Hey! You could always improve your food choices.

Food is one of life's great pleasures. No one (that I know, anyway) enjoys total deprivation. However, when it comes to shifting body composition, you have to make most of your decisions based not on taste and pleasure, but on results. Fortunately, there is a middle ground between taste and results. Unfortunately, if the middle ground food isn’t getting you the results you want, then you have to upgrade your choices to a higher grade of food.

Nutritional quality traverses a spectrum - it runs in degrees. Food choices aren’t good or bad; black or white. There are shades of gray in between. When you want to improve your results or break a plateau, you have to improve your food choices. The way you do this is to eat fewer foods that are processed, and eat more foods that are in their raw, natural state.

Here's an example: an apple is obviously "A" list. An apple gets the highest grade possible because it’s in its raw, natural state. Next down the rung you have unsweetened applesauce. It consists of nothing but raw apples and water, but it’s been pureed, so it’s not in its most natural state anymore and is therefore relegated to a "B" (still a good "grade," mind you). Turn it into apple juice and you're down to a "C" (still a passing grade). Then if you add sugar (sweetened applesauce or apple drink), now you're down to a "D". Finally, if the apples eventually become an apple pie, now you're down to an "F".

Your task is simple: look for places in your diet where you can improve your grade. Then improve it.

Can You See It?

As you read or listen to your affirmations, mentally visualize them as already achieved.

Because your brain thinks in pictures, adding a bright, clear, moving mental picture of what you want to achieve will help you to penetrate your subconscious mind more rapidly and more deeply than if you just read your goals.

In the book Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maltz shared an experiment on the effects of mental practice on improving basketball free throws. The study, published in Research Quarterly, divided the subjects into three groups. Each group was tested for free throw accuracy once at the beginning of the experiment and again at its conclusion.

Group one physically practiced free throws for 20 days. Group two performed no practice at all. Group three spent 20 minutes a day getting into a deeply relaxed state and visualizing themselves shooting free throws. When they missed, they would visualize themselves correcting their aim accordingly.

The results were remarkable: the first group,which practiced 20 minutes a day, improved in scoring 24%. The second group, which had no practice, showed no improvement. The third group, which practiced in their minds, improved their scoring 23%! Amazingly, mental practice yielded results almost identical to physical practice.

All great athletes and peak performers use visualization. Jack Niklaus said he never hit a golf shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in his head.

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi once told an interviewer that he won Wimbledon at least ten thousand times. When asked what he meant by this, Agassi replied, “Since I was five years old I saw it over and over and over again in my mind. When I walked on the court that day, it was my exact vision. I felt like I was stepping into the role I was made for, and I just demolished them!"

Legendary basketball Hall of Famer Bill Russell wrote about his use of mental imagery in great detail: “I was sitting there with my eyes closed, watching plays in my head. It was effortless; the movies I saw in my head seemed to have their own projector, and whenever I closed my eyes, it would run.”