Sabotage-proofing through setbacks 161 problem for you? If you eat carbohydrates late at night does that explain your recent weight gain? Become intimate with your body and how all these relationships work and then get ready to learn from your setbacks. Making setbacks learning experiences The key to success with any worthy pursuit in life that involves significant personal challenge, is that setbacks must be seen as learning experiences rather than failure experiences. Setbacks are simply uncomfortable lessons that tell us what to do differently in the future. Setbacks are definitely not evidence that we are doomed to fail – unless we want them to be. You don’ t drown by falling in the water – you drown by staying there. In the same way, your weight-loss plan has not failed because you have had a setback and over-eaten or put on some weight – unless you decide that it represents a failure. Alternatively, you could get out of the water by simply saying – well what did I learn from that? What does this mean I have to do differently next time? After I lost around 10 % of my body weight over nine months or so, I then put it all back on during the following Christmas holiday on an extended overseas trip. As I looked down, around my rotund belly, at the scales I felt completely demoralized. I was back where I started. Nine months of hard work completely wasted. Or so I thought. But I was about to learn a very important lesson about how my mind would like to sabotage my plans. The problem was that for the five weeks I was on holiday I had no access to bathroom scales so I was not aware of how much weight I was putting on. I knew I had gained weight but I completely underestimated how much. I thought I had gained a few pounds but in fact I had put on all the weight I had lost. My eating lifestyle was especially hard to maintain while eating out in countries where we did not speak the language and most meals were akin to a food lucky dip.