Self-sabotage 156 like alcohol, nicotine and marijuana, the whole goal of eating is as a reward – a reward to make us feel better emotionally? If this were the case, I think you can see how this mismatch will pitch our unconscious desire to use food to feel better, against our conscious desire to eat less to lose weight. One of the primary reasons why the unconscious will always win is because consciously we don’ t even realize we are in battle. So how common is the conscious – unconscious mismatch? I think this is one of the most common forces behind weight loss self-sabotage. A story that illustrates this comes from one of my morbidly obese clients who was a highly emotionally intelligent social worker. Let’ s call her Beth. Beth, told me how she had come to realize that food was not only the ultimate reward for her but it was pretty much the only reward in her life. She used this reward, not just to give herself a special treat to feel good, but to constantly keep her mood from tumbling into depression. Beth used food not to survive physically, but to survive emotionally. Beth described how she got through her day by doing a task and then rewarding herself with food. On particularly tough days, as she dealt with her two disabled children and her unemployed husband, she would spend five minutes on a task and then reward herself with chocolate, in one form or another, or a sweet pastry. In this way Beth just managed her way through her difficult life. As this became clearer in therapy she realized that she had a major mismatch. Her unconscious believed that food was the main way to cope with day-to-day life. This is a more exaggerated form of comfort eating. Food is being used, just like heroin is, to improve mood. It became evident to both of us that until this was dealt with, and other ways to improve Beth’ s mood were found, any attempt to lose weight was doomed to failure by self-sabotage.‘ Self-sabotage’ is simply our unconscious at