one principle: compounding. For anyone who gets sweaty palms around finance talk, here's the gist: let's say you invest $100 and get a $50 return that year (wildly optimistic, but I needed to keep the mental math easy). Now you have $150 in the market. Next year, with the same return rate, you get $75 back. And on it goes, your money growing exponentially because you're earning returns on your returns.

What does this look like practically? Investing $100 a month might not feel like a huge deal. But if you were to invest $100 every month from age 30 until you retire at 65, you can expect to end up with about $200,000. (Thank you Bankrate for helping me with this math.) And that’s with putting in only about $40,000 of your own money. You end up with 5x what you put in. Amazing!

So what does this really mean? The small actions matter. Investing a small amount regularly rather than spending it (even when the amount seems too trivial to bother). Eating a smoothie or veggie omelet every morning to build up your nutrient stores even though you want the bagel. It seems like nothing in the moment — I mean, how much can one smoothie really do? — but the actions compound. The more consistently you do them, the greater the return.

The good news is that you don't have to be perfect to see a good result. Swapping the smoothie for a bagel one morning isn't going to set you back any more than skipping a month of investing is going to tank your retirement fund. Just like buying coffee out every now and then isn't going to bankrupt you, no matter how hard the NYT tries to convince millennials that lattes are the reason we'll never be homeowners.

But don't let that talk you out of consistency. It's the regular $100 deposits that become $200k, not one massive lump-sum bet. Just like your health is built from a thousand small choices: nourishing food, movement, sleep, stress management. Not one extreme diet you white-knuckle for a year.

The Issues Exist Whether You Look at Them or Not

Your dwindling checking account is real whether or not you open the banking app. The credit card still needs to be paid off even if swiping feels like using Monopoly money. High cholesterol is still high even if you skip your annual labs. Your weight is your weight even if you refuse to step on the scale.

And sometimes it really does feel like ignorance is bliss. If you don't know exactly how bad it is, it can't stress you out, right? Wrong. The harsh reality is that if you don't run your finances, they run you. And if you aren't the master of your health, it becomes your master.

So what does this mean practically? You have to know what you're dealing with before you can do anything about it. Yes, it can be an emotional process. But the problem exists either way. The difference is that once you acknowledge it, you have something you can actually do about it. You get your power back. On the flipside, you give away all of your control (and thus happiness, fulfillment, and pretty much everything else) if you let the systems control you.

Here's the mindset shift that helps: become a scientist. Scientists don't beat themselves up over data. They collect it, analyze it, and make a decision. If you're starting this process — financially or with your health — and you feel the urge to spiral into self-judgment, stop right there. Feeling terrible about your past choices is, genuinely, the biggest waste of time. You were doing your best then. You're committed to doing better now. Simple, positive, true. (I say this as someone who used to motivate herself like a horse in the Kentucky Derby, aggressively whipping myself into action. It's not sustainable. It also just sucks.)

So do some deep breathing, gather your data, and take one single step forward. Repeat until the words finance or nutrition don't make you want to hurl.

Set It and Forget It

A good financial plan, just like a good nutrition plan, is something you set and forget. You create the automatic transfers. You define your monthly fun money budget. And then you let the system run. (If you're not doing this yet, seriously, read I Will Teach You to Be Rich)

A good nutrition plan works the same way. You know how to build your plate. You know which foods make you feel good and which ones to avoid. You know what to prep on Sunday and what to cook during the week. When things get busy, the system holds, and you don't need to waste your time with the minutiae.

If your nutrition plan feels like something that will collapse the moment you stop monitoring it, that's not the right plan. Just like unautomated finances waste your energy.

Where are you making this harder than it needs to be? Could you set a staples grocery cart on Instacart? Buy a few things premade instead of cooking everything from scratch? Pick out a few proteins and veggies to prep for your week. Automating your nutrition has the same compounding effect as automating your finances. Annoying upfront, but wildly freeing once it's done. Schedule the time to set it up, and watch how much space opens in your life.

At the End of the Day, It's an Energetic Exchange

Here's where we get a little woo, but I promise it will change the way you view how you spend and how you fuel yourself.

Money is simply an exchange of energy. You work (spend your energy) to earn money, and money buys things that improve your life (return your energy or give you even more energy). When you see every purchase through that lens, it becomes very clear very quickly whether a given expense is worth it. Sure, your Spectrum bill is annoying. But is high-speed internet worth it for the work you do from home, the Netflix you decompress with, the ability to stay connected? For most people, obviously yes. Is that concert ticket worth the 10 hours of work it takes to afford it? That's where it gets more personal.

Because what you spend should always give you at least an equal, if not greater, return on your energy.

Food is no different. Every time you eat, you're exchanging energy. It doesn't matter if you're eating a brownie or a salad. A salad might give you enormous physical energy to power through the day — a solid ROI — even if it's not your favorite food on the planet. A brownie might give you joy, but make you feel physically ill. It's up to you to decide if it's a positive energetic exchange or not. Some days the joy will be worth it. Other days it won't. And even the salad example: if you're shoveling dry lettuce and boiled chicken in your mouth while trying not to dry heave, the utter repulsion might take away from your energy no matter how 'healthy' it is.

This is what Ramit Sethi calls defining your Rich Life. If you're a shoe person, your fun money goes toward shoes. And because you've made that choice intentionally, you cheerfully skip the daily lattes or fancy dinners to fund it. You don't feel deprived, you feel in control.

The same goes for food. What's your Rich Life equivalent? What does eating in a way that actually supports you look like, while still leaving room for the things that bring you joy? Figure that out, and you've built a sustainable plan. Not a plan you'll abandon in six weeks.

The Bottom Line

Your finances and your health are running on the same operating system. The patterns that show up in one will show up in the other: the shortcuts, the avoidance, the all-or-nothing thinking, the guilt spirals. But so will the wins. Build the foundation. Let the results compound. Stop looking away from the data. Automate what you can. And make sure every exchange — of money or of food — is actually giving you something back.

If you've been reading this and realizing your current approach isn't quite working? That's genuinely good news. Because now you know. And knowing is the thing that lets you do something about it.

If you're ready to figure out what a real nutrition plan looks like for your life — one that fits how you actually live, not how a protocol thinks you should — let's talk. I'd love to help you build the thing that actually sticks.

Here's to getting your money, and your body, working for you.