“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” — Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Chocolate CakeAn appetizer, bread, a drink, and dessert… in addition to your meal, pick two of the four, but never three. So goes the advice from Brian Wansink, the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Andrea Sachs of Time magazine spoke with him recently about how Americans are eating themselves mindlessly into obesity. Brian says to focus on The Rule of Two. “There are four things that you can eat at many meals besides the main course: an appetizer, bread, a drink and dessert. The Rule of Two is that you can have any two things you want out of those four. But you can’t have three.”

Moderation is important in maintaining a healthy weight. The same can be said about managing your money and budgeting monthly expenses. Dieting doesn’t work as a long term strategy because it requires you to deny yourself and typically this is a mode that cannot be maintained. It’s not about denying the pleasure, but rather treating selections and choices with moderation. Most tricks used to control weight translate in some way to personal finances and learning to live within your means.

If you want to splurge in one area then cut back in others. Dawn writes about how to find the balance with frugal living. She writes, “Frugal living isn’t a dreary task, I think we need to reward ourselves here and there. Frugality in my opinion is also about moderation. Moderation is key no matter if I am eating, drinking, watching TV, going to movies or exercising. Excess is what happens when I stop controlling my life and let something else run it.”

Barbara O’Neill, a professor at Rutgers, provides a list of twelve similarities between health and personal finance problems experienced by many people. She offers a few “tricks” for success with regards to spending money and food behavior.

“People can lose weight and still eat favorite foods by decreasing their portion sizes by half. A comparable financial example is reduced spending on ‘discretionary’ expenses such as meals eaten away from home and lottery tickets. In other words, not cutting out these items completely but spending less than before.”

Each and every day, we’re confronted with choices. Wansink notes that, “The average American makes more than 200 decisions about food every day.” The number of money decisions could be close to that. Mindless Eating & Mindless Spending. They’re one in the same.