Despite all of our desires to lose weight, it seems that we eat in spite of common sense. Most of us want to lose weight and are willing to make many sacrifices to achieve it. Yet when we finally reach our goal weight, few of us are able to maintain it. Therefore, we must admit that our desires are completely irrational and simply incompatible with our needs. The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that what governs our appetites, our subconscious, is irrational. It would make me both desire things that are impossible to achieve, urge me to act in order to obtain them, and then punish me for the efforts it induced. However, all statistics have this remarkable feature that they reflect extremely common emotions: the vast majority of us experience the same subconscious message that we are too fat, that we should lose weight, and that this weight loss must come from our diet. That is to say, for our subconscious, losing weight is not only desirable but also possible. Assuming our subconscious is rational, understanding how it works gives us a chance to comprehend what it wants and to be able to achieve it.