by Howard Farkas

Created on: March 04, 2009

Have you ever wished you were more serious about changing your diet five years ago? You think about how much better off you would be today without the extra weight that you would have lost.

We have all felt regret over missed opportunities in life and daydream about how things could have been different if only we had a chance to go back and do it all over again. Well, I believe we can.

This is an exercise that I've used with my weight loss clients to help them change their perspective on how they view the long-term effect of changes they make today on their lives in the future:

Imagine yourself five years from now and you weigh the same as you do today. You think about all the opportunities
you've had over the past five years to start making the changes you've intended to make in order to lose that weight.

You feel regret about the fits and starts you've made, with the best of intentions, only to give up when you
didn't see enough of a change on the scale. You feel angry with yourself when you realize that if you only had more patience and stayed consistent with even some very modest changes in your diet you would have lost most of your excess weight by now.

Regret, anger, and guilt are only some of the emotions you might be feeling five years from now as you think about those missed opportunities.

Now here's the good part: those "past five years" haven't happened yet! You get to travel back in time again to the present. You're back from your preview of Future You, and now you actually do have an opportunity to do it all over again by starting to make changes today and sticking with them.

Here's a good example of how it can work:

Jeff is in his late 40's, and weighs over 300 pounds. He's been heavy all his adult life and has gone through many programs, including residential programs that controlled every morsel of food he ate. As you might expect, the programs had all been "successful" if you consider temporary weight loss to be a success. As Mark Twain observed, "It's
easy to quit smoking. I've done it dozens of times." For Jeff, though, this was a serious problem. He was now at the highest weight he had ever been.

Jeff has a ten-year-old daughter with whom he's very close, but he has always felt that his inability to be more active has been a major limitation on the quality of the time he has been able to spend with her. He regrets not having done more in the past to keep the weight off. Now that his daughter is turning eleven, he sees her spending more time with her friends and realizes the time he has left to experience quality time with her is quickly running out.

We discussed the "time travel" idea, and Jeff, a former college athlete not readily given to emotional expression, suddenly became tearful. He realized how badly he would feel about this in five years, and felt very relieved at the notion that he can "repeat" those years over again.

He said it was a perspective about the future that he never had before and can see more clearly how what he does today will affect his life then. Since that time, Jeff has been able to sustain his change efforts longer than he ever has in the past, and his weight is going steadily down.

The bottom line is something you've
heard many times before: it's never too late to start taking care of yourself. Using the "time travel" idea can really drive that message home.

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