I’m Afraid I’m Going to Cheat on My Husband

I've been married a little over a year and I am finding myself attracted to someone who goes to the gym that I'm at. I'm really scared. What if I do something stupid? What if I respond to it? What makes you so untrusting of yourself? Have you done this before? Have you cheated before? Hey, this is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. I'm so glad that you're with us. Talking about your relationships and your mental and emotional health, everything you got going on in your life. I'm glad that you're here. For two decades I've been sitting with hurting people when the wheels have fallen off their life. And pull up a seat and we'll figure out what's the next right move. If you want to be on this show, go to johndeloney.com slash ask. And it'll go to kelly 1.0. She'll convert it to hieroglyphics, which is her original language that she used thousands of years ago. And she'll get back to you. And thank God for AI because then it will translate it back to your native language. All right, let's go out to Seattle, Washington, home of Pearl Jam and talk to Christa. What's up, Christa? Hey, thanks so much. Nice to back with you. It's nice to talk with you. So I am struggling. I've been married a little over a year and I am finding myself attracted to someone who goes to the gym that I'm at. And I just didn't think it would be like that being newly married and I have a new baby. And just trying to figure out how do I deal with this? How do I change that? How do I not be that person? I'm scared of cheating. Okay, so there's a big, there's a lot of leaps in here. So, um, cheese, let me back all the way out. Tell me about your marriage right now. Yeah, I mean, it's generally, it's really good. We're adjusting to having, you know, another little person in our lives. It's generally like textbook grade. Just, I'm just struggling with figuring out, you know, what marriage really looks like as we move forward. Tell me about that. Um, so I would use to traveling a lot and being kind of a jet setter. The baby was a surprise and um, is the baby why y'all got married? No, no. No, it was a honeymoon baby. Um, super cute. Hey, oh, um, yeah, I'm surprised. Um, which, you know, I'm so grateful for that. But it just, let me stop you there. Right. Can I tell you you can be super grateful and be holding a baby that's like this suddenly is the reason you're alive, right? All that stuff. And also you can grieve the fact that it wasn't in your plans for it to come like this. Yeah. It doesn't make you a bad mom for you to go, good God, I wish this had happened four years from now. Yeah. And it doesn't make you a bad wife and him a bad husband if y'all are both scrambling now because this is not the picture y'all drew up. Yeah. I mean, I, I didn't think I would, I would feel this way having a baby either. And I, listen to me. Listen, there's no bad feelings. Okay. Okay. There's no bad feelings. You're allowed to be frustrated. You're allowed to be annoyed. They pop into your mind. And I think most of our pathology these days is because when the thoughts hit, we are so uncomfortable with them. We want to blame somebody else for them or we want to beat ourselves up for them. And then we feel dead in our own skin because we have to numb ourselves out. And then somebody walks by us in the gym and they say, hey, I think you're beautiful and all of a sudden we're like, oh, that makes me feel alive again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm saying. I don't feel like myself most of the time. Yes. Yeah. I imagine. You don't feel like the version 3.0 of yourself and now you're at version 5.0. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I just don't know. I feel like my identity is just completely flipped and I don't know how to deal with that, I guess. And yeah, having these feelings really scares me because I do love my baby and I love my husband. And I want that to work. I'm just so terrified. But if I do something stupid, what if I respond to it? Generally, I just keep my distance from that person. But I'm really scared. Have you cheated before? No. So what makes you so untrusting of yourself? In the past, I had really poor taste in men, I would say. And so I don't trust that I won't fall for something that's stupid. I guess I don't trust that I'm going to always make the wisest of choices. Okay. So let me clear the deck on a couple of things. Number one, there would be something wrong with you, Cyclot. There would be something wrong with you, all of you, if you suddenly stopped finding attractive people attractive. Okay. There would also be something innately wrong if there weren't lightning bolts of like electric desire. Okay, that just means you're human. Okay. You can control is whether you choose to meditate on that and fantasize about that and let it consume part of you. Okay. Like the whole room should be lifted up when a beautiful woman walks in the room, period, end of story. There should be a spirit that lifts in the room, right? There should be a spirit that lifts in a room when a fireman walks in, right? Or like a good looking guy in the gym, just walk like everyone should go, ah, right? And then it's the switch flips is a wonder if or I'm going to turn on the flirt a little bit or I'm going to receive his flirt a little bit. And man, my husband doesn't and that'd be so cool if and that reminds me of when. And that's when we get our self in trouble. And so if you honestly think in your guts, what I want to camp parts here in 15 minutes is are you wrestling with I'm a new version of myself and my husband and I have found ourselves. You heard me say this like six inches apart on the couch, but six thousand miles away from each other. Then what we need to do is go out for a half day and completely wipe the deck and say, hey, we got a brand new relationship. We have a brand new partnership. We have a brand new marriage because now we have