Reading about personal finance is always interesting to me. Mostly because I always seem to find a way to relate it back to calories and fat loss.
There are a lot of similarities between personal finance and fat finance. The main tenant beings almost equal:
Spend less than you earn, burn more than you eat.
Interestingly, I saw an article about personal finance the other day that was very much in sync with the ideas behind the Reverse Taper Diet.
Now, I don’t know whether this was on the Get Rich Slowly Blog or was something I was directed to through their twitter (@GRSBlog) but the basic premise was as follows:
Getting out of debt is rarely the ending for most people. People who were in debt and then get out of debt are very likely to fall back into debt. The reason being they never really learned how to live at a non-debt causing level. They simply realized they had a problem then went ‘crazy hardcore’ on solving the problem, but never really found a balance.
Sound familiar?
Think of people who diet and exercise to get lean, then finally get lean, then two months later are already falling down the slippery slope of gaining all the weight back.
The personal finance suggestion was to battle debt by going extremely strict on spending and saving for awhile, but then to gradually re-introduce some spending with the goal of finding a sustainable way of living that isn’t a horrible frugal burden, but that also isn’t so impulsive you fall right back into debt.
So, to use a really overdone piece of personal finance advice – Cut all unneeded expenses (including those 4 dollars coffees) when you are first trying to get out of debt. Go HARD and identify what is truly essential in your budget. Then slowly try adding expenses back into your life until you find a nice equilibrium. The goal is to figure out what expenses make you happy (those 4 dollar coffees) and which expenses you really didn’t need (the donut with those 4 dollar coffees).
This very similar to how and why we designed the Reverse Taper Diet.
We wanted to help people ‘learn’ how to eat to maintain their new body.
Because all the dieting in the world just isn’t worth it if you’re just going to fall back into ‘over fat’ in a couple months time. It’s enough to make you stop dieting for good.
So yes, when you have a lot of fat to lose diet and diet hard. But as you begin to approach a more ideal body shape, you start to increase your calories (SLOWLY) with the aim of ‘plateauing’ at around your ideal body weight. When done correctly you end up eating the amount of food necessary to maintain your new lean body. An amount of ‘spending’ you’re allowed while staying out of ‘fat debt’.
This is the whole theory behind the Reverse Taper Diet.
