A Mental Diet

My mom also sent me this and I wanted to share it on Nathan’s blog. I have believed in this for many years now, and I can guarantee that what this person says is true. With my own experience, I have experienced that my thoughts affect my reality. This is so well written that I’ve republished it, and I share his thoughts 100%:

The subject of diet is one of the foremost topics of the present day in public interest.
Newspapers and magazines teem with articles on the subject. The counters of the
bookshops are filled with volumes unfolding the mysteries of proteins, starches, vitamins,
and so forth. Just now the whole world is food-conscious. Experts on the subject
are saying that physically you become the thing that you eat — that your whole body is
really composed of the food that you have eaten in the past. What you eat today, they
say, will be in your bloodstream after the lapse of so many hours, and it is your bloodstream
that builds all the tissues composing your body — and there you are. Of course,
no sensible person has any quarrel with all this. It is perfectly true, as far as it goes, and
the only surprising thing is that it has taken the world so long to find it out; but in this
article I am going to deal with the subject of dieting at a level that is infinitely more
profound and far-reaching in its effects. I refer of course to mental dieting.

The most important of all factors in your life is the mental diet on which you live. It is the
food which you furnish to your mind that determines the whole character of your life. It is
the thoughts you allow yourself to think, the subjects that you allow your mind to dwell
upon, which make you and your surroundings what they are. As thy days, so shall thy
strength be. Everything in your life today — the state of your body, whether healthy or
sick, the state of your fortune, whether prosperous or impoverished, the state of your
home, whether happy or the reverse, the present condition of every phase of your life in
fact — is entirely conditioned by the thoughts and feelings which you have entertained
in the past, by the habitual tone of your past thinking. And the condition of your life
tomorrow, and next week, and next year, will be entirely conditioned by the thoughts
and feelings which you choose to entertain from now onwards.

In other words, you choose your life, that is to say, you choose all the conditions of your
life, when you choose the thoughts upon which you allow your mind to dwell. Thought is
the real causative force in life, and there is no other. You cannot have one kind of mind
and another kind of environment. This means that you cannot change your environment
while leaving your mind unchanged, nor — and this is the supreme key to life and the
reason for this article — can you change your mind without your environment changing
too.

This then is the real key to life: If you change your mind your conditions must change
too. Your body must change, your daily work or other activities must change; your home
must change; the color-tone of your whole life must change, for whether you be habitually
happy and cheerful, or low-spirited and fearful, depends entirely on the quality of
the mental food upon which you diet yourself. Please be very clear about this. If you
change your mind your conditions must change too. We are transformed by the
renewing of our minds. So now you will see that your mental diet is really the most
important thing in your whole life.

This may be called the Great Cosmic Law, and its truth is seen to be perfectly obvious
when once it is clearly stated in this way. In fact, I do not know of any thoughtful person
who denies its essential truth. The practical difficulty in applying it, however, arises from
the fact that our thoughts are so close to us that it is difficult, without a little practice, to
stand back as it were and look at them objectively. Yet that is just what you must learn
to do.

You must train yourself to choose the subject of your thinking at any given time, and
also to choose the emotional tone, or what we call the mood that colors it. Yes, you can
choose your moods. Indeed, if you could not you would have no real control over your
life at all. Moods habitually entertained produce the characteristic disposition of the
person concerned, and it is his or her disposition that finally makes or mars a person’s
happiness.

You cannot be healthy; you cannot be happy; you cannot be prosperous; if you have a
bad disposition. If you are sulky, or surly, or cynical, or depressed, or superior, or
frightened half out of your wits, your life cannot possibly be worth living. Unless you are
determined to cultivate a good disposition, you may as well give up all hope of getting
anything worthwhile out of life, and it is kinder to tell you very plainly that this is the
case. If you are not determined to start in now and carefully select all day the kind of
thoughts that you are going to think, you may as well give up all hope of shaping your
life into the kind of thing that you want it to be, because this is the only way.
In short, if you want to make your life happy and worthwhile, which is what God wishes
you to make it, you must begin immediately’ to train yourself in the habit of thought
selection and thought control. This will be exceedingly difficult for the first few days, but
if you persevere you will find that it will become rapidly easier, and it is actually the most
interesting experiment that you could possibly make. In fact, this thought control is the
most thrillingly interesting hobby that anyone could take up. You will be amazed at the
interesting things that you will learn about yourself, and you will get results almost from
the beginning.

Now many people knowing this truth, make sporadic efforts from time to time to control
their thoughts, but the thought stream being so close, as I have pointed out, and the
impacts from outside so constant and varied, they do not make very much progress.
That is not the way to work. Your only chance is definitely to form a new habit of thought
which will carry you through when you are preoccupied or off your guard as well as
when you are consciously attending to the business. This new thought habit must be
definitely acquired, and the foundation of it can be laid within a few days.

For more info on HOW to do this mental diet, visit:

The 7 day mental diet