it. We've never been together. We've never been romantically involved and had a human to take care of. Yeah. And we've never been in love and trying to do life together and build something together. And I was the wild fun jet setting, jump up on the table girl and now I'm covered in throw up and changing diapers and breastfeeding and also watching you be disappointed that I'm not right. Like all of that has happened all at the same time. Yeah. And so the question is who are we going to be? Like so that's that's part one. Part two is everywhere you go, there's going to be attractive people and there's going to be hilarious people and there's going to be poets and there's going to be people with jobs that your spouse doesn't have. And you wonder what that would be like. That makes you human. Great. Appreciate it and move on with your life. Okay. If you think I am at risk of blowing up my marriage and becoming somebody I don't want to be, then quit the gym. Go to new gym. It's that simple. There is no pulley machine that's worth your marriage. Yeah. Right. But almost always that my goodness, that guy's good looking, but more than that, what's attractive about him is that you see him noticing you. Yeah. And that feels good. Yeah. And is it happening at the same time that your husband's got his head down trying to figure out how to be a husband and a dad too? Yeah. Okay. That's the conversation that needs to happen. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's not I need you. I want you to use these words. I want you to be intentional about noticing me. Yeah. And it feels like right now, if we get one on one time the TV's on and it's not, it's just not, and I fall asleep and he's working on starting his new job. There you go. Yeah. And just because it's winter, it doesn't mean summer's broken. And so it might be a season of winter right now. He's got a new job. You have completely your identity that you knew, everything about you that you knew is gone now. And so it might be that we need two or three months or five months or six months of snuggling up on the couch under a blanket. There's not fireworks and it's not your life. Fourth, and we're not running around in tank tops and swim trunks, but the roots of what our relationship is growing deep. Yeah. But I want to ask you like what can you control about feeling alive again in this new season? What about old you? Are you missing? I feel like I used to be driven and fun and adventurous and I don't feel like I don't feel any of it anymore. Okay. I don't feel anything. Okay. Tell me about that. I just don't think. Yeah, it's like the only time I feel like a piece of me is there. You know, like I'll have moments with my son, but I'm just that every day. I just look in the mirror and I don't recognize myself and I don't. Yeah, I just feel really, really empty. Okay. Can you exhale on that? Hold on, grieve that. Sorry? Grieve that for a second with me. Like the woman that you were so proud of and the woman that you spent years curating and creating, she has a baby now. She's a wife now. Right? Listen to that sound. It's one of my favorite sounds in the world. Right? And I'm glad I don't have that sound in my house anymore, right? Both are true. Both are true. Yeah. Okay. So my question is that emptiness, that who am I? What is my purpose now? Because my purpose was being so hot and sexy and my purpose was adventure and my purpose was passion and driven and all that. And all of that, by the way, she's still there and she'll return. She's just going to look different. It's a different kind of awesome now. She was rad, dude. And now you're entering into a different kind of rad. The question is, are we going to remain empty and let somebody else from the outside come try to feel that for us? Because I'm telling you, that's a bottomless pit. Or am I going to be intentional about asking, who am I going to be now? And look at my husband saying, who are we going to be now? And then I'm going to reverse engineer that with, we don't turn the TV on at night. We have to have, even if it's six minute survival sex and I've got spit up on my shirt and by the way, I'm not taking my shirt off yet, but we're turning the lights off and we're getting this done. Right? Like, what does it look like? And hey, I know you're trying to start a new business. You can take five minutes and by the way, it's not even taking you five minutes. But close the laptop. We're doing this. Or I need you to close the laptop and keep the kid because I'm going to go do something silly with my girlfriends right now. Yeah. What came so easy now has to become intentional. And just because it's intentional doesn't mean it's less than and doesn't mean it's not valuable. In fact, I think the more intentional it is, the more valuable and precious it becomes. I guess, yeah, that does make sense. Yeah, everything is a half hour and a list to get out the door. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, so reality has changed. Trying to pretend reality has not changed is not real. It's just dumb, right? It has. Yeah. And so what does it look like to put sex on the calendar? Does it look like to put adventure on the calendar? What does it look like to put exercise on the calendar? It's different. It's different. Yeah, definitely different. It's just a different kind of awesome. Let me promise you having sat with people on this very issue. If and when you, it's obviously when if you sleep with the hot guy at the gym, I can't imagine a scenario where you don't wish that you had that back. But to me, it's a, it's less about that guy who just noticed you and more, it is a signal for where we need to lean in inside our home, you and your husband. What is that revealing? What is that feeling of? Oh my gosh, there's, he recognizes me as old me. What is, what is that signal that we can head towards in our own house and put on the table? Is a moment of honesty. We're a year in and I've got