Goal sabotage 54 If you really want to develop some pain that will talk to your unconscious mind in getting you motivated, do this simple motivational exercise. Close your eyes and spend a couple of minutes imagining yourself as 10 kilograms( 22 pounds) bigger than you are now. Notice how you feel about that? If you are unhappy about your weight now, imagine how you will feel about it if you were even heavier again. Hold this feeling. Remember it. Bring it up in your mind every evening and every morning as you drop off to sleep and wake up. What do you think is easier to do: lose 5 % of your weight now or 15 % in five to ten years time to get to the same point? I could tell you what the research shows, but I think you can guess the answer …. being a lazy psychiatrist I’ m going to work on the 5 % now. The third unrealistic expectation that would-be-dieters have is that losing weight is easier than it is. Now this is an interesting problem because the expectation is propagated by the medical profession as much as by the individual. I think that the gap, the degree of difficulty, between how hard people expect weight loss to be and how hard the medical profession makes it, is huge. I do not think that my colleagues realize what they are asking of people when they throw out lines like,‘ You really should stop eating those bad foods and get out and exercise three or four days a week’. Embedded in seemingly helpful and simple statements like this are huge life changes that few people are capable of making for the longterm even with lots of psychological support. As a psychotherapist who spends his life helping people to change themselves and the way they lead their life, it is really obvious that even intelligent, highly motivated people would find it difficult to‘ stop eating those bad foods and exercise three or four days a week’. To understand this problem you need to understand the psychology of your typical doctor. While it is changing with the recent introduction of post graduate degrees, most doctors had to make the top 0.5 % of the academic scale in the country to make it into medical school. While a minority are particularly intellectually gifted, the majority are of above