I started on The Lemonade Diet way before Beyonce Knowles popularized it. It was rigorous and physically demanding – I often felt weak and the days of abstinence from food gave me hunger pangs. In fact, I met with multiple setbacks and wasn’t able to complete The Lemonade Diet successfully.

For her role in the movie “Dream Girls”, Beyonce was introduced to The Lemonade Diet. It was the only way to lose weight fast, according to her nutritionist.

The end result? A loss of 20 pounds in 10 days. The Lemonade Diet was catapulted to international recognition when Beyonce promoted it on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

I thought that she must be crazy for successfully taking up a challenge that practically does not allow food for up to 10 days, while all I faced were failures in my several attempts!

But here is what I have learned – there are ways to help us control our food cravings and succeed. A diet is more than just abstaining from food and sticking through the pain and pangs. There are many things that can be done to make the process easier to stomach. And that is how many see their diets through from start to end successfully.

For The Lemonade Diet, with the absence of food, your body continuously sends hunger signals to your brain. You might be tempted to reach for the burger at the table. Stop. Read the following. You do not want your diet to fail, just when it is beginning to work. To complete the Lemonade Diet successfully, your mind has to be strong enough to combat these hunger signals. And here is what you can do to strengthen your resolve:

Creative Visualization

Creative visualization helps in improving your actual performance by imagination. Sports stars do it all the time. Think of Roger Federer running through his service in his head in a crucial match. The underlying basis is both biological and mental – your thoughts and feelings affect your body profoundly. When you feel anger, your heart beats faster. Creative visualization is used to ready your body and mind when you go through something physically demanding like The Lemonade Diet.

Sit in a quiet spot and focus on the following for a few minutes at the start of each day, or whenever the need arises:

• Imagine you have achieved your post-diet goal. Imagine yourself slimmer, healthier and happier. Imagine how you feel, and having those feelings run through you.

• Think of your family and friends noticing a difference in you, and complimenting on how great you look.

• Visualize yourself fitting into the clothes you have always wanted to wear. The blouse on display in that shop you have been eyeing for a month. Visualize yourself putting it on, having it fit snugly, and strutting down the street, attracting the admiration of onlookers.

There can be many variations to the above visualization practice – you could be at the beach, or at a party.

The key is that, like all goals, it has to be realistic. Take small, manageable steps, and you would have walked a mile in the long run. It helps to be as detailed as possible in your visualization – imagine what your friends will say exactly to you. Visualize the nitty-gritty details of the blouse in that shop display.

Making your visualization as real and close as possible will make it all the more attainable, and your determination to achieve your goal will be stronger. It tells yourself – “You can smell it. You can almost touch it. Now reach forward and go get it.”

Hypnotherapy / Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)

Before you dismiss the above as hocus pocus, these therapies are actually medically recognized as especially effective for dealing with food cravings in weight treatments.

Hypnotherapy works by having an external voice induce you into a relaxed state, and helps converge your attention and energy singularly into your particular weight goal, such that you will find yourself more focused and clear-minded towards it.

Its effectiveness is best channeled for people who are self-motivated, who know and are able to visualize exactly what they want. Thus, it is extremely useful to combine hypnotherapy with the above creative visualization.

We are our worst enemies. Sometimes, the only person preventing us from succeeding is our issues. This is when NLP also comes in. It allows us to speak to this person that continuously blocks our way from success – ourselves.

For example, I have always been mocked for being “fat” back when I was young. This lack of positive self-image imbibed a self-defeatist mentality in me – I felt that no matter what I did, I would never gain the winning approval of the people around me. It affected my diet – I thought I would never overcome my hunger, just as I have never overcame anything significant in my life before.

NLP has since made me understand that I was putting myself down all the time, and that if only I gave myself a chance, I could actually succeed. It helps us get in touch with our inner selves, allowing us to understand ourselves from another angle and to put our issues to rest.

Every time we hear success stories from people who have managed to lose weight on programs like The Lemonade Diet, we only focus on the end stage and not the process. A diet is more than starting and ending up with a weight loss – in fact, people who go away with this mindset often end up failing. A good diet program should also consist a properly thought out process, one that keeps you motivated to see it to a successful completion.

The Lemonade Diet might not be easy to complete, but with methods listed above, the process of abstaining from food becomes a lot easier, and the benefit at the end extremely rewarding. Really, just ask Beyonce.