a toddler and I have to be honest with your husband like, a guy's noticing me at the gym and it feels so good. It feels so good. I'm not going to do anything with it, but it's making me realize. I don't notice you anymore. I feel empty inside. I feel so empty that some stranger at the gym with big abs makes me feel seen again. And I want you to begin to see me again. And here's what that looks like. What if we didn't have phones up? What if we had our laptops down? What if we, what if we, what if we, what if we? Let's just co-create that thing together. You'll have a brand new marriage so clear the deck. The tower's fallen of your old marriage. Clear it and let's rebuild it. And to reiterate, you're not a bad, if you're not a bad human, if you think somebody else is attractive, if you think they're super good looking, you're not a bad person if somebody hands them or beautiful walks in the room and you feel alive. Great. That's wonderful. That's life. That's what beauty does. Where you begin to cross over is you begin to imagine what would it be like if in those thoughts and feelings we can control. If you don't feel like I can control those and you got to remove yourself from the situation. Thanks for the call, sister. I don't think there's something wrong with you. I think there's alarm bells going off and I think there are big spotlights pointing you in the direction you got ahead. It's just going to be uncomfortable. It's just going to be different. But adventurous, fun, driven, purpose-filled, Christa, she's still there. Just her purpose and her adventures and her drive are going to be pointed in different directions now. And that's incredible. Thank you for the call, sister. Call anytime. Call anytime. We come back, a woman asks, how she can tell her husband that he needs to just suck it up. I can't wait for this. We'll be right back. Full stop. Monten the Knife Company makes the best knives on the planet. Period. You know that my son and I are big hunters and I'm always talking about what an amazing, incredible cook that my wife is. So between the woods and the kitchen, my family needs knives that will hold up. A few years ago, I bought my wife, the Monten and Knife Company chef's knife set and she still uses it every day. She says it's one of the best gifts I've ever given her. I have a number of Monten and Knife Company knives for all of my fishing and hunting outdoor adventures. Listen, their knives are designed, tested and built by real hunters and real cooks. And when you pick one up, you can instantly feel the quality. They are proudly made in the United States of America and they're razor sharp right out of the box and they are tough enough to last a lifetime. Montana Knife Company guarantees that my grandkids are going to fight over these knives someday. When they need sharpening, you can just send them back and Montana Knife Company will sharpen them and send them back to you for free. I want you to give the outdoorsman and the cook in your life a knife that they will love and actually use forever. Go to monten and knife company dot com to see what's available right now. They sell out quick so you got to check them out. That's monten and knife company dot com. The new year is here and if you haven't already, it's time for new towels from Cozy Earth. Throw out the old towels that you're ant give you at your wedding or that you stole from the hotel. Listen, you need new towels. I don't know how they do this, but Cozy Earth towels will change your life. That probably says something about the state of my life, but listen, Cozy Earth towels are incredible. And when it's cold outside, a hot shower can be awesome, but even nicer than the hot shower is wrapping up in a looks towel. These towels are amazing. They're made from a blend of cotton and viscos from bamboo. These things are soft and plush. They feel like a hug and everybody I know needs a few more hugs. And if new year, new you means getting new sheets, I want you to check out Cozy Earth's Baja bedding collection. I got these and I'm going to tell you right now they're so incredible. Soft, so soft and the colors are beautiful. It makes our bedroom feel and look like a resort. As always, Cozy Earth bedding products come with a hundred night trial. Try them out. If you don't love them, you can return them hassle free, but trust me, you're not going to want to go to CozyEarth.com. Use code Deloni for up to 20% off your entire order. That's Cozy, COZY, CozyEarth.com slash Deloni, use code Deloni. I'm doing great. How about you? Good. Except for I feel terribly guilty that I'm about to ask you a question about my husband right now. Oh, geez. All right. Bring it on. Okay. So just to give a little back to her a few years ago, I got out of the Navy to work at a church part time and stay home with the kids. And my husband's still in. He's been gone most of the last three years. In this summer while he was on deployment, I was pregnant with our fourth child. We don't have any family, but we have a bunch of kids, obviously goats, chickens, dogs, so I buy myself taken care of that. Then I have a C-section. Cause what? Yeah. Right. Why not? Exactly. A million chickens. And then I had a C-section and came home and had to recover from that and have it take care of the new baby and take care of everything else I was doing and just wait for him to come home, which was another two months. So I just felt like I was looking at the end of the tunnel. There was a light and then when he got home, I'd be able to rest, but that just has not happened at all. I mean, he's got three months off and work now and he just has no patience for anything to his hembers so short. And I just feel like I can't ask him for help because his patience is so bad. When I leave for my meetings for church or to go grocery shopping, he's always rushing me and implies that I'm just wasting time basically. He said he wants to, he even said he wants to plan a backpacking