Understanding your biases will help you lose fat.

People don’t tend to like the comparison between your bank balance and your calorie balance (but when has that ever stopped me haha)…

They think it simplifies a complicated thing like why we eat/make food choices/ emotional eating etc

But ironically this is exactly why the analogy works.

How we spend money is just as complex and illogical as why we overeat…

We spend money to impress people, to fulfil social norms we don’t care about, because it was on sale (even if we didn’t want it).

We refuse to look at our credit card statements because we don’t want to acknowledge debt; a bit like refusing to weigh yourself to see how much weight you’ve gained. (This is known as the ostrich effect: burying your head in the sand)

We think about money differently depending where it came form. You might go and blow the £100 you won on the lottery but you are far less likely to do that if you worked overtime for it.

Yet it is the same £100. (This is known as mental accounting)

We experience loss aversion: we prefer to avoid losing money than to gain the same amount. Much like how when you lose 2lbs ‘its nothing’ but when you gain 2lbs ‘it’s loads!’

We over spend and over eat to make ourselves feel better or when we are bored/lonely/emotional/ stressed.

We assume we will be happy when we earn X much like we assume that we will be happy when we weigh X.

My point here is that many factors influence how we eat just like many factors influence to how we spend money.

We certainly aren’t logical in either but we would likely do better if we were.

This is why it is so interesting to question your decisions.

Understanding your own cognitive biases helps you make better & more logical decisions.