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 blood-stream 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 pamphlet 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 they days, so shall they 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.