episode 132: are you stuck in the instant gratification trap?
On episode 132 of The Diet Diaries I’m talking about instant gratification. Why we need it so badly, why it never gives us what we actually want and what we actually need to do instead.
This episode is inspired by a recent client conversation and how my client articulated the experience of shifting around her schedule so she could create time to prep lunch to bring to work and not be so crazed in the mornings.
She said “it sucks now but it sucks more tomorrow. So let is suck now so that it doesn’t suck later.”
If that doesn’t capture how to avoid instant gratification, I don’t know what does.
So I’m breaking down what this really means and why it’s so important for making changes to your eating habits, coping with body image issues and finally going through recovery from binge eating.
Here’s what I’m talking about in episode 132:
What it means to front load discomfort
Why we are constantly seeking instant gratification
How to avoid instant gratification
Why urgency is keeping you from meeting your goals
Why all of this matters for your negative body image and binge eating recovery
Add your name to the Fall Mini Retreat early interest list here to get all of the details as soon as they’re ready!
Check out this blog post and episode 106 of The Diet Diaries for more resources around binge eating recovery.
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[00:00:00] Hey friends, it's episode 132. Let me get a little closer with the microphone here of the DIA Diaries. And today I'm talking about something that was inspired by a client conversation I had last week. Um, I don't know if this particular client listens to the podcast, but. Either way, this is gonna feel really relevant.
[00:00:21] So we were on a call last week and we were talking and she was sharing a couple of, we had talked the week before, um, about a couple of really specific changes that she was gonna make to her routine to help her free up some more time so that she could make the choices that she wanted to make around food and kind of feeling ready for her day.
[00:00:41] And what she said, and I have this written down, this is cut and pasted from our conversation. She said it sucks now. But it will suck more tomorrow. And then she kind of rephrased it a little bit, or we kind of captured and summarized it with this idea of like, let something suck now so that it doesn't suck more later.
[00:01:02] And I know the word sucks is kind of like a strong word and no, we're not trying to do things that make you feel miserable. Certainly not. And also there is a certain level of discomfort to. Making changes. There just is, and accepting that is a huge part of this work. If you actually want to do anything differently, to stop dieting, to stop being so abusive to yourself, to exercise more, to learn how to eat in a way that feels good, to stop feeling so obsessed when there are sweets in the house, you are going to have to get uncomfortable.
[00:01:41] There's no way around it. And part of this, this is actually, this the, it sucks now, but it sucks more tomorrow. So do the thing so that it sucks now so that it doesn't suck later. Right. That's kind of a, um, a different way of talking about this idea of front loading discomfort. And this ties in with instant gratification.
[00:02:05] We are all very conditioned to meeting instant gratification and it makes sense. We live in a world where we can have anything instantly. Information, food, clothes, um, social connection through our phones, through the internet, pretty much. Um, and it's very hard to tolerate not having the thing that we want at the moment that we want it.
[00:02:37] And that is really what this work is about. Cause you're gonna get these urges, you're gonna get your cravings, you're gonna get those, um, you're gonna kind of react to certain situations to want to like eat the snacks in the cabinet or pick up your kids leftover fries or skip the workout that you set your alarm for.
[00:02:54] Or say, screw it. I'm just gonna keep scrolling TikTok, even though it's 1130 at night and I really need to go to sleep, because it feels better in the moment to do those things, right? We want that instant gratification. We want that relief. And so what? But what happens is when we give ourselves that this is like the suck now versus suck later, things suck later, right?
[00:03:17] So we need to flip that discomfort now. Sucking now leads to L. Comfort and sucking less later. Discomfort, comfort now. Sucking less now leads to discomfort. Sucking more later. Right. So think about this, like, let's say, um, there's leftover cake in your fridge from your kid's birthday today, I'm recording this on Monday, June 5th, which happens to be Ben's 11th birthday.
[00:03:50] Um, we only have one piece of, he wanted a cookie cake this year, which I got. Um, we only have one piece left over. I had a piece yesterday when everyone came over. I actually did not think it was that good. So that one piece sitting in the cabinet has holds no interest to me because it was like, not good.
[00:04:05] Um, You may be thinking, well, it doesn't matter to me if it's not good. If there's cookies in the cabinet, I'm gonna wanna eat them. Yep. I get that. And one of these skills is learning. Like, if you don't enjoy something, why are you eating it? What's the pleasure, what's the point? Um, separate skill for a separate episode.
[00:04:21] But anyway, so you might have, let's say you have cake, leftover cake sitting in your house. And you know it's sitting there and it's taking up like a lot of space in your brain and you're like, no, don't eat it. Don't eat it. The cake is bad. You're not allowed to have it. Cake is bad. You already had cake.
