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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
The Diet And Money Double Whammy
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“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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
This article was originally published November 7, 2006
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-11-07.htm.
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