trip trip for himself while we're here on leave. And I was like, maybe I'd like to go on that and he's like, well, we'll watch the kids. And I just felt so discouraged by that. I feel so burnt out and I've had to be strong for so long and I just wish that I could just rest and someone would be strong for me or sacrifice for me so that I can just breathe for a little bit because it's so hard to watch him be so impatient when for years I've been doing this and it made me feel like it was easy. And that I should feel guilty if I'm stressed out about being a mom. So I'm just like, do I just tell him to suck it up because that's what I've been doing for all this time or is that too mean or what? No, I mean, it's because he's going to say the same thing to you. And so that's not the issue. The issue is underneath this thing to fold. I hear two fold things. One is the men and women I've sat with after deployment number two and deployment number three are fried at the cellular level. Yes, that's so true. And we see in combat deployment, what was you doing? Now, he was he's in the Navy. He was just they really didn't have a mission. They were kind of just being present around the waters in different areas. Okay. And so this is just my experience and you both have been in. So you have a different perspective than I do. This is just the outside when people come sit with me. Okay. There's like a hierarchy of I saw combat. So I get to be ex-wired. I get to feel a certain way or I get to like have these responses. I was deployed, but I didn't see combat. So I only get to I'm only a permission to feel this level of frustrated scared, lonely, left out, whatever. I've been in the service for 20 years, but I never went to combat. And so none of my feelings count. None of the things I saw watched, et cetera. None of that counts. And it's easy. Here's the challenge. Both of y'all have picked up a score card. You know, they're walking around keeping score and that's a recipe for a marriage in an ash. And you sitting down and saying, Hey, tell me about like I even deeper than that. You don't look like you're happy to be here. You don't look well. Are you okay? I miss you. I miss my husband. And it's less about he's not seeing, he's not knowing me. And it's more about how can I see and how can I know him? How can I celebrate him? And that sounds crazy, but that's the only path to you being finally seen and known and celebrated to somebody has to go first. I totally agree with you. I mean, I've actually been following that advice that you've given. And I'm like, every day I try to tell him is being encouraging to him. Like I've noticed that you're doing these things really well. When we get into bed at night, I will make a point to say, you're doing a really great job with this or that. And thank you for everything that you're doing here and these changes that you have made because he's not all bad. Obviously, of course, he's made a lot of good changes. And so I acknowledge all of those things. Are you at a position now where you can clear the deck and say, Hey, we've got a brand new marriage. I want to build a new marriage because when we had doesn't exist anymore. The one we had was two kids, no chickens, one deployment. And I had a steady paycheck too. We have a new life now. What do we want this thing to look like? And for somebody who just came off deployment number three, there might be so much chaos with four kids. Yeah. The wife working part time plus all these chickens, plus all these whatever, plus the financial stress, the living in San Diego, all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it. And it might just be that he's electrified and the only thing his body knows to do is get out of here. And or let me put it this way. I remember exactly the moment when I realized falsely, by the way, the greatest gift I could give my family was to just not be in the house. Because I couldn't do anything right. I didn't know the rhythms and routines of this house. I was working 24, 7, 365 in hospitals and sitting with hurting people and then doing my college job during the day. Like I just knew I make this thing worse. I'm going to be out of here. I'll go make money. I'll go on hunting truck. I'll just leave because that'll be the best gift I can get my wife and my kids. Okay. And you get what I'm saying? So like what I thought was the greatest thing actually made everything worse. It put gasoline on the already existing fire, my marriage. So it sounds like what you're saying, how I'm taking this is that I need to suck it up kind of. No, no, no. And both of y'all need to stop sucking it up. Yeah. Here's the thing. You're there's no amount of sleep or rest that's going to solve the chaos. It is your life right now. That's true. You have a you have a you're just like, hey, when do I get to go run my marathon? And the problem is your marathon will not have a finish line. So what do you recommend for that like burnt out feeling? What do I do about that? I just feel like I can't even enjoy being around my children anymore because I'm so tired like not physically, but just like you said on a cellular level. I'm just yes, it's existential because you're running a race that has no finish line. People can do insanely hard things when there's a finish line. