Books & Money

I wrote an email to a friend describing two books about money I read towards the end of my education that I found rewarding to read and extremely useful.

They should not be the only two books people read about personal money management, but they make a great start for people who are just starting to think about their money in terms beyond only paying their bills.

Here are the books:

Get A Financial Life

This is a personal finance book written for people in the 20’s & 30′, as well as other people just starting out. It is non-stuffy. It does not read like a textbook, it is enjoyable to read, but nonetheless informative. I also discovered by looking it up that the authors put out a new edition since I last read it. You can read it in a weekend or two and the advice will literally bring you significant benefits.  It gets updated every few years so make sure you have the latest edition.

Your Money Or Your Life

This is a book about the “Voluntary Simplicity” movement and “down shifting”. You may not want to do many of the things listed in the book, most people do not. However, this is an incredibly valuable book to read because it makes you think about the deeper meaning of money, work, and how they relate to where you want to go in your life. It isn’t written by a hippy, but by someone who was a successful financial adviser in NYC who decided it was time to think about money beyond paying the bills and building investments as ends in themselves. The thoughts he suggests you contemplate can give you a powerful way to look at your life.

If anyone reads or has read either of these books let me know what you think. 🙂

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

On this date last year I weighed 223.8 lbs. Today I weigh 178 lbs.

I reached a high of 260 lbs back in 2000.

I’m a man with a husky frame who stands at 5 11.

A combination of old sports injuries, bad habits, and lack of health insurance put me at 260 lbs. A new career with health benefits, several surgeries, and several years of healing got me back to the point where I could exercise again. My weight came down to and was stuck at the mid 220s for several years. Having always had a slow burning system and being a bit older I thought I was stuck there for good.

I used to read a personal development forum where I learned about The Hacker’s Diet last year.

This day last year was my first full day on it.

I haven’t changed any of the foods I eat. The feedback mechanisms built into the Hacker’s Diet basically showed me that bad habits kept me fat despite my good food choices. Things like snacking in front of an open refrigerator and simply eating too much.

My meals on the Hacker’s Diet looked pretty much the same as before, but with the bad habits cleaned up my weight came down about a pound a week.

I’m going to relax and focus on maintaining my new weight for a while. Then I am going to find a good sports medicine clinic to get physical therapy to get my bad shoulder ( reconstructed after ligament damage, torn rotator cuff ) and bad knee ( torn, missing cartilage ) ready for weight lifting.

My female friends have been telling me that I am in serious need of non-baggy pants. Apparently, women get just as bothered by seeing a pair of well formed glutes as men do, they are just discrete about it. After I get a chance to get a new haircut I will start on slowly rebuilding my wardrobe.

Anyway, since everyone who loses weight becomes a guru, here is what you can do to lose weight the way I did:

Read this SHORT article for valuable background information:
Why The Scale Lies

Read the Hacker’s Diet
The Hacker’s Diet

Buy a GOOD scale:
I recommend the brand called “tanita”. The most important quality of a scale for The Hackers Diet is consistency. You should be able to step on and off of a scale 3 times in succession and get the same weight each time.

Set up a FREE account at the Hacker’s Diet site
This site has a FREE and the best implementation of The Hacker’s Diet software.

Track the calories in your food in a daily food diary:
Don’t whine! This is amazingly effective and it only involves a few minutes of writing a day to get visible results. How is that for a miracle cure? Writing! Most people underestimate how much they eat. It is exactly like when you decide to go on a budget, begin writing down how much money you spend and become amazed at how much money you must have been spending before you started tracking your purchases. It works much the same way with tracking food and calories. Keeping a food log will dramatically improve your weight control with very little effort.

Keeping a food diary is easy with a free cronometer.com account.
Just type in what you ate, cronometer will tell you the nutrition you got. Cromometer will also tell you if you made your daily requirements or not

http://www.cronometer.com

Lose no more than 1 – 2 pounds a week.
If you lose weight no quicker than at this rate you will lose less muscle and have less loose skin when you finish losing weight. Instead of looking like a flabby raisin you will look tight(er) and good. Losing weight at this moderate rate will also make it more comfortable to eat less, since you will only be eating slightly less. Expect to lose about 5 lbs your first 1 – 2 weeks from a water weight loss.

Exercise
Aside from every other reason you have heard to do it, exercising during weight loss minimizes the amount of muscle lost and it minimizes the amount of loose skin you will have when you are done.

I am one of those people who gains weight easily. All of the things listed above worked for me and worked for me near painlessly. It is all based on long known boiler plate science. No gimmicks and once you buy a good scale you can do what I did at no cost.

Good Luck! 🙂