60 Chapter 7 – The Low Sacrifice‘ Diet’: We must have our cake and eat it too The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation. Oscar Wilde We now have all the elements in place to understand the Low Sacrifice‘ Diet’. It is not really a diet in the traditional sense. In essence it is built around the research into Restraint Theory – remember the What the Hell Effect and the Last Supper Effect? The failure to understand Restraint Theory has been the greatest oversight in modern weight-loss program design. This is closely followed by the incorrect emphasis put on exercise that I will be discussing in Chapter 9. To recap, Restraint Theory( RT) tells us that if we have to give up too many good foods, ultimately we will rebel, say‘ What the Hell’ and break our diet. Moreover, we tend to do this with great, devilish delight as we proceed to over-eat and undo all the good work we have done. I call these frequent breaks from a diet‘ mini-binges’. Like smokers who practice the art of repeatedly giving up smoking, some of my clients manage to do this a couple of times a week! If you were to add in their calorie intake every time they broke their diet and had a mini-binge in the course of a week when‘ dieting’, you would find that they were eating around the same, or more, total calories as before they went on the diet! Deprivation means doom to a diet. I think this is the most common cause of people reporting, with confusion, that while they are‘ watching what they eat’ they are not losing weight. An Eating Awareness Diary over five days will usually show what is really happening. While most of the time they are indeed eating healthily, these easily‘ forgotten’ mini-binges make up, plus more, for all the calories they avoid eating the rest of the time.