[00:04:35] You already had too much cake. No more cake. And then you're like, oh, but I really want the cake. It will just feel so good to have the cake. And you kind of go back with this internal battle, right? And notice that, because I'm gonna kind of play this out in two scenarios. There's like a restriction mindset here, right?
[00:04:51] Which really makes us want to have like relief cuz it feels really crappy to tell yourself you can't have that. You were bad, you had too much. It's this very restrictive mindset and that creates a lot of discomfort and we want to find relief from that. So what typically happens is we end up having the cake, having that piece of cake, and then you feel really shitty about it, right?
[00:05:14] So, There's a lot of discomfort building up. You eat the cake to find that relief. So you feel kind of a brief moment of comfort because you've released that discomfort of telling yourself you can't have it. You have the cake and then you feel like shit afterwards because you're like, God damn it. Like, I really didn't wanna have that.
[00:05:31] Why did I do that? I didn't even want that. It wasn't good. So you've got comfort now for discomfort later. Now, if we kind of flip that, And we kind of change the way we're going into this, right? So the scenario is still the same. The cake is sitting in the fridge. You know it's there. And instead of saying to yourself, this is bad, you can't have that, you already had too much.
[00:05:50] You're like, you're so unmotivated, you ha, you can't have any. Saying to yourself, you know what? I had cake earlier. It was really good, and I know that if I have some more right now, I'm gonna feel really full. I'm probably not gonna enjoy it. And it's really not kind of in alignment with what I'm working on right now.
[00:06:08] Right. I'm really trying to learn how to have sweetss around. Without feeling obsessed with eating them. Maybe you're also working on fat loss, but thinking about it through the lens of what's important to you and maybe even your values, so, right, so one of the values that I'm working with is kindness, right?
[00:06:26] So is it really kind to yourself to eat that cake when you know that it goes against what really matters to you, right? Is that really being kind, eating that extra piece of cake at night when. You've had some, you enjoyed it and you know that you're working on this goal and you know you're working on trying to have sweets around and learning how to kind of tolerate that.
[00:06:47] Does it feel kind to yourself to eat the cake when that's not really lining up with what your goals are? So you say, no, I'm gonna choose not to have it. And there's discomfort there, right? Doesn't mean you don't want it anymore. It doesn't mean those thoughts aren't there anymore. But you're making a choice and there is gonna be some discomfort there.
[00:07:07] But because you're doing it from a much more compassionate place, from a values driven place and not this restriction, punishment based based place, there's not as much discomfort. There's some, but it's tolerable. And then, You make it through the night, you don't have the cake and the next morning you're like, oh my God, I did it.
[00:07:26] I didn't have that extra piece of cake. I'm really proud of myself. I did it. I wasn't sure. That was really hard. And now you get that evidence, you get that proof, and the next day you're feeling really good, like, look like this has been really challenging for me in the past. I've always binged on it and look, now I can have this around and I get to make the choice that feels really good.
[00:07:45] Right? That's comfort. So there was discomfort Now, For comfort later. You didn't give in to that instant gratification to find that relief. And so that's really what all of this is about, is learning how to tolerate discomfort now so that you can have comfort, that you can make progress, that you can have change later, right?
[00:08:08] If you're constantly trying to find that relief now, and you're always looking for comfort now, and you've got no skills to tolerate discomfort, nothing will ever change. Because you just keep doing what you're doing. And if you're, and if that's something you're going through right now, I totally get it.
[00:08:25] Like it makes sense. That's kind of as humans, like how, what we're conditioned, we're looking for relief. We don't wanna be, you know, in a, in a, in a mental certainly or a physical position of discomfort. Um, But this is really about like delaying that gratification, building up your tolerance and your capacity to do that.
[00:08:47] Right. And so if we go back to what my client was saying, you know, the language doesn't completely reflect this, but it's the same idea. Um Right. Something that she was working on was changing the time of day that she showered so that she would be able to, um, Have more time in the morning and so that she would be able to get some food together to do some quick lunch prep in the morning.
[00:09:09] So it's just about like kind of shifting around how she was using her time and being able to shower at night meant she had to move some other things around at night, like really kind of reshifting priorities, how we're allocating time ultimately so that she could not feel as rushed in the morning, feel more common, grounded, and have time to kind of put a lunch together.
[00:09:27] And so, Doing those things like food prepping, moving around, those things may not feel great, right? It does feel kind of sometimes sucky to do that stuff, but it's gonna suck more later if you don't do it right. So coming back to that, and I don't wanna make this seem like it's just like a lesser of two evils kind of thing, because.
[00:09:47] It's not, because what starts to happen is you really start to see the benefit of sitting in that discomfort now for the benefit later. And really it's probably more, ultimately ends up being more about like sucks now so that it doesn't suck later. Right. Which I think I said at the beginning is looking at my notes, I have that right now, suck now so it doesn't suck later.