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Like just like how I said, I felt like there was a finish line like a late end of the tunnel, but now I'm realizing that's not true. Exactly. Because you had a picture of what it was going to look like when he got home and he had a picture of what it was going to look like when he got home. Mm-hmm. And he walked in the door and you're like, ah, I'm off. Mm-hmm. Your turn. Definitely. I thought. And he walked home and said, this home is more chaotic than the boat I just got off of. Mm-hmm. That's definitely true. I mean, it might offend. He did tell me that when he got home, he was going to, of course, it would be that way. Of course. But he probably didn't anticipate how. You probably sent him some flirty pictures too and said, I can't wait to get home. I'm going to rock your world. We're going to make kid number 9, 10, 11. I have me. And you both got home. I was pregnant. I didn't want to play it. But like, but like, but like you both had pictures of what this is going to look like. And you both had good intentions of what we were going to do and how we were going to be. Yeah. But you keep saying I just need to rest. That's not true. What you need is some sort of, let me rephrase that. You do need rest. But your rest is not going to be found in just unhooking from everything. Right. Because you're also a problem solver. And that machine will kick up wildly. Mm-hmm. What you need is some support and some help and you need a partner in a unified vision for what our home is going to feel like and look like moving forward. And you don't have that. Right. Yeah. And so you're adding more chaos with more chickens and more dogs and more ponies and more whatever. There's this ever. There's this ever. Let me put it this way for you. You have some sort of internal gap. No space that you're trying to get other people and other things to fill. And so what is that gap? I don't know. How do you know? I mean, usually it takes a minute's introspection. I don't really do that. I'm too distracted to think. I actually get to know myself. I probably avoid it. Yeah, probably. But I think you're right. When you said that, it sounded right to me. I just don't know what the answer is. What that gap is for me. Okay. And there's not just like a, oh, it's this. It's usually a whole bunch of shenanigans. Okay. And it's just, here's the time. It's worth exploring. What you're seeking here. It's really, it's peace. Yeah. Right. It's not being off the clock, although that might be a part of peace. It's not him doing the dishes, although that might really help. Those are all tactics. Those are all hacks. They're all things that have to get done. But you're talking about something in your bones, man. Yeah, you're right. I did my service. I became a mom. I tried to be a wife. I held it all together. I had another kid and another kid and another kid. And then I had this, I watched a lot of YouTube, I was pregnant. So then I wanted to have the chickens and the farm and whatever. All of these things are supposed to solve that gap inside your chest and they're not. You're right. And I just keep adding more things. Yes. And then you blame the rest of the world for your lack of peace. Yeah, that's true. Now I'm not, I'm not letting him off the hook. He does need to have some suck it up. He does need to like, he needs to have the same, if not more vigor about the mission that is his home, that he just got off the boat. He's carried on the boat. The problem is, is they didn't send that boat out there without without some sort of mission, some sort of operation strategy. Your home doesn't have one right now. Sorry. And so that's what I mean by y'all clearing the deck. It's not about either you sucking it up at this point. Yeah. Y'all chose to make four humans. So there's going to be just a level of chaos to just is. There's going to be a level of fatigue and a level of what happened to my body. There's just going to be that. Y'all just have to y'all have that responsibility. Y'all put that weight on the bar. So it is what it is. But it's about clearing the deck and saying, hey, I miss you and I love you. And we have a brand new marriage now. We have never been married after deployment three after I quit my job after we have four kids. What do we want this thing to look like and feel like? And then we get to develop a strategy to get us there. If you sat down across the table and said, I miss you and I love you and I want to build a new marriage. And I realized that while you were gone, this house became an electrified chaotic zoo literally. And I want to know how we can cook, create a new marriage and I don't know how I can love you in this new season. What would he say to that? I think he would be all for it. He's a very dedicated person to me and to our family. He is. I think that he's going to, like you said before and made me realize he's going through his own struggles too. And we probably just need to, like you said, start new here. From each other, what is going on and try and serve each other and support each other and be a team instead of trying to fight each other all the time. It sounds gross the way I say it. You just said it's perfect. But it can also, the way you said it can also be a lot of cliches, right? A lot of things you just ditch onto a pillow. Right. There is a point when this gets gross and I wish it wasn't this, you couldn't still it down to this level of transaction. But Terry, the great therapist and author says at some level, it is how can I give you what you want and what you need so that you aren't anchored enough to give me what I want and what I need? And the challenge is someone has to go first. Yes. Otherwise, it's just about take, take, take, give me, give me, give me. I need, I need. And that turns into, well, you don't, you never. And then it turns into, I've got this score card and I'm winning. Exactly. I just need to wipe a clean stuff, presenting him for how I feel. Because it's not his fault. It's just our life. It's our life. That's right. Yeah. And like any, you've been through these trainings before and your years of service. At some point, the battlefield will happen to you or we're going to come up with an operation and with a strategy and a plan and then we're going to happen to this battlefield. And so it's just recognizing after we woke up at six years later and the world had just happened to us. And now we're going to take our autonomy back and we're going to take control of this thing and we're going to lock arms and do the same together, unify it together. And if you haven't asked, if