Calories and Counting

Calories and Counting ⅼ Food and Finance

Bottom Line: When basic elements of our lives don’t seem to work, we are vulnerable to bad actors who are selling products for themselves , not to help you.

Premise

If there’s one thing that is completely obvious to us all it’s that 1+1=2. (Note: feel free to Google this and find out all the clever ways that this is not true. I just did. The one about using base-2 instead of base-10 is kind of interesting…)

Similarly, when we count up, we know what our next number will be. One, two, three, and then here we are at four.

Then counting backwards does the same thing in reverse: one, two, three, four, three, two, etc.

And from what we observe in everyday life, adding and subtracting work out pretty much every time, so long as we are careful and using the correct numbers for our situation.

Two Common Examples of this: Money and Calories

If you have $100 and then your good friend gives you another $100, you end up with $200 dollars. Every time.

If you have a 100-calorie snack pack, then eat another tasty 100-calorie snack pack, you’ve now consumed 200 calories of snack pack. Every time.

So, this means that you are now 200 dollars richer, and 200 calories richer. In fact, if you kept going with this, by the time your friend has given you 35 of these wonderful $100s, and by the time you’ve had 35 of these snack packs, you’d be both $3,500 richer and one pound heavier.

Now, if we factor in some walking around and shopping a little, we can reverse some of these numbers. We could buy some trinkets at the local gift shop, then walk around some more and look at the ocean. These activities have the effect of burning both our money and our calories. So now we have $3,485 and weigh slightly less than the one pound more that we’d gained!

The implication of these facts is that there are some easy solutions to some of our vexing problems. We can just follow the simple logic of addition and subtraction to our weight, if we want to lose or gain; and our money supply, if we want to have more or less!

Eat less. Save more. Eat less. Save more. Exercise, too.

For some, this is great advice. And yet for so so so many others, it’s absolute junk. It is simply not good advice because, a) it doesn’t bring about the expected result and, b) it doesn’t bring about the expected result and that makes us feel miserable !

Implications

The existence of these erroneous “simple facts” has led to massive industries that thrive on our inability to deal with these basic facts of living. These industries develop perplexing products that claim to simplify our lives.

For example:

The Diet Industry!

“All you need to do, and it is so simple, is deny yourself these two or three nutrients on a regular basis, along with taking our patented Life Powder, and you will UNLEASH the younger, vibrant self that you know has been buried for so long!!!” *

                (*this statement has not been proven or even researched because we are completely full of it…)

The Finance Industry!

“Roll over your 401(K) into an IRA with a buffered fund of limited downside with an industry-leading blend of 3x upside that’s guaranteed to beat the market!” *

                (*past performance is not a guarantee of future returns and blah blah blah we are completely full of it….)

These industries have more in common than they appear to. To start, they are both built to solve the problem of how complex their respective areas are. But the individual products, often, are built to solve a different problem: how to build wealth for their founders. Clever and marketing and sales aside, their existence results in more confusion, which is great for business! There are many people with good intensions out there, but all of these products are products for sale.

This absolutely does not mean that everything out there is bad. This is more of caveat emptor. We all need to step back and ask ourselves whether we are getting sucked into a product that only solves a problem that was hatched in someone’s head (or a lab, or a boardroom), or if it genuinely solves an existing problem. Perhaps a starting point is to ask this: how complicated is it?

And here, too, we have some similarities between food and finance.

We can consider- very briefly, and I’ll ask that you allow me to just paint a couple of sparse pictures- that food and finance, calories and counting, began in much simpler forms than how we see them today.  Our distant ancestors ate what they could get and traded for what they could not. They ate to live, and exercise was in the form of work and play.

Hunt, gather, trade for the things that you can’t get yourself.

Now let’s add a layer of complexity with some social contact and currency.

Hunt, gather, trade using some form of currency, and while talking to the person you traded with, you invite them to eat dinner with you and spend the night. They tell you that, since you’re being so hospitable, they have this great spice that will make your food tastier and they’re happy to share. And it is amazing! You want more, but how can you get it? You ask. And won’t others want it?

The spice-bringer, Spicy, has something wonderful to tell you: there is a ship going off to get some more spice, and for a little of your currency, you can have some spice. This sounds pretty good, you think, but a little risky. You’re going to need something extra because you’re really going out on a limb here. So Spicy has an idea: you give some currency, and you’ll get all of it back, plus a little more after it’s all been sold. And some spice? You ask. And some spice, replies Spicy.

So now there’s interest being earned on your money because you took a risk and invested, and there’s also something new, the spice itself, compelling you to desire changes to your food!

Fast forward to today…

Well, it’s only a matter of time before each of those things gets built upon and complexity gets added. We now have tremendous menus of financial and food products. There are people in laboratories figuring out the perfect vanishing caloric density (to make you feel like the calories are just melting away) and there are people hatching buffered index funds (they invest in index funds using collar options to….forget it, just understand that they are not even remotely like handing Spicy some money for a product and being compensated a little for your risk).

The bottom line is that we’ve got a world that is far ahead of itself in terms of what we, as a species, are able to deal with. This isn’t just my theory, it’s been written about by others who know a whole lot more than I do (I trust you can Google this), but the proof is all around us: mental health, the environment, social media, constant advertisements, and the dizzying array of decisions we have to make in order to make it through each day.

It's all so taxing that we end up larger, poorer, and running just to stay in place!

So, What Are We to Do?

First thing: we need to simplify.

Did you have a dad, or some other wise person, who always said, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”?

I frequently find myself saying to clients, “Let’s not get too cute with this.” And what I mean is, when you start getting too clever about everything, there is a cost. Mental and physical energy are expended whenever we add a layer of complexity to our lives. Mistakes get made, which are frustrating. Then there is the pressure we put on ourselves- Am I supposed to eat this? Am I supposed to invest in that? Did I just make a mistake? Have I polluted my body with X-additive? Should I run a little faster, should I lift more weights, should I should I should I??????

Simple Ideas:

An apple is better for you than a candy bar. Earning interest is better than not. Saving more than you spend is generally a good idea.

There is no magic, so if something is incredibly complicated-sounding and seems to work by some kind of magic, it’s probably not a good idea!

Probably most importantly, if you find something that works for you , then is it sustainable? If you get results and can keep it up, you’ve got a winner! If you cannot stick with something, then it’s definitely not going to work for you. The greatest, most fat burning and strengthening exercise in the world is not good for you if you’re not going to do it! The best saving program in the world is not so great if you are not actually doing it.

In Conclusion

So there it is. A simple list to check:

                Who was this product made for, you or the creator?

                Is it unnecessarily complicated such that you cannot really understand it?

                Does it work for you ?

                Can you continue doing it for a very long time?

If all these steps are in place, then you’ve got yourself a winner!

Now let’s get out there, make some money and build up a sweat.

Pickleball, anyone?