THE FUTURE YOU HAS SOMETHING TO SAY....

...AND YOU'D BETTER LISTEN.

You know you should floss every day.  You know you should sleep 8 hours and exercise.  You know you should save more money.  But we all skip doing what needs to be done because we don't have the time, forget or are just too lazy.

So what can we do to help us eat better?  Science and technology might be able to help us.


Anyone can start a good habit.  A study at MIT showed that once mice got the hang of a maze and a reward, their brains' activities only spiked at the beginning of the maze and the end (getting the reward).  Going through an unknown maze showed similar spike of brain activity while the mice were trying to figure out where to go.  But once they got the routine of the maze, their brains went into something like "auto-pilot."

You too can go into auto-pilot when it comes to healthful eating.  What is a hateful task at first (let's say, preparing and eating vegetables for example) can become a routine and healthful habit.  The more you do it, the more it becomes habit.  I once heard that you need 3 weeks (or was is 6?) to form a good habit.  So commit yourself to eating well for at least 3 weeks.  As my friend Christine said, she trained herself to like vegetables, and now she craves them.  See if you can go into auto-pilot on healthful eating.  If you do it enough times, the science states it'll become a no-brainer.

You have the added incentive of the compound effect.  The better foods you eat, the better your body is.  The more you do it, the more your body rewards you with lighter weight, less illness, more energy.  Even the most minor change result in bigger changes in the future.  Stop drinking that one-soda-a-day habit without changing anything else in your day?  You can lose a pound a month, getting rid of that ugly 12 pounds in a year.

On the flip side, bad eating habits also have a snowball effect, packing on unwanted pounds, opening you up to higher rates of disease and illness.

Of course saying this is one thing, and doing it is another.  As humans, we have a much easier time thinking that our future selves will start doing all the things we need to do.  That's why I was so interested in this TED talk about how we can see what we will look like in the future via a computer-generated picture of you.  The TED talk primarily focuses on retirement savings, but I wonder if we'd eat better if we could see how our bad eating decisions will affect our future selves.  And what we might be doing to our children (who, let's be honest, are all super cute and active because they are young, so we're not that worried right now).  Would you feed your children fast-food or highly-processed foods if you could see what those substances would do to your now-adult picture of your child a computer can generate?  Will you be setting them up for heart disease, obesity, illness, inactivity?  Yes, dramatic big words, but that's where our nation is headed.  Perhaps sometime in the near future, we'll be able to use technology like this to help us eat better.

So why don't we do what we know we should?  There are so many reasons.   But whatever you need to do to start eating healthful food -- be it by making healthful food a habit, by reminding yourself of the snowball effect of good eating, or by imagining what you and your children might look like in the future -- just start. 

Your future self will thank you for it.