episode 237: the best way to take care of your future self

Jul 21

We spend so much time wishing we could go back and do things differently—talking to the past version of ourselves who didn’t know better. But what if there’s way more power in looking forward instead of backward?

In this episode, I’m breaking down:

Why thinking about your future self (not just your past) changes everything
How to create a clear, concrete plan to support the “you” who’s just minutes away
A simple framework to stop living on autopilot and start making choices that feel good now and later

If you’ve ever felt stuck in regret or struggled to connect your actions today to the results you want tomorrow, this conversation will help you find a different way in.

237
[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to the Diet Diaries today. I don't know what date this is gonna air. Um, summer schedule's a little bit weird, so I'm recording this kind of a bit in advance, um, so that I have a little bit of flexibility, but it's a topic I've really been wanting to talk about it, so like it's all good.
Um, and what I'm gonna talk about today is kind of building off of a post that I shared at this point. It'll be a couple weeks ago. And it was a reel where I talked about my future self. So here's the genesis behind this. There's been like this really big trend on social media, and I'm probably like a little bit late on this trend because that's how I am and not on TikTok.
Um, where people will like, quote unquote, like have coffee with their 18 or 23-year-old self, right? And so it's like a reel or like a TikTok video, whatever, where you have coffee with that version of yourself. And basically you tell them all the things that like you want them to know or the things that were gonna work out or the things you would've done differently.
I like, I get it, like certainly, [00:01:00] you know, like we, we have to learn from history and learn from things we've done in the past, but to me there's a lot more opportunity in looking ahead to how we can change and impact our future self because that person isn't here yet. And I love this articulation I wrote in the real, um, that I did, that your future self is a breath, a minute, an hour a day.
A week, a month, a year or more away, right? There are many, many, an infinite, almost number of versions of your future self between literally a breath from now and an hour from now and a year from now. And there are so many ways to impact her. And what if we shifted from talking to someone that's 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago to the person we're gonna be in a minute from now, or five minutes or an hour or a year?
Um, and I know sometimes thinking about your future self in these larger time gaps is hard because it feels vague and it feels, um, [00:02:00] really amorphous and it feels like, well, that's not gonna happen, or, I have so much time to fix this, or it just feels hard to envision. But imagining yourself a breath from now, or a minute from now, or five minutes from now, is pretty close in.
You can kind of like visualize what things are gonna be like in the next five to 10 minutes or even an hour. And so I wanted to kind of talk about today, I'm gonna do a companion email for this one as well with a bit of a worksheet for this. 'cause I think this is really, really important and a really big part of behavior change, um, is to start to think about kind of in different categories, what are you doing to support these different versions of your future self, right?
So let's get really specific about this. I'm gonna break out a worksheet, I think, and there might be some changes based on what I'm saying, but, um, a minute from now. Five minutes, an hour, a day, a week, a month and a year. And we're gonna break them out by categories, um, around self-talk, around food, around [00:03:00] exercise.
And I'll probably come up with some other categories, right? And so I think I'm thinking maybe it'll be a bit of a grid. So you have kind of the category of food and what are you doing today, today to support the future version of yourself in the category of food a minute from now, five minutes from now, an hour from now, et cetera.
Right? So here's what I mean by this, right? Like I think food, we can start with food. Let's say that you like, you have dinner and you want dessert, you order dessert, and it's like your favorite dessert. You know, for me, cake, I love cake. I'm a cake person, right? So I order my favorite piece of cake and I have like a few bites.
It's really good and it starts to get kind of full. And I know that eating that full piece of cake is way more food, more calories than my body needs, right? I know that if I finish it, I'm gonna feel really full. But in the moment, it feels so fucking good that take that cake tastes good and I want to eat it now because it feels good, right?
And there's a lot of neurological, biochemical stuff going on that's driving us to eat this thing. [00:04:00] This is a really good example of how we can use one sort of situation and think about our future self in the immediate future, but then also kind of in the distant future, right? So if I think about myself.
10, 15 minutes from now, if I finish eating that piece of cake, I'm gonna feel gross. I'm gonna feel stuffed. I'm gonna feel probably frustrated and disappointed that I ate past my point of fullness and ate more than I needed to and ate in a way that's out of alignment with what I know is good for me.
Right? So there's gonna be a big physical component and there's gonna be a big emotional component. Right. And there, you know, depending on like where you are at in your work with food, there could be guilt, there could be shame. Absolutely. Um, the, with the work I've done, I'm not gonna feel guilty or ashamed, but I'm gonna be really pissed at myself that I ate in a way that I know is.
Fully out of alignment with what feels good for me. Now, are there certain situations where finishing that piece of cake could be in alignment? Yes. This is not always a black and white thing. I'm just giving you a specific [00:05:00] example, right? So if I'm having that cake and I can pause and I can think about myself five or 10 minutes from now and say, how am I gonna feel five or 10 minutes from now?
How can I take care of Jordana in five minutes from now? I can stop eating this cake. I can take care of her. And then let's say five or 10 minutes pass and I'm like, oh, I'd like some more cake. Okay, well then maybe I have some more cake then. And then how is that also taking care of Jordana a week or a month from now?
Right. This gets a little bit nuanced, but if I were to finish the cake every single time I wanted to, I'm gonna gain weight eventually. Right? And I'm going to be eating more food, more calories, more energy if we really break it down and get clinical about it than my body needs and. That is in most cases for me specifically, I'm talking about my personal situation, not me taking care of myself, right?
I can eat that cake and I can like maximize my enjoyment out of it. I don't need to eat the whole thing to maximize that enjoyment out of it. So [00:06:00] by pausing and thinking about my future self a week or a month from now, where my body's had time to kind of like process that and respond to it and start to.
