Welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. We are your hosts, Zach and Darcy Spafford.

Zach-Darcy has some big news to share with all our listeners today!

Darcy- Today was my first time giving a talk in Sacrament meeting! It went better than I expected. I based my talk on the book Believing Christ. I shared my raw experience with the ward about never feeling good enough and how learning about my Savior and striving to create a relationship with Him gives me the strength to keep going.

Zach- it was a great talk, and I was so proud of her for being brave and vulnerable.

Darcy- In this episode, we would like to discuss how quitting porn and diets are similar and how we approach the subjects that significantly impact our success.

Zach- We would like to start by recognizing differences in the moral value we place on food versus pornography. We are not arguing for the two items' moral equivalency.

Darcy- Our hope with this discussion today is to bring awareness for all parties involved around the similarities between dieting, losing weight, and quitting pornography.

Darcy- What comes to mind when you think about going on a diet with the end goal of losing weight?

Darcy - Often we think of meal plans, exercise regimes, willpower to stay away from certain favorite foods, good foods and bad foods, and many other short-term measures that will help us lose a certain amount of weight so we can fit into certain clothes or look a certain way.

Darcy - Now let’s shift from a diet to a lifestyle change in how we eat.

Zach - My dad was a great example of this. When I was a kid, he stopped eating meat.

It stopped being something he felt would help him achieve his values of feeling healthy and comfortable in his body. He has a condition called gout, and he decided that eating meat wasn’t worth the pain it caused or the medication he would have to take.

Often, when we approach the struggle to eliminate pornography from our lives, we are given targets, and sometimes we set targets designed to provide us with some distance from the last time we viewed pornography. We set up internet filters, plan our internet use, seek motivation, and other measures to put barriers up so we can make it a certain amount of time.

All of these ideas are good and may help improve our capacity to create some wins around our choices.

If something works for you, then keep doing it.

It’s also worth noting that for many, achieving a certain amount of success for a short period only to fall back into old patterns can be discouraging, especially if that creates a sense of hopelessness and failure.

Darcy - In that process, it is worth considering how the measures you choose to use to mitigate your pornography choices are more like a diet than a lifestyle change.

To help you do that, I’d like to offer you three ideas that often come up in our work around pornography.

First: Am I expecting immediate results?

Darcy - One of the first things you’ll see in a diet advertisement is something to the effect of “lose 10 pounds in the first two weeks”.

Often this is the same mentality that we seek to impose on our process of overcoming pornography from someone who has been using pornography to help manage their thoughts, feelings, and urges.

Sometimes, this is because our spouse wants that immediate shift which is understandable. We’ve talked about this in other videos. Just be clear that starting this process will likely have ups and downs, good days, and learning...