By Vaughn Gray

ReEvolution is all about enabling you to take your mind, your body, and your life in any direction you want. We strive to provide you with all of the information you need to make whatever changes you want to make in your life. But information alone isn’t enough. The path to the life we want to live requires changing our behavior – our eating, exercise, sleep, work, relationship, and mental habits – and this can be a tough thing. The biggest stumbling block many of us face in trying to forge a fitter, healthier, more engaged and productive life is finding and maintaining the motivation to make changes. And even if we do succeed in staying motivated, often our efforts to change are undermined by old habits.

This is especially true when it comes to our eating  habits. There is a technique to gaining control over your impulses and desires that is so powerful, it’s really the only tool you need. So instead of giving you three principles and three action steps, we describe this technique here in detail. Like a lot of our advice, it sounds a little crazy, but it really works. Give it a try for a month or so. The more you practice it, the more effective it gets. We promise you’ll be amazed with the results. We explain this technique with reference to controlling food cravings, but it can be applied to just about any kind of impulse or habit you're trying to get in check.

Controlling Impulses, Focusing Desire: The ReEvolution Method

Imagine your favorite unhealthy food. Picture it on the table in front of you, perfectly presented. Envision yourself about to take a bite. You can smell the aroma. You can almost taste it from the smell alone – the texture as it hits your tongue, the flavor exploding in your mouth, the sigh of pleasure that ripples through your body. You put it in your mouth, start to chew and – dish soap. Someone has poured dish soap all over it. Really close you eyes and live the experience of biting down, expecting all of that delicious flavor and instead – ugh! The acrid taste, the oily coating in you mouth – it’s repulsive! Pour yourself into the vision. Will yourself to feel the disgust, the nausea, the instant need to spit it out and wash out your mouth with water. How much do you think a bit of that food would appeal to you right now?

We’re not suggesting that you start picturing your favorite foods tasting like dish soap or castor oil to control your food cravings. We offer this example simply to illustrate how much influence imagination can have on our emotions and desires. Imagination and visualization are most powerful when we create vivid, detail rich pictures, and associate these pictures with strong emotions. The way to put this to work in your life is to begin vividly associating your less than savory habits (smoking, eating snack chips or fast food, or even dating the wrong people) with the actual negative consequences of indulging in them. This can be a lot more powerful than you may believe.

We know what you’re thinking – that everyone already knows that cigarettes, junk food, fast women, and toxic bachlors are bad for them, and knowing this doesn’t change a thing. We still find ourselves being drawn to them. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it emotionally. Knowledge alone isn’t powerful enough to overcome desires, cravings and habits. But the kind of visceral emotional response you can create with imagination and association is more than enough to help you break bad habits and forge healthier ones.