Goal sabotage 55 average intelligence, but much more importantly, they are highly organized when it comes to processing large amounts of information and highly disciplined in learning, analyzing and regurgitating it. The origins of our motivations to be a doctor are varied but inevitably we are driven by an intense desire to be a doctor( whatever that means to each of us) and a desire to achieve highly, often accompanied by an intense fear of failure. In short, doctors are not representative of the general community in the way in which they achieve things. But doctors are, of course, human and like most people they apply their view of how they do things to advising others on how to do things. In contrast to other doctors, any psychotherapist, working to help people to change, would expect, and be very happy with their clients if they just started to behave differently when it came to a problem behavior – even if the desired outcome did not happen for some time! This means that when it comes to weight loss I get excited when people start to change the way they eat – even if they initially don’ t lose any weight at all! Psychotherapists know that once people begin to change, even with baby steps, as long as they keep persisting they always get to where they need to go. What kills persistence is seeing setbacks as failure experiences rather than as learning experiences. It is our expectations that will define whether or not we will experience setbacks as a learning experience that we will persist with, or as failures that mean we should stop trying completely. Managing expectations is a key principle that sits behind this book and explains why I approach the treatment of weight loss very differently from my medical and dietitian colleagues. We must make it easier for people trying to lose weight by demanding less of them if we are going to change the poor outcomes of