[00:10:05] Right. And that's really what it is. Um, and if you could think about this even in terms of like, like exercise, and you'll hear a lot of people say like embrace the suck. That's kind of a different concept around like how hard certain workouts need to be. Again, different, different topic, but you're not always gonna wanna go to the gym.
[00:10:25] You're not always gonna wanna go for a walk. You are not always gonna be motivated to do these things because motivation, especially external motivation, right, is very fickle, comes and goes, not something that can be relied on. So when you kind of accept that, all right, this is gonna be uncomfortable. I'm really not gonna wanna do this, but I know I'm gonna feel better afterwards.
[00:10:46] I know this is how I need to be taken care of myself. I know this is gonna set my whole day up for success. I know this is gonna help me feel more calm and grounded, whatever those things are that you know that, that, let's say exercise does for you, right? You've gotta. Let it suck now, meaning just not just do the thing, but make the choice to do the thing even though it's uncomfortable and even though you don't want to, so that you get the benefit on the back end.
[00:11:13] So that it doesn't suck later, right? So if you skip the workout, if you skip the thing, then you walk around all day feeling really crappy about it, feeling crappy, probably physically in your body. Cause you didn't move the way that you needed to. Feeling crappy emotionally and mentally because you let yourself down.
[00:11:25] You didn't stay true to the commitment that you made to yourself, right? So that sucks. Um, so. And this is, this shows up in other ways. Like I have a kind of a list of a couple scenarios here that I won't necessarily talk about in detail. Um, but I kind of talked about like that cake example, which was really in detail, which kind of fits like a little bit with emotional eating and cravings.
[00:11:47] Like you got the urge and you want to eat something right this second, and you feel like, oh my God, if I don't have that candy, that chips, whatever it is right now, I'm not gonna be able to like sit. I'm so uncomfortable without that, that I have to have it. We need to set that instant gratification. Can you delay that?
[00:12:02] Can you sit in that discomfort? And maybe next week or in the next couple of weeks, I'll do an a follow up episode for the specific tools for how to do that. Right? This is kind of like identifying the feelings and the emotions and maybe even some of those physical sensations that come up when you are sitting in that discomfort.
[00:12:22] You might, your heart might start to rates you might like. You know, tense up. You might get sweaty palms. Your thoughts are probably racing. You're probably not paying attention to whatever it is that you're doing, right? You might, your stomach might get kind of like, maybe you get butterflies or, um, you, I think I said your heart rate gets elevated or, you know, you clench your jaw, right?
[00:12:45] There's so many different ways that these things physically manifest, and I'm, I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here. But, um, I will talk through a couple of skills in a, in an episode coming soon about how to sit in that discomfort, right? Because how do you tolerate it? How do you sit with it? How do you not abandon yourself?
[00:13:00] How do you not walk away from yourself? It's been coming up with so many clients lately. Because it's just the human condition about how we deal with this. Um, you know, so another, it's really just about taking away the urgency and realizing that you will survive if you don't do this thing right now. A big one is when you feel shitty about your body, especially, right?
[00:13:22] We're in summer now. Putting on shorts, putting on a bathing suit, a sundress, whatever it is, and you're feeling crappy about how you look. The urge is gonna be to go on a diet or it's gonna be to restrict food to do something about it. And making the decision not to do that. Not to restrict food, not to go on a diet as a way to try and quote, fix how you feel about your body that is front loading, discomfort that is sucking.
[00:13:45] Now sitting in that really hard feeling. So that you can feel better later because if you go on that restrictive diet, if you, if you cut out food, that's gonna suck even more. And it's also not gonna change how you feel about your body, right? So now you've got this double whammy of feeling crappy. The initial thing is still layered and now you've layered something on top of it, right?
[00:14:04] Because separate, but I'll say it again, cuz always needs repeating. Going on a diet does not change the way you feel about how your body looks. They're totally different things. Um, changing what you eat doesn't change how you feel about how your body looks. Um, those are separate skills. So this comes up a lot.
[00:14:25] And just start to notice when you have an urge to do something or not do something, cuz it can show up both ways around food, around exercise. Notice how you try to find relief from it. Can you? Notice the discomfort that comes up. If you don't react to it right away. If you don't kind of get it, give in.
[00:14:47] If you don't, um, go for that instant gratification. What happens? What does it feel like? What are the sensations that you notice in your body? Can you sit with it for a minute, 60 seconds and see what happens? Maybe that urge kind of slows down. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it ramps up. We'll see. But I'm, after I hop off of this episode, which I'm gonna do now, pretty much, I'm gonna make some notes about some of the skills that you can use to learn how to sit and tolerate that discomfort.
[00:15:19] So that's all for now. Thanks for being here. I'll be back next week with more. Thanks for listening.