Want to know an easy way to eat well? Follow the food pyramid at every meal.

I'm thinking back to the dinner I had last night. I'm visualizing it: Spinach lettuce, red grapes, shredded carrots, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, topped with salmon. No dressing. Just a bowl full of healthy stuff, all mixed together, simply scrumptious.

This visualization exercise is intended to cause me to eat fewer calories today. Not sure it's working. I think it's making me hungry instead.

According to the August issue of The Oprah Magazine, the findings of a study published in the journal Physiology & Behavior (2008) reveal that women who wrote a detailed description of their last meal (it happened to be lunch for this study) ate fewer cookies than those who didn't. OK, so maybe I should have written down my dinner items. No. I don't think that would have worked any better. Obviously, for some, journaling past meals does work. Might want to try it and see if it works for you.

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My tongue is dry. My brain is buzzing. My stomach, hollow; my shoulders, tense. It's less than 24 hours until I'll take the baton in my first 6.2-mile leg of the Hood-to-Coast relay, only 14 hours until I'll hit the road with five other mamas, headed to the starting gun at Timberline Lodge.

Gulp.

Am I ready? Physically, I think I am. I haven't been running the distance I would have liked -- it's been closer to 12 miles a week than my goal of 20+ -- but my speed is exactly where I want it to be. I ran in Central Park on Friday and achieved my goal pace of ~8-minute miles with ease. But mentally. Ahh, mentally is another story.

I'm freakin' terrified.

The worst of it is, I shouldn't be. I'm a virtual paragon of positive thinking.