Cindy has been having some anxiety about the future. She successfully lost 43 pounds and has been maintaining that loss for over 8 months, but she still has negative thoughts and images that pop into her head from time to time. The most common one is that she sees her future self standing in front of the mirror, trying to zipper her jeans, and realizing that they have become too tight. She experiences a sickening realization that none of her clothes fit anymore. Her heart sinks as she steps on the scale and sees how much weight she has regained.
I discussed with Cindy the fact that this visual in her head of trying to zip her jeans is making things so much harder for her! I helped Cindy replace that visual with a much more realistic one. In this picture, her future self steps on the scale and notices that it has gained 3 or 4 pounds. But instead of experiencing that sickening feeling in her stomach, she immediately becomes problem-solving oriented. Cindy breaks out her diet notebook and her Beck Diet Solution book, reads her advantages of losing weight list, reads back to the times when she was doing inflexible eating, and sets up an eating plan for that very day. Because she has already firmly mastered the skill of following a plan inflexibly, it is not difficult for Cindy to put herself back in that mindset, especially because reading her advantages list has concretely reminded her why it’s worth it to do this. Within a week or two, Cindy already sees the scale going back down. This is completely realistic, and helped put Cindy’s mind at ease.