I have wanted to lose 10 pounds (~6% of body weight) ever since I started Financial Samurai in 2009. I have come close, dropping five to six pounds in some years, but never quite hitting the double digit goal. As a result, for more than 16 years, I failed to accomplish something that should have been straightforward, especially for a supposedly rational economist and personal finance nerd.
There were even moments when I considered intentionally gaining a lot of weight just to make losing 10 pounds easier. The idea felt similar to racking up a ton of credit card debt to enjoy life to the fullest, then celebrating once it was all paid off. I saw people do this online and get praised like heroes.
Instead of deliberately gaining weight, I eventually decided it was healthier to just lose weight. And surprisingly, all it took was finally applying two economic principles: reduction and substitution. Once I did, the weight came off in six months.
The Basic Economic Principle of Reduction
As the price of a good rises, the quantity consumed tends to fall. This relationship is clearly illustrated by the classic supply-and-demand curve.
If each meal costs $25 and I have $100 to spend on food, I can buy four meals. If the price per meal rises to $33.34, that same $100 only buys three meals. With a fixed budget, the rational consumer must reduce consumption by about 25–30 percent.
Where we get into trouble financially is ignoring this principle. Instead of adjusting behavior, we pay $134 for four meals, absorb the higher cost, and then complain about food inflation.
A more constructive response is to use higher prices as a forcing function to consume less. Fewer meals out can help us stay within budget and, in many cases, improve our health as well. Lower spending and better discipline is a win-win outcome.
Yes, combatting inflation is straightforward but not easy. As investors, we've been able to make handsome returns in recent years, thereby making it easier to splurge on food. However, as a rational economist, you change your behavior if you want to change your outcome.
We Should Have Consumed Less Food During The Pandemic
Based on the simple economic principle that higher prices should reduce consumption, I should have lost a ton of weight during the pandemic.
Instead, starting in 2020, our food spending climbed rapidly as we ordered more delivery. At the time, it made sense. Delivery saved time and reduced exposure risk, especially since our daughter was born in December 2019 and had a still-fragile immune system.
The problem is that food delivery typically costs about 20% more than picking up the same meal and roughly 50% more than cooking at home. With a newborn and a three-and-a-half-year-old, we justified the premium as a necessary time saver.
Five years later, we were still ordering delivery regularly. Not only is it expensive, but restaurant food is also generally less healthy, with higher levels of added sugar and salt.
The Catalyst To Finally Start Losing Weight: Less Money
To lose weight, it helps to have a catalyst. Mine was spending five weeks with my parents in July 2025. My dad, who is about six feet tall and weighs roughly 155 pounds, called me chubby. Thanks dad. I fired back that he should put on some weight and muscle.
But deep down, I knew I could stand to lose some weight. At the time, I was five foot ten and weighed 172 pounds. There is nothing like going to Hawaii and having to take your shirt off at the beach to make you confront excess weight. If you are no longer trying to attract a mate, the natural tendency is to let yourself go because you already have one.
Because we stayed with my parents, we saved at least $20,000 in lodging costs. Initially, I only had food and transportation expenses to worry about. That changed once I decided to remodel my parents in law unit. What I thought would cost $25,000 ended up costing $41,000. It was the most money I had spent in a four-week period since remodeling a prior home from 2019 to 2022.
As I watched the bills pile up, I became acutely aware of every cost around me. When expenses rise, cash flow available for everything else shrinks. And one of the few truly flexible expenses left was food.
As a result, I intentionally decided to spend less on food to improve cash flow. For example, instead of spending $25 for an extra container of poke from Fresh Catch, we made due with less. The funny thing is, in the end, my parents ended up footing 85% of the remodel bill. I just didn't expect them to, which is why I lowered my expenses.
Related: Everything Is Rational – The Answer To All Things Irrational
A Careful Inspection Of Our Food Budget
When we returned from Hawaii, I finally examined our food spending closely and was stunned. We were spending around $3,500 a month on food for a family of four.
Although I manage our investments and generate supplemental retirement income through this site and book writing, I do not actively manage our household expenses.
In my head, I believed we were spending around $2,500 a month on food. Inflation that accelerated after 2021 changed everything. Even though headline inflation has moderated, our food costs are still roughly 40 percent higher than they were five years ago.
Mentally, I was stuck in a much earlier pricing era until I confronted the actual numbers. Inflation has a great way of sneaking up on us.
Adding Substitution To Lose Weight
Anchoring to outdated price memories is why all of us should conduct a deep financial review at least once a year. What we remember is often disconnected from present reality.
