LLB! Thanks for posting the new exercise. I am smiling at your answer but I'm tempted to co-op it for my use also.
Caveat: I am, as you know, a youthful, lovely and amazingly active crone, but I am not the beautiful age of 85. I'm considerably less than 85, but I have a friend who is 85 and when I talk to her I sometimes think I'm "older" than she is. She's had one awesome life and seems to regret none of it, so I do kind of aspire to that state of mind when I grow up!
Be that as it may, I could fill pages with things I regret up to this point and heaven only knows how bad it'll get in the coming decades. But limiting it to eight, I'd say:
If I were 85 and had it to do over, I'd likely:
1) Not ever gain 100 extra pounds. One can lose it, but the health consequences are not worth it.
2) Live by a secret a lady in politics once told me when I complimented her on her ability to "keep her head when all about her are losing theirs ... (Kipling);" she said she had a prayer she kept saying to herself: "Should I speak now?"
3) Never have any pets; I become dependent on them instead of the other way around.
4) Become a dietician instead of a reporter; it's healthier all the way around and the pay is better.
5) Learn early to love vegetables and hate sweets.
6) Get a ph.D before I got too jaded to care.
7) Write a cookbook instead of a bad novel.
8) Learn to play the harp.
Well, that's the short list. There's more but I'll stick to the exercise. As for the second part, I guess I could start doing all of them this month, but I doubt if I will, since I haven't yet.
I didn't stick to weight-related items in my list, but if you think about it
everything is weight-related. If I dedicated a fraction of the time to, say, the last three items that I do to managing weight, I'd likely not have a poundage problem at all.