Breakfast like a princess … 45 Given that a calorie is a calorie, there was only one scientific explanation for this surprisingly consistent finding – not the minority, but the majority of people who have to restrict their calorie intake cheat! While a person’ s metabolic rate may slow on a restrictive diet, it is not sufficient to explain this discrepancy. Even if they are in hospital, they sneak food – which is often not hard( even the weight-loss ward that I worked on had vending machines that the weight loss inpatients could easily access to supplement their otherwise highly regimented low calorie diet). I do not see it as cheating at all. I see this as simply normal human behavior. To try and‘ treat’ normal human behavior is a total waste of time for all concerned. If we accept that this is true, it would appear that we are all cheats when it comes to food! Often we lie to ourselves so we are not technically lying when we report that we have stuck to our diet. What I mean by this is we genuinely don’ t remember having eaten the problem food. Our mind, through powerful unconscious maneuvers, makes us forget, or often, not even notice that we ate it in the first place. Hard to believe? If we can drive a car without paying any conscious attention we can certainly eat food and not notice. Often after people have worked with me on this they will come in and tell me how they have caught themselves eating food that they had not planned to eat. This is like alcohol. At medical school I was taught that in taking a history on how much alcohol a patient drinks do one of two things. If possible, have their partner in the room and look at the partner’ s face when the patient is answering the question,‘ How much do you drink each day?’ As in poker, the partner will often demonstrate easy to pick‘ tells’ as they listen to their partner tell a few porkies. Sometimes the‘ tells’ are relatively straightforward like one partner who recently exclaimed during our interview,‘ That’ s bulls ** t! The only time he’ s not drinking is when he’ s asleep.’ The second thing I was taught in assessing alcohol intake was that if we could not get‘ collateral’ history we should simply double what we were told!( So the moral of the story is, if a doctor is asking you how