Why do you crave certain foods while other foods leave you feeling flat? Would you like to know how to control your cravings?  The steps below will help you engineer your eating for success? This is not some fast weight loss diet or no carb diet or even a diet program. This is about engineering your emotions or associations with food.

Think about your favorite foods (you may need to close your eyes to visualize this) and find out how all the different foods you eat appear.

Let’s take chocolate cake as an example. Notice how you SEE your chocolate cake. Is it richly detailed 3D right in front of you? Is it a big picture or a small movie or a still photograph?  On the other hand, let’s picture a less desirable dish. Does it appear in drab grays and blacks? Is it a photograph down in the corner?

So if you want to eat better food to meet your health goals, systematically change the the way you view food. Make the chocolate cake or other sweets less attractive in your mind’s eye; black and white, flat or make the picture in your mind small and fuzzy. This will reduce its attractiveness immediately. Also increase the attractiveness of healthier dishes; making them more colorful, richly detailed and 3-dimensional.

I promise this strategy will have a big and automatic affect on your eating habits. You might think, ‘ it’s too simple.’ When you know how to do something, it is easy. Learn it, practice it, and put it to work for you.  Remember, just like riding a bike or tying your shoes or most things in life, repetition is the mother of skill.

You’d be surprised how many people FAIL to motivate themselves. They have poor flat pictures of their work or fuzzy black and white images of their goal or reward. No wonder they’re not motivated.

Now you have a strategy to help you get what you want, what you value. The bigger, richer, more colorful and more 3-dimensional your mental pictures, the better your motivation and actions become.