Personal finance hasn’t really been on the forefront of my mind the last few weeks/months (arguably last year and a half, in many ways).

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to the doctor for a checkup and to sort out a problem with my stomach, and my blood tests came back with some high cholesterol numbers.

Not a huge deal at all.

But I definitely put on some pandemic weight and had been leaning towards I have to do something about this.

And with the addition of the medical news, I was like… let’s just nip this issue in the bud here before it goes from being a little issue to like an ISSUE.

So while personal finance hasn’t been my primary goal lately, I find that the more I do on this health journey, the more I actually do think about personal finance.

First of all, I threw some money at this problem. Which was a fortunate position to be in and this has been one of the first times in life that I could be like – money or “other thing” and just pick other thing.

I read a great book by Scott Adams called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big that talks a lot about how we only have so much discipline muscle for each day and sometimes there are some trade offs to get to the success points we want and it was just really timed that I was reading it right as I started this.

So my first goal was to eat less calories than I burn.

Which made me laugh as I would chant this mantra to myself and think “it’s just like spend less than you earn, Mel” and then I would mutter angrily under my breath about what endless unpleasant garbage all of this is.

But that was like it. I could eat a whole chocolate cake if it was less calories than I burned that day (which… for many reasons, as I’ve learned, is not a wise approach), but I could. And sometimes just having the freedom to know I can… I’m the type that can do wonders for mentally. I can actually do much harder things than I really want to as long as no one is forcing me to do them.

And like a total dork, I tried to apply what I have learned in personal finance to some of these steps and they kind of did help keep me moving.

I lost 5 pounds like so fast. It was awesome.

Shortly after this, I learned more about what water weight was.

It reminded me of when I first started learning personal finance and I used every frugality trick I could find and was like “wow, $50 extra bucks a month.” At the time, this was quite nice. In the long run… not a huge win. Psychologically though, awesome.

But then… nothing. So I thought, it was like a solid 4-5 years before my personal finance habits really started to work for me. I’m clearly not 4-5 years into this, but I keep reminding myself that 4-5 years are quite likely to pass and wouldn’t I rather be on the current healthier path I’m on that the previous one.

And that mentality helped me just keep chugging along every time progress has stalled so far. So that little extra bit of discipline muscle from this world has been nice.

Then, going back to eat less calories than you burn, I realized that there are literally endless combinations to use to achieve this goal.

I hate most of them.

Like 95% of them?

But I kept looking and found 5% that seem to work.

I try to get the numbers right 80-90% of the time and the 10-20% I don’t, don’t seem to have a huge effect overall.

Instead of trying to force myself to do things I hate (I’m looking at you running), I just went back to swimming.

When trying to figure out calories was overwhelming initially, I ate a ton of prepackaged food that clearly told me the calorie counts. The healthiest approach? Nope. But the one I could function within? Yes.

Slowly, as I get better at some of these things, I’m able to shift a bit from the easiest approach, to slightly better. And I’m hopeful I’ll be able to keep improving in little steps over time. I’ve been able to add a weekly yoga class to swimming 5-6 times a week.

I’m learning how to cook a little better, so the amount of prepackaged food is reducing.

I’ve also learned to invest a little, but not a lot, in my goals. I’ll pay a little more for certain foods I want and maybe experiment with a new healthy one each grocery trip – but I didn’t just toss the cupboards and buy a ton of frou-frou ingredients that I don’t even know if I’ll use.

I pulled out my old swimming gear and signed back up at the gym. But I did buy new goggles when my old ones felt like they were breaking my eye sockets (fun new thing about getting older) – and a good moisturizer to keep my skin from getting super dry and itchy (thanks, chlorine).

I’m also trying to stay pragmatic about setbacks. This past week I managed to stab myself with a mirror shard really good and managed to swim for all of one day before I learned what swimmer’s toes are (they are disgusting, don’t look it up) and will now be treating that for a few days before getting back in the pool. On the plus side, I was also starting to get swimmer’s ear from being too lax with my preventative ear drops (another investment), so hopefully that will clear up while my toes do and by the end of next week I should be swimming again.

It very much reminds me of that feeling when you finally hit an emergency fund goal and then your tires explode.

Well, I’m off to buy a tube of Lotrimin. What things in life have you tried to do that remind you of the same of the same skills you built up to improve your finances?