you haven't gone past, man, you didn't even do anything. I'll just drove around in the ocean on a boat for a while and docked and went and partied and got back on the boat. Right. Which is the easy story to throw out. They're asking him, hey, what was it? Tell me about it. Yeah, it's not really fair to him to say that. Well, what I thought and what I will guarantee you and you know this, the number of men who I've sat with over the years who say, hey, by the way, I'm going to tell you what happened. You cannot tell my wife that this thing blew up, that we were under under watch for we're we're trying to think say not nerdy military terms. So the listeners don't like that we were thought we were going to get shot and killed twice a week or three times a week or every week. Or we got geared up and got all the boats out of the middle and put them out and then we had to put them all back week seven to do that over and I'm like, who knows. But he was probably trained. You keep your mouth shut about what happened. You suck it up and you go home. Right. And if you become a safe place for him to exhale and talk to you and you give him a map on how he can love you. Now you're talking about game change. Will there be times when both of y'all have to suck it 100% yes, that's just life that's being apparent as being a spouse. Are y'all going to have to do things that you don't feel like doing 1 million percent? That's life. But right now solving that at the tactical level isn't a good use of your time or energy. It's just going to lead to more burnout. It is exhaling and saying, how do we want to feel when we both walk in the door every day? I miss you and I love you. Let's build something completely new from the scratch up. We get to decide what it looks like. I'm all in. Are you in? And if you want us to call, I love talk to him. I love talk to him. But it's awesome. It loves you and it's awesome. You love him. It's built something amazing. We come back. A woman asks how to face shame about using weight loss medication. If you've seen me speaking on stage at live events in the local comedy club or anywhere on social media or the internet, you have seen me wearing poncho shirts. Why? Because I love them. I'm always wearing poncho shirts. And now that it's cold outside, it's perfect for wearing my favorite poncho shirts, the denoms and the flannels. Their denim has that soft broken in feel in a little stretch. It's like you've worn it a million times, but it still looks incredible. And poncho flannels come in original or western styles and I'm telling you, they're going to be the softest shirts you've ever owned. And somehow these soft shirts are tough and comfortable. I love poncho shirts. They come in slim or regular fit and they're built to last and they hold up to whatever your life throws at you inside or outside. When you are shopping for the guys in your life, I want you to go to ponchooutdoors.com slash Deloney. If you sign up with your email, you get ten bucks off your first order. And I want you to tell them that you heard about their amazing shirts right here on the Dr. John Deloney show. That's poncho PONCHO ponchooutdoors.com slash Deloney. All right Sacramento, California. Let's talk to AMY. What's up, Amy? Hi Dr. John, how are you? Great, how are you? I'm doing well. Excellent, what's up? So, kids of deal. After many months of test, experiments and discussions with between me and my doctor, we finally decided that the right next step for me and my health was to go on GLP1 weight loss medication. Outstanding. Awesome. Thank you. So, for context, my starting BMI is about 30. Okay. I'm comfortable with this decision, but I realized that I have only told two people about it. One is my husband, and the other one is a good friend who is also on the same journey. So we're bouncing off of each other. How long have you, by the way, BMI at the population level is a helpful metric at the individual level. Does it tell me a whole lot? Are you overweight? Are you struggling with your weight? Tell me where you are. Yeah, so I'm overweight. I'm not, I don't consider myself obese. Okay. I'm about 30 to 40 pounds heavier than I want to be. Okay. And is your desire, is that based in reality, or is that based in some sort of distorted view of yourself? No, it's pretty real. Okay. All right. Your doctor agrees you could use to lose 40 pounds? Correct. Okay. And the weight gain has caused some real medical issues as well. Perfect. Not just that. How long have you been taken? What are you taking? I'm on Zepound. Okay, great. So how long have you been on it? Just a couple weeks. What have you seen? What have you experienced? It's pretty magical to be honest with you. The way that it just turns out, all the food noise. Yeah. But people keep talking about it, but it just wants you to experience it. It's hard to believe. And I'm asking this for the audience as much as anything else. What have you noticed about other positive side effects? I can't say much yet. I think it's too early to talk. What I've heard from, so I've had up some of them on this show before and these have become some of my close personal friends. But there are fitness experts across the globe and not influencer dorks, but like actual trainers and actual scientists. Many of whom, when these things came out, when JLP ones came out, they took them not because in any shape or profession, they needed them, but they wanted to be able to speak from insider knowledge, right? And to a person, a hundred percent of them have come back in personal conversations to me and said, I stopped drinking. I stopped worrying all the time. These things, basically that weight loss is a downstream benefit of a whole host of other powerful benefits. And so I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, you're like, all sweet, signing me up for that too. So let me get to the root question here. Yeah. Where in the world does your shame come from that you happen