Effective self-regulation is an important ingredient of a healthy lifestyle. Past research has outlined the facilitative effect of consideration of future consequences on self-regulation. We extend this research by examining the underlying mechanism that enables individuals who consider future consequences (high-CFC individuals) to use their distant goals as guides for their current actions. We examine the role of planning in guiding present behavior to reach future outcomes and show that high-CFC individuals are better planners and that propensity to plan facilitates self-regulation in the present. We build on this notion and examine how accounting for individual differences in CFC, which also reflect individual differences in planning aptitudes, can inform the motivation of healthy consumer choices. Our results suggest that health-messages need to be framed along two-dimensions, the outcomes associated with a health behavior and the means individuals can implement to reach these outcomes, and that the effectiveness of message frames depends on the extent to which an individual considers future consequences. We show that self-regulation among the vulnerable population, namely low-CFC individuals, can be increased by designing messages that help these individuals to emulate the decision-making behavior of high-CFC individuals.