This is the same anchoring mistake many older generations make when they say things were cheap back in their day and that working harder was all it took. They underestimate the compounding impact of inflation relative to wages.
Once I understood our true spending, my wife and I created a monthly food plan. Our target was to return to $2,500 a month and save $1,000 a month while eating healthier. That meant eating less, but also substituting.
The biggest substitution: going from food delivery to more home-cooked meals.
Living in San Francisco, a top three food city in the country, makes this harder. We build the technology that makes food delivery convenient. We are also surrounded by hundreds of excellent restaurants across every cuisine imaginable, all deliverable within an hour.
In fact, I recently discovered a restaurant called Khao Tiew that serves the best khao soi I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, once you add boneless beef short rib and tax, the dish runs about $28 for pickup. So for now, I’ve replaced it with $1.49 instant ramen noodles and call it a lesson in discipline. Substitution baby!
Write Out Your Reasons For Wanting To Lose Weight
After running through your budget and deciding how much to reduce and what to substitute, it's finally time to write out the reasons why you want to lose weight. Because once you have a why, you can do almost anything.
My reasons are:
- Boost cash flow by $1,000 a month as I prepare for tougher times ahead due to AI.
- Reduce total cholesterol by 50 points before my next physical in six months.
- Stay trim like my dad so I can live to age 80+ and have my kids visit me with hugs and kisses like when they were young.
- Reduce impact on my knees and joints when playing supports in order to feel better every day.
- Continue fitting into the same clothes I’ve worn for the past 25 years, saving money and sparing myself the time and annoyance of shopping for new ones.
The Final Financial Kick in the Rear to Lose Weight
By mid-October, three months in, my weight dropped from 173 pounds to 168 pounds. I felt good about the progress because I was no longer just losing water weight. It felt real.
Then Business Insider came by to interview me about saving money while raising a family. When I saw myself on camera, I felt newly motivated to keep losing weight. The saying is true: the camera really does add 10 pounds.
After the video came out, I could suddenly empathize with actors and celebrities who obsess over fitness, weight-loss drugs, cosmetic procedures, and extreme diets. When your image affects your livelihood and future opportunities, the pressure to look your best is intense and understandable.
The experience also reinforced my desire to not pursue video to not fall into the trap of external validation. So it’s back to writing and podcasting for me, where the focus is on ideas rather than appearances. But if you want motivation to lose weight, film yourself and watch it.
Thank Goodness For Higher Food Prices
If food prices were falling, food consumption would logically rise. Good food is hard to resist. But when I watched my favorite steak at the supermarket go from $28 a pound to $32 and then $39, I stopped buying it. First I substituted with $12 cheeseburgers. Then I began reducing the consumption of meat altogether.
As delivery fees and menu prices climbed, opting out altogether became simpler. Meals that once cost under $85 for our family of four now routinely exceed $140. At that point, rice porridge with chicken and cabbage for $15 covering two days sounded great.
Now that I am used to a flatter stomach, I have no desire to go back. My endurance on the court has improved and I feel fitter overall. As Steven Tyler once said, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
Although paying more for food is unpleasant, I am oddly grateful. For too long, I lived comfortably without scrutinizing my food spending and ate whatever I wanted. This is the problem with living in America given there is an abundance of everything.
By eating less, I not only lost weight but also improved my financial discipline. Maybe I’ll even reach 155 pounds one day, like I was in high school, and live to 80 like my dad.
Who am I kidding? 155 pounds is too light. I’m happy staying around 165 pounds, plus or minus two, for the rest of my life. Fight on!
Readers, have you adjusted your consumption or substituted away from higher priced foods as prices surged? How have your habits changed since the pandemic? Are you a rational economist and PF nerd who adjusts behavior to prices?
Suggestions For A Better Life
Ultimately, the goal of losing weight is to feel healthier and live longer. Whether you succeed or not, you can at least protect your family with an affordable life insurance policy through Policygenius. My wife and I both secured matching 20 year term life insurance policies during the pandemic to protect our two young children, and once we did, a tremendous amount of financial worry disappeared.
To expedite your journey to financial freedom, join over 60,000 others and subscribe to the free Financial Samurai newsletter. You can also get my posts in your e-mail inbox as soon as they come out by signing up here. Financial Samurai is among the largest independently-owned personal finance websites, established in 2009.