to live in a sliver of history when we have some amazing medications that can, that are pretty transformative? Yeah, I'm trying to forget about myself to be honest. Again, I'm comfortable that this is the right choice, but I realize that I don't want to tell people. So the expectation is it's going to be visible, right? People are going to start noticing. And if people start commenting about it, my initial reaction is that I don't want to talk about this at all. But I'm not a liar. So I don't know what to do. The question beneath it, why do you feel like you need to tell anybody? Why can't you just say thank you so much? What have you been doing? Been working hard? Ta-da. But, but is that true? I can't. Yes, I have been working hard, right? But I have been working hard for a few long time and it hasn't been working for me. Okay. So you just found, you found different ways that it didn't work. And now you found one that did. Yeah, I think the core of it is that I feel like I should have been able to handle this myself. Where does that should come from? Because that should is a lie. You got dropped into a world ecosystem that your body was not designed to live in. Period. What do you mean by that? The human body from the cellular level to the neurological level to the physical level was designed for environments of scarcity. All of our brain chemistry is designed to go, oh God, there's apples. Once a year, or let me put another way, my great-grandmother got a sack of oranges for one Christmas. And the thought of having oranges in December was madness. It was worthy of a Christmas gift. The Christmas gift they got that year. And now we go to the store and we have oranges stacked in a pile as tall as we are 24, 7365. True. Not to mention Uber Eats and Gas stations and hyper-palatable foods and hyper-process. We just aren't supposed to live in this environment. And I want to applaud you for scratching and clawing and trying so many different paths for so long. What that tells me is you're committed to trying to find ways to be a good steward of your body. That's awesome. And now you found one that works. Hooray. Awesome. And nobody else gets a vote. I guess I want to give you some pieces. How would you respond to the question of whatever you've been doing? And I feel angry that people actually entitled to ask that question of people about people's body. Yeah, but hold on. How do you respond to this? Yeah. You can choose anger if you want to or you can choose deep compassion because you've been there too. True. You've had somebody in your life that lost a bunch of weight and you had to know because they must have the secret of liquor. What's the secret path, the super workout? That's the atomic diet. What is it? And so if somebody asks, take that as a sign that you are a light and a dark place for them. And you can just say it's a whole bunch of stuff. I'm still working on it so I don't want to talk about it too much, but it's been a lot of hard work. Or just say I met with my doctor and these GLP ones are magical and they're going about your day. I think at the end of the day, I'm generally like a pretty high achieving person. So I try to excel at everything that I do. Do you use the internet? Do you use the internet? Yes. Cheater. Do you use a laptop? Correct. Cheater. Do you have a smartphone? My granddad was an engineer and he used a protractor, cheater. Do you drive a car? Yeah. Yeah, my great-grandfather had to get around on a horse, cheater. It takes the tools that we have and every tool we have comes with trade-offs. My great-grandparents walked a lot and so they were thinner and healthier. We drive a lot. We can get places a lot faster. Both of us would say we should trade. Great. Cool. If you take GLP ones, you have to exercise. You have to work out. I do. Okay, you have to lift weights. Great. You have to be intentional about protein and fiber. Great. But we just live in a sliver of history where we have this both, this amazing abundance. And if you read the data on global starvation, it has fallen off a cliff in recent decades. Amazing. There's still hungry people make no mistake. But awesome. We've figured out abundance in this little snapshot of history. Cool. We're burning out the soil and all that, but fine. We solved abundance for a while. Great. And that comes at a cost which is we have light switches in our minds that are not designed to have food everywhere all the time 24-7, especially food engineered by scientists who are trying to flip switches in our mind and make it almost impossible to stop eating. Cool. Or as John Stewart says, science has become amazing solving problems caused by science. Cool. Right. That's true. It's just hard to turn off the noise, right? Even the noise of light. So if you just go keto for two months, it's going to be fine. Or if you just lift heavier, then you're going to be fine. And then you try all of those things and it just doesn't work. That's right. Correct. The hardest thing is just mostly doing the right thing over and over again for a long, long time. Tart. Tart. I'm exhibit A. Tart. And so you found something incredible. Great. I don't think you're a cheater. I think you're doing the next right thing for you and your body and you're not doing it on a whim and you didn't watch a YouTube clip and be like, oh yeah, I'm good. Like you went and sat with a doctor. And I don't think other people will get a vote in your life. And I would not have one second. It's just me personally of shame about telling somebody that I was on a JLP1. If I was taking one. And also I can't control what stories other people choose to take with that information and make up about me. So I'm not going to try. But I'm not going to cash in my integrity. