Most of our lives we’ve had adults telling us to eat more. We don’t need nearly as much food as we think we do.

First, balance is required. If you’re the type of person that wants to enjoy life (and who isn’t?) then you likely want to enjoy going out to eat, stopping off at Krispy Kreme for a donut and coffee now and then, having a beer with friends, a nice place to live and a decent car to get around in. You want to take nice vacations, etc.

But, if you go to extremes with those things you’re not going to enjoy life. You’re going to eat out too much, eat the wrong things too often, drink too much alcohol, take on more debt than you can handle, etc.

It’s a matter of finding the balance in both your health (diet, exercise) and your finance (what you spend, where you spend it and what each purchase ultimately costs you).

The other key is having drive and discipline. Our cultural has a created this idea that you should get what you want now and you should be able to get it easily. (Credit cards, drive thru’s at fast food restaurants, etc.) People that don’t have the drive and discipline to make themselves eat the right things and exercise likely won’t have the drive and discipline to make themselves get sufficient education and build a career that provides them with the means to live comfortably without overextending themselves.

The issue involves an individual’s personality as well as how they’ve allowed themselves to be shaped by advertising and mass media…

The analogy between food and Pf only hold when you equate good nutrition with being skinny. This is easy for a policy analyst and difficult for a true nutritionist.

In this analogy:

exercise=work at the highest paying job possible

eat less=spend less

don’t go on a nifty diet=don’t trust experts, they’re trying to sell you snake oil

. . . but, if you’re already skinny and already exercise in the metaphorical and in the literal sense, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are healthy and well nourished. Approximately 1/3 of Americans are not (yet) over weight, but only 10% are adequately (not optimally, but adequately) nourished and less than half a percent of Americans are thought to be in optimal health.

I would smile and say, “Two things – first, I eat less, and second, I exercise more.”

“That’s not what I meant!” they’d say. “I know that already! I wanted to know YOUR SECRET.” They wanted to know the way to eat all the things they want and STILL lose weight.

I think it’s the same with money. It’s easy to KNOW that you have to spend less than you take in. People just resist doing it because they want the OTHER easy thing, too.

Where people fall into bad habits with money or food, I feel like the reason they take bizarre ways out like the zero carb only fruit juice diet or investing everything they have in some currency trading program they discovered on an infomercial is because they felt that THOSE things would be easy.

Chasing “sexy” ideas is definitely a bad choice, and often those are the same as the “easy” ideas.

In India, high risk mutual funds are giving a return of about 50% annually, the highest being 66%, while medium risk funds are give a return of more than 35%. The profits made are tax free.

This has been the case since the last 2 years and the markets have been doing quite well here.

I’m thinking of investing 6,000 USD in high risk funds and from then on a major part of my monthly salary for the next 18 months, so that i can fund my own business by then.

Since you are not in favour of investing in mutual funds, i’m eager what you’d advice me to do.

Don’t trust brokers. They are out for their best interest, not yours.

Mutual funds get fat off investors is true.

Ramit and Cris, I’m a big believer that “sense of urgency” can be destructive with both healthy eating and healthy finance. Both require a senseible plan, with a balance.

Cris, I also experienced that by learning mindfulness (that is to say, deciding to have a plan andmake good choices to stick to it) I have improved both my physical and financial health.

I imagined a lot of young, recent college-graduates might not understand this as much as I (hitting middle-age sooner rather than later sort) do, so Ramit, it’s a pleasure to see you writing on this.

To Dimes, I say, the point doesn’t IMO boil down in both cases to consume less. It boils down to “know how much you can healthily consume based on your specific situation…formulate a plan to stick withiin that…and then make good choices that support that plan.”

In both dieting and investing, I was surprised to learn I ought to consume a little more for my maximum benefit.

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Good for you for asking the right questions. That’s awesome.

-Ramit