36 • If IAm So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight? taught how to manage our brains. We have negative thinking that is mostly unconscious and conditioned. This thinking leads to negative emotion on a regular basis that we do our best to avoid. As part of the brain's survival system, we are programmed to avoid pain. Again, this served us as we were evolving throughout thousands of years, but it is no longer serving us. We have way too many easy ways to avoid pain that have nothing to do with our survival. In fact, avoiding pain with false pleasure actually leads to more and more compounding pain. We feel stress, anxiety, or boredom and we deal with it by overeating. We get some relief with the taste and dopamine and then we are right back into negative emotion but now with the added negative consequence of weight gain and increased desire. We are not attempting to manage our desire for overeating, we are attempting to eliminate it.