Do something with it, right? I'm potentially gonna gain weight, not from eating one piece of cake, but if I never think about my future self every time I have dessert, yeah, eventually, like there's gonna be a longer term impact to that, right? There's a short term five minute impact where I'm gonna feel really full and overstuffed and physically uncomfortable and disappointed that I didn't pause and slow down and really think about my future self.
And then there's gonna be the longer term of wow. Well now like I've gained a little bit of weight, my clothes are tight. And I know that I'm really not showing up and taking care of myself in the way that I need to. Okay. So that's like a really specific example. Um, you know, this shows up with exercise.
This shows up with self-talk. This could show up with, um, getting dressed. And this is also goes far outside the realm of the work we do here in terms of like relationships and work. [00:07:00] And other like behaviors that you do around, like maybe you run, like cleaning up around the house, um, or going to bed early, or how much time you're spending on social media or how much time you're spending reading books or any of the ways and the, the responsibilities and the things that we have.
Um, we are wired as such and live in such a world where instant gratification and feeling good in the moment, um, is something that we are kind of constantly. Contending with. And so learning to practice how to pause and think about a version of yourself that doesn't yet exist but is going to exist, right, is going to exist five minutes from now, 10 minutes from now, and I'm going to like completely set aside that will, anything could happen at any moment and you could get in a car accident tomorrow.
I'm just not like gonna go down that road, right? Like I'm taking the, the. The, the more positive outlook on things that yeah, you're gonna be around for a while. [00:08:00] Um, and how do you wanna take care of that person? Because how you take care of that person happens in this moment. It happens now. So we always have a choice with how we wanna take care of that person who isn't quite here yet, but who is going to be here?
Right? It's a little trippy. But there are versions of you in the past and you can't take care of them anymore. They are done, they are over with. Whether that version was a minute ago, five minutes ago, the same thing, an hour a day, a week, a month, a year ago, 10, 20, 30 years ago, they are over. You cannot impact them.
And we always do, we always look back like, I shouldn't have done that, or wouldn't I have done that? What if I didn't eat that cake? What if I, what if I'd made a different decision? What if I didn't do this? I should have stopped. I shouldn't have over eaten. I should have drank that much. I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have done all these things.
I should've done the workout. I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have hit snooze. Right? All the things, you can't change that shit. But you can change tomorrow [00:09:00] whether you go to the gym, you can change tomorrow, whether you hit snooze, you can change tomorrow. Whether you eat an entire bag of cookies or just three, right?
There's, that's where all the opportunity is and we spend so much time looking back with regret and guilt and shame and it's like, I'm not gonna say it's a waste of time because it's not because lasting podcast, or two weeks ago I talked about like looking backwards and see what led up to this moment.
There's valuable information there for sure. It's kind of like if we only ever look back and we never look forward and think about our future self, that's the problem. Right. Okay. Look back, fine. Talk to your 18-year-old self. Think about what you did yesterday, the day before. Learn from that. Yes. I mean, I have a whole course around like food journaling and learning and connecting those dots, but then we have to take that and we have to apply it, and we have to use it to take care of our future self.
And I wanted to start to create a framework to do that because it feels kind of ambiguous to say, take care of your future self. Like, yeah, that sounds like this. Kind of like, like, yeah, [00:10:00] nice. Like flighty, idealized, like, oh, I love my future self, but what does that actually look like? I want this to become a thing.
Right? An actual skill that you can do. And so that's why I wanted to create a framework around it. Um, and so if you're not on my email list and you want a copy of this worksheets, um. Sent me a message and I'll get it to you. Um, but I wanted, I wanted, I'm gonna try to start doing this maybe a bit more about having companion podcasts with posts or companion podcasts with emails to kinda add more context, more flavor, more nuance, and if you prefer to listen versus read, right?
So you're kind of able to get support and content, um, in different ways. Um, and also repetition is helpful and sometimes it's really helpful to listen to something and then read something and have them overlap. Things click differently. We need to hear things. I mean, way more than two times, many times for them to really sink in.
But um, really the question is, what are you doing to today to support [00:11:00] these versions of your future self? Right? And there's many versions and so it's hard to think about all of them at once, right? We can't think about every version of our future self. So let's get specific. And I think very often it's easier to get more specific with the versions of our future self that are closer in because they're coming very soon.
And it's kind of like, there's been research studies that show like, you know, I remember like from growing up, like this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, like. I don't know, like I think a lot of the researchers that stuff like wasn't that effective. And you show people like all those like kind of old school commercials where they show like your, your lung, like if you smoke and like what the lung looks like, um, that people really can't connect themselves to these things that are so far into the future.
It's too far away. It's hard to grasp. People think they have still have time to change things. They think it won't happen to them. Um, but something like five minutes from now is a lot closer and you can really visualize. You kind of know where you're gonna be in five minutes. You know where you're gonna be, you know, where you know what you're gonna be doing, you know who you're gonna be with, and you know how you wanna feel in five [00:12:00] minutes a year from now, five years from now, that's a lot harder.
So I would really suggest that you start close in five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a week. And I would maybe even cap it at like a week. And so as you think about your future self, thinking about it in those timeframes and in across different categories, right? Eating, exercise, self-talk. Getting dressed.
Um, those are kinda like some of the big things that we talk about here. And then if you wanna expand it beyond that, you know, work, stress, family stuff, absolutely you can, it applies. Um, so that's what I got for you today. Um, hope this is helpful. Always love to hear from you. Keep me posted what's going on with you guys out there.
In the ether, I like kind of talk to myself out here. Thank you for being here. Always, always, always. Um, more soon.