For background, I was an Economics major at The College of William and Mary and have always loved the subject. If I had not gone into equities, I likely would have pursued fixed income instead. The single most important economic indicator I follow is the 10 year bond yield. The risk free rate tells us an enormous amount about growth, inflation expectations, and risk.
my wife and I spend about 30k a year on food. yes we like to eat out. for me it is pretty simple. eat out half as much and don’t eat after 8pm and i’ll lose those 10 extra pounds i carry. but I also really enjoy those things and doubt
it makes much of a difference in my longevity so still undecided.
Cool, that’s a nice budget for the two of you. What’s your height and weight? And are you happy with it?
Are you using a scale that estimates body composition or, better yet, DEXA (e.g. Bodyspec)? And do you do regular resistance training and prioritize >0.8g of protein per pound of body weight? We are both at the age to start worrying about sarcopenia, so I think it’s more useful to track your lean and fat mass since you actually want to spare the first while reducing the second.
Thanks for the reminder. I’m going to do a DEXA scan soon. I’m sure it’ll just tell me to work out more and lose more fat.
After always being a bit soft around the edges – never overweight, but softer than I’d like—, this article helped me lose 20 lbs. at age 30, and keep it off for the next decade, and hopefully forever.
I realized that:
weight loss = math + control
I can do control, and I can do math.
From the Tightwad Gazette, pp 783-786
Diet, You’ll Like It
“The weight loss industry has grown to $32 billion annually. Clearly, many dieters believe they need the aid of clinics, health club memberships, appetite suppressants, expensive healthy foods like fish and fresh salad, and expensive “crutch” diet foods like a diet sodas, diet shakes, NutraSweet, weight watchers frozen dinners, and so on.
But my research has convinced me that those who want to lose weight can almost certainly do so without spending extra money. Further, if you’ve mastered frugality, you already possess the parallel skills required.
We interviewed several experts including John Frank, an obesity specialist and director of the nutrition research clinic at Baylor College of medicine. Frank said that despite all theories, weight-loss boils down to one principle: you must use up more energy than you take in. While it’s true that genetic factors can make weight loss tougher for some people, if losing weight is important enough to you, you can overcome your genes.
Weight loss is a fairly precise science. To lose a pound, you must eat 3500 fewer calories than you burn. Most adult use about 1500 calories daily. If you create a daily deficit of 500 calories through eating less or exercising more, you should lose a pound a week.
I was determined to get serious. I was pushing 40 and wanted to conquer this last unresolved area of my life.
So I decided to use the same skills I had learned from tightwaddery. Like saving money, losing weight can be achieved through unremarkable means. It’s about self honesty, precision, recordkeeping, modification, learning a few new tricks, and follow through. Very simply, I lost weight by counting calories.
A small investment is required for this. You need:
1. An accurate scale to weigh yourself daily.
2. A food scale to measure food in ounces.
3. Measuring cups and spoons to measure food by volume.
4. A small notebook to record what you eat.
5. A piece of graph paper to plot out your progress.
Next, set a daily calorie maximum for yourself. Most diets are designed at 1200 calories for women. Diets below 1000 calories for long periods aren’t advisable without medical supervision, and diets of 1500 calories may be too much for many women to lose weight. I chose 1000 calories and I took a multivitamin. Both Frank and a weight-loss dietician told me this was in the low range of an acceptable plan.
When on a low-calorie regimen, it’s crucial to get 95% of your calories from a balanced diet of nutrient rich foods. You’ll tend to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables because they are nutritious and low in calories, while limiting your consumption of fatty and sugary foods. Because protein is important when dieting, I ate the same moderate amounts of meat, eggs, yogurt, and cheese as usual.
Each day I began a new page in my notebook with the date and my weight that day at the top.
Throughout the day I wrote down what I ate. I worked out my calorie count before supper and adjusted supper and my evening snack accordingly. I tallied the total calories each night.
The result: I lost 20 pounds 16 weeks. Frank said that my rate of loss was excellent. At first, you lose weight a bit quicker; then you should lose about a pound a week. If you lose faster than that you’ll lose muscle tissue as well.
When I was on weight watchers, I constantly consumed “crutch” foods. Because my stomach became used to being fed something frequently, I became obsessed with food and sometimes found myself actually daydreaming about it. By dieting without any crutch foods, food eventually became less important to me, almost utilitarian. I was hungry during the first week while my stomach adjusted, but I chanted my mantra: “hunger is good.”
If you kept a record of your calorie consumption, through calculation and experimentation you should be able to pinpoint the number of calories you need to maintain the desired weight.
In the years since I lost this weight, I have easily maintained my weight. I weigh myself every few days. If I find my weight has crept up a pound or so, I simply revert back to the diet for a few days.
