The Low Sacrifice‘ Diet’ 61 What RT also tells us is that this process is too powerful to beat using traditional approaches that rely on self-discipline. No amount of‘ selfdiscipline’ will keep it at bay indefinitely. Sooner or later the unconscious rebellion wins out if we have to restrain our eating too much. The moment you start feeling deprived, you are at risk. As we discussed at the beginning of this book, we have a deep emotional attachment to certain foods – particularly celebratory or‘ party’ foods. This is the key. While people have an attachment to particular fattening foods, it is usually not to all foods. As I started to look more closely, I realized that, of the fattening foods my clients ate, they had a strong attachment to some but not to all of the fattening foods they ate. There are some people, who I will discuss later in the book when we look at unconscious sabotage( Chapters 13 & 14) who are not attached to any foods in particular but are attached to their weight. These people eat lots of whatever food they can lay their hands on. If you find that, as we work through this chapter, you cannot identify any particular foods that you are attached to, this might be why. In the interim, this chapter is for those of you attached to particular‘ forbidden’ foods. While the idea that we are emotionally attached to some, but not all, fattening foods might sound obvious, to a psychotherapist it is a critical hinge point in the process of developing a personal change strategy. Truth be told, RT was leading to some pessimistic thinking about the capacity of humans to lose weight in an environment of temptation. Indeed, RT is the science that sits behind the anti-dieting movement. But RT assumed that there was equal emotional attachment to each fattening food – and, fortunately for us, this is not the case. I applied this to the overweight clients I was working with and found that only a minority of the fattening foods they ate were foods they were particularly attached to – foods that would be a‘ high sacrifice’ to give up. So my approach changed as I realized that it was only the‘ high sacrifice’ foods that would trigger the rebound over-eating dictated by RT. Taking many fattening foods that people ate out of their diet did not bother them at all. As long as they did not feel deprived they did well.