5 Strategies For Losing Weight and Being Financially Fit


By Caroline Wetzel T


his year is your year. Now is your opportunity to acknowledge how satisfi ed you are with your personal


fi nances and take yourself to the next level of fi nancial fi tness. Just as you take great care with your emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical health, this is your moment to tend to your fi nancial health.


How do you even begin? Start with


what you know and what you are read- ing about in this issue of Natural Nutmeg: weight loss. Many of the same attitudes, behaviors, and activities that enable you to lose weight and become healthy physically can be applied to your personal fi nances to help you become more healthy fi nancially.


I can say this from both personal and professional experience. You see, I lost 50 pounds through specifi c changes I made in my own life. And I have obtained a level of fi nancial wellness and support my own clients daily in doing the same as a Certifi ed Financial PlannerTM


and Private


Wealth Advisor. Start with a Vision


Before I lost all that weight, life was


tough: my clothes didn’t fi t, I had no energy, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable socially. I avoided having pictures taken of me when- ever possible and was deeply saddened one day when I saw that in a photo of a pregnant friend and me, I who was not pregnant looked ready to give birth! Something had to change. After I dried my tears I set my sights forward. I reframed how I thought of myself and envisioned being a physically fi t, active, fun-loving woman who felt comfortable in


28 Natural Nutmeg - January/February 2019


her own body. That vision grounded me and kept me focused on the person I aspired to become in time through changes in eating, exercising, and other behaviors.


I remember vividly the fi rst time I had


a vision for my own fi nancial future. I was an 18-year-old freshman in college. In my public speaking course, a classmate deliv- ered a presentation on compound interest and saving for retirement. He explained that the earlier you save and the more often, the more time you had to potentially make money on your savings before you had to use the money. I promised myself at the end of that class that no matter what I earned, I would always save some portion of it. And I retain that savings-oriented vision and ap- proach to fi nances even today.


Follow an Integrated, Holistic Approach


For me, losing weight was more than just eating fewer calories than I exerted. I had to apply a holistic, integrated approach to how I obtained, prepared, consumed, and burned off the food I put into my body. From preparing more food at home using mini- mally processed ingredients, to taking my meals to work, to exercising at least 4 times a week, I had to incorporate many dimen- sions to lose the weight and keep it off.


Similarly, I learned as a newlywed that


saving and investing alone wouldn’t make me fi nancially well. In my case, I needed to buy the right kind of life insurance to help take care of the mortgage my husband and I assumed as new homeowners. And I dis- covered as my husband and I began to look across our previously separate fi nancial lives


that there were different kinds of debt that people have and, as a result, various strate- gies for both carrying and paying off that debt. And I learned from the untimely early deaths of people important to us that it was critical that my husband and I incor- porate estate planning into our fi nancial wellness, even if we weren’t rich and didn’t have children. We needed to ensure that the assets we were building as a team during life would be distributed as we wished at death, especially in case we both died at the same time.


Monitor Your Progress Using a Variety of Data


Monitoring my progress losing weight meant more than reviewing what the numbers on my scale showed each week. I monitored my blood sugar levels at regular intervals. Trainers provided me workout routines to follow and I reported both what I completed and how I felt doing it. And at the gym I checked a gadget every month to see how my portion of body fat to muscle changed over time. As I lost weight and gained muscle, I felt less lethargic and more energetic. And I noticed that slowly, in time, I enjoyed being social again and not only hid less often from friends’ cameras but actually jumped into spontaneous silly poses when I felt like it.


In the same way, becoming fi nancially


well with my husband has included review- ing both qualitative and quantitative inputs. We developed a fi nancial plan and have been reviewing it annually for years. In between reviews, we strive as a team to con-


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