One last note: a hidden cost of losing weight is that you may need to replace some of your wardrobe, but this need not be costly. In fact, losing weight can be one of the best tightwad strategies to improve your wardrobe. The secondhand market has a much better supply of clothes for thin people, possibly because people get rid of clothes when they gain weight. Also, thin people almost always look good no matter what they wear. In contrast, some larger women compensate by spending more time on hair, nails, and wardrobe. In my case, many of my clothes simply fit better.
When I read this I couldn’t help but think what different lives we must be living. I spent $16k CDN on food for a family of 5. About 10k at the grocery store, around 5k at restaurants and about 1k in food delivery service.
I feel like that budget has been fairly liberal and if I spent more I would probably just be heavier. That’s not to say that I went without.
I have to say that I am feeling like that about a lot of the recent posts, I wonder if it’s just me or if Canada is falling that far behind.
Not sure. If falling behind means less expensive food to feed your family comfortably, that’s a great thing!
Here in San Francisco at least, spending less than $100 going to the grocery store to feed a family at four or more than several days is very difficult.
But I’m happy to hear about everybody else’s budgets if they’d like to share. Thanks for sharing yours.
It’s not you. Canada has fallen far and continues to fall very far behind. Sadly, it’s like looking up a very steep hill every day, especially for our children. Just like Sam did, you should get into better “shape” if you want to get out of your life what I got out of mine.
Not sure what you mean? I never said I wasn’t in shape? Do you recommend shaving more out of food costs? I’m already 60% lower than Sam and feeding one extra person.
I eat 2 main meals now and try to finish eating around 5:30 pm and next day have breakfast after 7:00 or 7:30 am. People can figure out their best window eating times, depending on work and other daily responsibilities. It could work for ie. shift workers. That is the beauty of this way of eating. One still has to eat healthy foods.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jqZsS03dlPk&list=PLmkVOa1Wra8XvfMDz6pzGbMRo1huyTxBt&index=3
Strongly recommended that you learn about intermittent fasting. Created by Toronto physician, Jason Fung. It’s about when you choose to eat your meals so that the body burns and stores fuel released, not stored to grow unnecessary fat. Ie. eating 16:8 timing, where one eats meals within 8 hr. Window while 16 hrs. not earth allow body to burn calories. Such as when asleep. ☺️.
Go to YouTube to find his videos.
Sam, this one is easy. I had the same struggles myself: read the Fat Chance book from Robert Lusting. He is the professor emeritus of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). It will really open your eyes.
Overall:
The new dietary guidelines reflect this quite well. The issue is that this goes against the “common knowledge” of the last 50 years…and people still believe that refined carbs are good, when we have an overwhelming amount of data showing that they caused the obesity pandemic of the US of the last 40 years…
Oh, I hear you about cutting out processed foods and sugar – and I THINK everybody knows this. But saying it’s easy is unrealistic. If it was easy, our nation would be fit and there wouldn’t be such a large burden on our healthcare system.
We need to tackle weight lose beyond food deficits. We need to change our habits, our lifestyles, and our mental models for why we should lose weight.
Oh man you are so right about wanting to cut back on food due to cost. Food inflation is out of control and easily gets me upset. I always try to cross compare pricing at stores before buying these days and constantly look for sales. I usually hold out on restocking pricey things like olive oil too until there’s an active sale.
Just yesterday I was trying to buy a grain-free cereal and was mind blown that one store was selling a normal size box for $12. Twelve bucks for cereal? what?! Luckily I found the same cereal on sale at another store for $6. It takes me a lot of extra time when I need to get groceries because I have to pay so much attention to pricing, but it’s become necessary.
My other method for losing weight has been cutting out snacks especially in the evening. It became so habitual for me to eat at 9pm. But I realized most of it was due to comfort not actual hunger on most days. I stuck with it for 10 days and then I didn’t even think about eating in the evenings anymore. My stomach and brain had adjusted by then. One impetus that got me to make this change was listening to a podcast about a guy who used to eat gummy worms obsessively. He came to realize he didn’t even like the taste of them and wasn’t even hungry when he ate them, he had just created an unnecessary habit for himself as a way to cope with stress. Once he recognized this and replaced that with a healthier outlet for stress, he lost all interest in eating huge bags of them. It was a very weird story, but surprisingly helpful.
Yes, so frustrating. So instead of giving in, we must fight food inflation by simply eating less and sticking to our budget. We don’t adjust our budget to higher prices. Instead, we adjust our consumption down to higher prices.
Great job not snacking in the evenings. We should cut out food after 6 or 7 pm. Better sleep too.
Fight on! And no gummy worms at night lol.