Sabotage-proofing through setbacks 162 When I’ m at home, I normally weigh myself every few days. If my weight starts to come up I review what probably caused it and follow my guidelines a little more closely. Over the next few day my weight moves in the right direction again. Without this feedback mechanism I lost touch with where my weight was at and found myself back where I started. I was so angry with myself! I found myself thinking‘ This is all too hard. Why bother at all – it is just not worth the struggle!’ What intrigued me was that my mind was so very prepared to give up. Rather than turn my experience into a learning exercise, it wanted it to be failure experience. Our unconscious is not particularly complicated or sophisticated, but it is sly and crafty( much like refrigerators and pantries really!). Its greatest power comes from stealth, from staying below the radar so that we are not aware that it is at work until it is too late, until we have blown the diet and allowed our old bad habits to re-establish themselves. Failure has to be created One of the main strategies our unconscious uses as saboteur is to set us up to see eating more healthily as an‘ all-or-nothing’ exercise. Remember the What the Hell Effect that we discussed in Chapter 3? This is the all-or-nothing process in action at two levels. First, we break our diet and pig out – that is the all-or-nothing effect at work at the first level. Then at the second level, we decide that the whole diet is blown and we should give up and go back to eating the old way. This is a classic example of a setback being turned into a failure experience rather than a learning experience. But let me be very clear about this – your unconscious wants you to see this as a failure experience and not as a learning experience, so that you give up completely and stop bothering it by making its life difficult by wanting to change things. It knows how to keep you safe in your usual world in known territory, but take it into new territory and its job becomes much more difficult.