Quantum
Weight Loss
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to travel back in time? I
know I’m captivated by the concept of time travel. I loved Jules Vern’s “The
Time Machine,” Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” the TV series “Quantum
Leap” and, especially the “Back to the Future” movies. I don’t think I’m the
only person that loves to fantasize about time travel. I mean who wouldn’t give
anything to go back in time and fix the spoils of a misspent youth, or simply to
retract those 5 Big Macs from yesterday? I think what I like most about these
fantastic stories is the notion that small changes in the past can have a huge
impact on the future. Maybe the reason these stories are so captivating is they
offer us the prospect of getting another chance to get it right. Imagine you
had the power to change your past. How would you use it? Chances are, you would
use it to change your future.
Unfortunately, until Wal-Mart starts stocking flux
capacitors, we are all stuck in the present and it does not take a rocket scientist
to figure out that when you are stuck in the present, you can’t change the past
. . . or can you?
While we humans have not mastered the art of physically
traveling through time, our minds can allow us to “travel” anywhere we want and
that includes our past. The truth is we travel to the past all the time and our
future depends on what we do once we arrive there. Our present feelings, behaviors
and capacity to change are all affected by our impression of the past. Problems
arise when we focus on the disempowering moments of that past.
Generally, people are not stupid. We find it easier to do
things we believe will bring us results and we don’t want to waste energy on
doing things that appear useless. Our beliefs about our potential help us to
set odds on whether or not a specific action will actually lead to success. We
then use those odds to subconsciously decide if we really want to expend energy
on the activity or not. Faith in your ability to succeed is especially
important when the task at hand is particularly difficult or does not return an
immediate result. In fact, according to Stamford psychologist and Author of Mindset the New Psychology of Success, Carol
Dweck, PhD, developing a belief in one’s ability to succeed (she calls it a
growth mindset) “allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging
times in their lives.”
Since weight loss success involves a lot of seeming small,
decidedly difficult actions that do not always appear to return immediate results,
you really need to believe in yourself. Since one’s impression of the past plays
a key role in the belief in oneself and since believing in oneself is essential
to completing difficult tasks, if you could improve your impression of the past,
you could improve your future. Thus, allowing you to achieve the dream of every
time traveler without the need for a nuclear powered DeLorean.
I specifically use the phrase “impression of the past”
because that is exactly what it is, an impression. Your memory is not like a
computer hard drive. It does not blindly record every bit of data that it
receives. That’s actually a good thing because at any given moment, your body
receives millions and millions of data bytes from all of your sense organs.
That not only includes your eyes and ears, it also includes information from
your skin, internal organs and a host of other bodily systems too numerous to
list. All-in-all a lot of data. In fact, your brain probably receives enough
data in just one day to fill all of Google’s servers. If our memory had to
store all that data, it would likely be all filled before we reach our third
week of life. Not only that, but if we were asked to remember last week and our
brain had actually stored all the
data from “last week” it would take all of “next week” to replay it.
Instead, our brain is designed to break down the totality of
life’s experience into fragmented bits of critical information and store only
those that are most important. When we need to travel to our past, these bits
or “impressions” are re-collected from the brain and used as some of the
building blocks of what we perceive as memory. That recollection, however, is
incomplete. So what does the brain use to fill in the details? It uses a
building material called the present. Research by Harvard psychology professor
Dan Gilbert, PhD, shows that the way we feel right now has a huge influence on
how we remember the past. In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Dr. Gilbert
calls this phenomenon “presentism.”
What that means is that you can control your past by
controlling your attitudes in the present. One reason this is so powerful is
that by arming yourself with a better past, you will automatically have more
faith in your abilities and as a result your actions will likely manifest a
better future.
One of the easiest ways to start improving your past is to
go back with the intention of finding something worth going back for. I always
ask my clients to specifically remember something positive about the previous
week. The challenge is we are conditioned to find fault with ourselves. So when
the client travels back in time, all they see are their failures. What I try to
do is to help them to see what went right.
In a recent conversation with a client, she said, “I ate all
the wrong things last week.” If that were true, it would be pretty discouraging
and for that client at that moment it was true and she was discouraged. After
just a few more minutes of coaxing though, we were both pleased to discover
that, while her food choices were not perfect, she did “stop eating when she
felt full.” As a result she admitted that she ate a lot less food than she
normally would have. This was actually pretty exciting. Once she realized that,
she was able to recall all sorts of positive reflections of the past week.
By creating just one positive moment of confidence in the
present she was able to “re-collect” an awesome past which lead an explosion of
confidence about her future potential. Please don’t misunderstand, revamping
your past to be more positive does not mean ignoring your failures, it means that
you change the way see them. To create that moment of confidence, I didn’t simply
change the subject to sweet smelling rose pedals and soft squishy puppy dog
kisses. I used a technique I call the MAGIC
WAND. First, I introduce the notion that Mistakes Accomplish Growth If Changed (MAGIC) and then I ask, “What About Now
Differs? (WAND)”
It is possible make something quite positive out of what you
perceive as a failure by simply recognizing it as a learning experience. Think
about it: Failure, or simply not getting something right the first time, is the
way everybody learns. True growth actually comes from a mastery of failure. What
I ask is that people simply re-frame the way they remember failure. Honestly,
the whole concept of failure just clouds your perspective and is completely
unproductive. Whenever you catch yourself thinking something you did was a
“failure,” substitute the word “mistake.”
Once you can be free from the mental bondage of failure, you
are free to ask “What about now differs?” When I asked this question to my
client, it gave her a chance to refocus her mental reconstruction of the
previous week on the specific accomplishments she felt broke her old
destructive patterns. By comparing a mistake of last week (eating a Twinkie)
with a mistake you might have made 2 weeks ago (eating a box of Twinkies), it
is easy to see that progress has been made. The comparison elicited by the
question serves to literally transform the perception of the mistake. Now that
same event is not seen as the total disaster it was thought to be. Focusing on
how your mistakes are getting better will free your mind of guilt. Without
guilt, you will be able to step back, learn and move ahead. All mistakes teach
valuable lessons. If you take a little time to search for the betterness in
your mistakes you are likely find them. Actually, just the fact that you are positively
reflecting and analyzing your past is an improvement in itself. Most people
don’t do that.
Once you see you have in fact improved, you can move forward
by asking another WAND question, “What Accomplishes New Directions?” While this
works best before or while you are in the process of making a mistake, it can
also work a week later as you analyze it. By asking this WAND question, you get
to decide on a new direction for your life and limit current and future damage.
For instance, if you are halfway through a sleeve of cookies when you ask this
question, you might just throw the rest away. If you ask the question a week
after eating the whole sleeve, you might resolve to slam the door on the next
troop of cookie hawking girl scouts that come banging at your door. Really,
either way you should emerge from the incident with the proud recollection that
you have grown instead of feeling shameful.
If you are still longing for the day when you can actually
go back in time and have yourself an old-fashioned playground style “do-over”
on life, try to remember that that TODAY
is your tomorrow’s past! In a very real sense, from the perspective of the
future you, you are already in the past. Why don’t you impress that future you
by starting your do-over today? In fact, to make it a bit less daunting, forget
about doing your life over and concentrate on doing your better. When you think
about it, if you begin your “do-better” right now you WILL change your
tomorrow.