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to be a person who just suddenly stops telling the truth or telling my story. But I'm going to be a guy that can't, I can't decide. I can't make you not make up stories about me. Great. Cool. But I guess hear me say, Amy, I'm proud of you. As a guy who sat at my kitchen table in Wept when I first took anxiety medication. I thought I'd filled my son, thought I'd fill my wife, thought I'd filled my everything. I wept. And those medications for a short season turned down the noise enough that let me go sit with a counselor and give back into the gym and and and and and and and. I'm in there. And there's also a place just to be of insanely deep gratitude that me and we live in a time with all this abundance and we live in a time when our brains have been hacked and we live in a time when somebody studied what is a heel of monster poison or something and came up with these GLP ones and so far with the right intentionality about what we eat and how much protein we get and how much we're lifting weight whatever. They can be magic for a large swath of a hurting population. Incredible. So I applaud you sister. I applaud you. Call me back in a few weeks and let me know how you're doing. I would love to keep up with your journey here. I'm proud of you. It's awesome. Hold your head high. We'll be right back. Alright, it's the new year and everybody's talking about getting more organized with less clutter, less stress and more peace. Here's one area of organization I want you to focus on this year, your digital footprint. To do this, I recommend delete me. Every time you fill out a quick form, grab a discount online or sign up for some kind of free thing on the internet, your personal information, things like your name, your email, your phone number, your address, all of that stuff gets collected and sold and shared by data brokers behind your back. And over time, all of this turns into a fire hose of spam calls and weird text and scam emails. Delete me's team of privacy experts finds your personal information on data broker sites that are selling your data and it gets all of that information taken down. And then delete me keeps checking on your information to make sure it's always gone. It's like setting healthy boundaries for your digital life because protecting your privacy is part of protecting your peace. It's about organizing everything in your life. So this year, start fresh with fewer distractions and more peace. Go to joindeleteme.com slash deloney for 20% off an annual plan. That's J-O-I-N. Join deleteme.com slash deloney and start organizing and protecting your peace this year. All right, we're back. I've got a money and marriage question. These are anonymous questions that people leave at the money marriage retreats that me and Rachel Cruz put on a few times a year here in Nashville. Here's the question. We've been married 10 plus years. We have two little kids. We live in a rural area and don't really have friends we can call or that we hang out with. Lots of people we know, but no real adult friends for either of us. How the heck do we do adults make friends in small rural areas? As a guy who grew up in suburbs, I moved out to a rural area when I was here in Nashville, out in the woods, like banjos playing everywhere. And I had to get used to two things. Number one, the people around me had different lived experiences than I did. And I had to get over something that I didn't even know was inside my chest, which is I thought that I knew more about the world and that I was a little more educated. And I was, I mean, I hate to say it, but I'm probably a little bit better. And that was 1,000% raw and correct. And so two things that my wife and I did. Number one, we were over intentional about generosity. That means we were always taking food and stuff to our neighbors. And some of our neighbors are in their 70s. And we've become great neighbor friends with them. We talk about their illnesses. We talk about their dreams. We talk about the cost of land. We talk about the engine that my neighbor's putting in his new truck, his old truck, and his 70s. He's just awesome. We talk about our kids. We talk about everything. But it started with us taking over some homemade sourdough bread. It started with us taking over like when I get a deer during hunting season, I'll take one over and just donate the whole thing to him. It started with, hey, come up to my front porch. Let's have coffee with my 60-year-old neighbor who's dying of cancer. And he showed up and it was amazing. It was a blast. And so number one, we went first and we led the generosity. Number two, we started having my kids' friends, parents over all the time. We are very different. And they turned into dear, radical new friends of ours that we love and we care about. As we started realizing they've got different lived experiences, they lived in different towns. We all had different jobs. But we all care about mostly the same things. We want some peace in our life. We want our kids to do well. We want our marriages to be good and we want to laugh hilarious until funny jokes. And we have different values and different beliefs in Yada Yada. And it has been awesome. But again, that took us inviting people into our house. And it's been transformative. And so I can just still it down in two sentences or two little, quippy phrases. Go first and be weird. Go first and lead with generosity. Go first and do the invites and be weird. Just be willing to do things that you're uncomfortable with that you've never done before and have conversations with people you've never talked about before. And open your eyes and realize, I'm no better. I'm just different. And I want to learn about their world. And I'll tell you what, in our life and my rural community out in the woods, it has changed everything in my life. For me, my wife and my kids. Love you guys. Bye. All right, let's talk about your marriage. Right now we have February and October weekends on sale for the money and marriage getaways. The best marriage retreat on the planet. Get started at 749 bucks a couple. Get yours at ramsysolutions.com slash getaway.