In this episode, I give you a guided tour of Delayed Gratification and its empty promises and harmful world view, specifically regarding the extent to which it has become a central tenet of fitness coaching, self-help and personal success coaching.
Delayed Gratification is an impoverished mechanism set up to counteract what society deems to be moral failings that are in most cases actually the result of other impoverished mechanisms born from how our still-rigidly puritanical culture views the self.
In this episode, I discuss:
- Why the popularity of the concept of delayed gratification is rooted in the labor economy
- Why we demand payment even in jobs we enjoy
- How biweekly pay schedules give an indication of how long humans are willing to delay gratification
- The relationship between incentive and outcome and how it is replicated inside our minds
- Why this gets complicated when we are the "boss" and the "employee"
- How fitness gurus use this complication to sell billions of dollars worth of diet and exercise plans that are designed to fail and get away with it
- How this keeps us in the mindset that weight loss is a problem to be solved via higher expectations
- Why you would never do this in any other setting
- How the concept of support is far more effective in weight reduction than expectation
In the direct context of weight management
- Why fit people more easily benefit from the concept of Delayed Gratification, and how this strengthens the errant messaging to severely overweight people
- Why society views obesity as a result of over-gratification
- What the miserable lived experience of overweight people indicates is the larger culprit
- How DG trains us to despise healthy food
- How DG contributes to the unhelpful dichotomy and categorizations between "good food" and "bad food"
- The Do X to Get Y formula
- How this formula drives delusion
- How DG empowers this pairing
- How DG deepens the notion that only outcomes are gratifying and the process is thereby NOT gratifying
- Why the empty experience and results of DG beg the question: Who is being gratified by this arrangement?
- How Visualization done in service of DG contributes to mental fatigue, dissociation, delusion and sell-criticism
- How positioning our wellbeing in the future, creates contexts of peril and fear in the present, further incentivizing our dissociations and dissociation from reality
- How this leads to eventual rebound and binge eating
- How shame, in addition to blinding us, propels us toward extreme "solutions" that result in failure
- Society's bias that takes unhealthy/harmful eating for granted as part of the human condition
- How this prevents us from working toward healing and instead keeps us spinning our wheels, adding stress and expectation to a
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