A new study has suggested simple ways of improving the way we eat--make an action plan and visualize yourself carrying it out. Those who visualize their diet and eating habits are more likely to achieve their goals, according to the study.

Researchers at McGill's Department of Psychology studied the diet plans of people and found that people who visualize their diet and eating habits more likely to achieve their goals.

Dietitians should advise patients to visualize their diet
The researchers say that dietitians should not stick to the traditional method of just advising their patients on what to eat and what not to eat and should instead advise them to make a concrete plan about what they are going to eat and visualize carrying it out.

“Telling people to just change the way they eat doesn’t work; we’ve known that for a while,” says study researcher Barbel Knauper, Professor of Psychology at McGill University in Canada.

”But research has shown that if people make a concrete plan about what they are going to do, they are better at acting on their intentions. What we’ve done that’s new is to add visualization techniques to the action plan.”

Study details
To reach their findings, Knauper and her team asked 177 other students at McGill's New Residence Hall to set themselves the goal of consuming more fruit for a period of seven days. They also categorized the participants as low fruit consumers and high fruit consumers.

The result of the research showed that all the study participants ate more fruit over the course of the week than they had before the study began.

But those, who created a detailed diet plan, writing about when, where, and how they would buy, prepare and eat fruit, and visualized themselves completing the plan, increased their fruit consumption twice as much as those who simply set out to eat more fruit without visualizing and planning how they were going to do it.

More precisely, those who visualized and planned to eat fruit consumed an average of 3.85 servings of fruit a day, while those who didn't make a plan ate 2.23 servings of fruit a day. Visualization techniques works like sports psychology According to Knauper, these kinds of visualization techniques are derived from sports psychology, in which elite athletes visualize their performance.

"Athletes do lots of work mentally rehearsing their performances before competing and it's often very successful," Knauper said, "so we thought having people mentally rehearse how they were going to buy and eat their fruit should make it more likely that they would actually do it.""And this is exactly what happened."The study findings appear in the last week’s issue of the journal 'Psychology and Health.'