The sleeping dragon of rebellion 25 What was so psychologically attractive about this rule was the message that I did not have to give up my favorite foods! Who could say no to that? The promise of not having to go hungry and being able to eat all my favorite foods – admittedly in lesser amounts and in different ways – got me in. After all, what did I have to lose – a few more weeks of staying overweight? I was planning to do that anyway! This approach allowed me to stop thinking about how to diet and to actually get started. Like most diets, this one started with a harder initial‘ detoxification’ phase designed to give you the early reward of losing weight to motivate you to keep going. I think it might have involved giving up all alcohol for a couple of weeks – well, that wasn’ t going to happen. I had read every article ever published by the medical profession on the benefits of a couple of glasses of red wine a day, so I knew that not drinking any alcohol at all was just plain silly! But even at this early stage in my weight-loss career I knew that fundamental decree‘ begin as you wish to continue’ as we discussed in the last chapter. Besides, I wanted to know if I would lose weight while still eating the foods I loved. This meant that I lost weight more slowly – around a kilogram( 2.2 pounds) every couple of weeks. But what was really cool was that I was losing weight without making any real sacrifices. Later we will talk in more detail about what the actual diet – more correctly:‘ healthy eating lifestyle’ – entails, but right now I want to focus on why I was able to eat this way for the long-term. Because I did not have to count calories or avoid my favorite foods, I suffered no real sense of deprivation. It was not until I started reading the research into what is known as Restraint Theory that I began to see why this was so critically important. Building the sensitive new age guy This story begins in the later stages of World War Two. Did you ever wonder what became of conscientious objectors? Well, at least some of them at least, were experimented on. It was called the Minnesota Experiment. In an attempt to understand the experiences of their less