But size 12 is a healthy, slim normal. And Dr Alex Yellowlees of the Glasgow Priory agrees. He believes that thinking size 12 is outsize is unhealthy. Too right.

This is all in today's Herald. A normal girl, Glasgow teenager Angelica Gray, size 12, is doing a photoshoot for Vogue. This is terrific news, in the fight against size 0 role models. The rather bleaker news is that she is becoming the new face of Evans, known for its outsize fashions. At size 12.

The Herald was full of good stuff today. Scottish Borders Council is no longer providing biscuits at their meetings. Someone spotted the silliness of debating the problem of obesity whilst tucking into the free bikkies. The wise spokesperson said "If we regularly served up spoonfuls of salt, sugar and fat at meetings there would be an outcry but in effect that is just what biscuits are." Good man.

In part, it is social pressure coming at us through the media, because even people with a healthy bodyweight want to lose weight.

The charity, Eating Disorder Association, has linked up with Dove, who do the commercials with women of all shapes and sizes, to promote understanding of how the media affects our body image and our self esteem through Body Talk. It is primarily targeted at young people, but there is good material that we can all benefit from.

We all need to understand this, as a negative body image and low self-esteem really does affect our lives deeply.

So why do we want to lose weight? We can be healthy and fit even when we are on the round side. Look at this great clip of the Roly Polys who used to dance for Les Dawson in the 80s!

There is a lot of social pressure on us to be thin, and as a result we tend to have very negative attitudes towards our bodies, and go on the road of Diet, Deprive and Deny. As a result of this, some people get eating disorders, others binge, others feel self-disgust and generally feel bad about their apparent lack of control.

Dieting does not have a good track record of helping us to lose weight. You will recognise a number of the problems that comes with dieting. One is that you end up focusing on food when this is the last thing you should be doing. You eat according to tight rules and regulations, rather than responding to your body's hunger signals. In the end, you lose touch with this important sensory information and you don't know anymore when you are hungry, or worse, when you are full. The pleasure of eating disappears as we count out the number of points we are allowed or the number of calories in an item. And we end up eating bad things anyway, and then we have broken the rules, are a complete failure and we may as well stuff ourselves as we are going to be a fatso forever anyway.

This self talk is not helpful. What really is the goal? If you set a goal to lose 1 stone, and you then lose that stone, will you set yourself another target, and get yourself back on the treadmill?

So what is your real goal? Would you like to be in control of your eating again? Feel healthier? Eat better food? Be happier? Identify your real goal. And hypnotherapy will help you achieve it.

One of my clients the other day told me that she had been on a diet for 30 years on and off, but was stubbornly one stone overweight. Clearly dieting doesn't work for her. Jennifer Savage and Leann Birch from Pennsylvania State University have just published research on this very problem!

A total of 176 women were assessed at baseline and followed over four years to see how their weight changed. There were 3 types of women identified.

1. Those making no effort to control their weights (N)
   
2. Those using healthy strategies (H)
   
3. Those using both healthy and unhealthy strategies (H+U)

Women using a mix of healthy and unhealthy strategies (H+U) gained significantly more weight (4.56 kg) than the N group (1.51 kg) and H group (1.02 kg) over the four year observation period. This was after taking statistical account of things like education, income and initial BMI..

Perhaps not surprisingly, the H+U weight control group demonstrated greater anxiety over weight concerns and restraining their food intake and had poorer eating attitudes than women in the H or N groups.

So what were the strategies these women were using to control their weight?

• Healthy strategies included reducing calories and amount of food, eliminating sweets, junk food and snacks, increasing activity, eating more fruit and vegetables, eating less fat or less high-carb food, and eating less meat.

• Unhealthy strategies included skipping meals, using diet pills, liquid diets, appetite suppressants, laxatives, enemas, diuretics, and fasting. The women who used these strategies gained weight.

As the researchers point out, the probable reason that women who used healthy weight control strategies were more successful was simply because these strategies are more sustainable. Unhealthy strategies can lead to loss of control, overeating and bingeing, which over time results in increased weight. So it is the way you try to control your weight that determines success.

In these days of relative plenty, hunger is not the main trigger to eat. Most of us don't really know what hunger feels like anymore. 

Vision - what we see - is one part of the complex pattern of factors influencing the amount of food we eat. So if we are looking through the kitchen cupboards and spot a bag of crisps, we are likely to eat them, even if we have just eaten a full meal. If there are no crisps to be seen, we manage to do without.

Many of us eat because we see something nice. We get hungry watching the food programmes on the telly, or reading a magazine, or wandering through the aisles in the supermarket. All these things make us think about food and eating. So our eyes are more likely to tempt us to eat than the signals coming from our body.

Yvonne Linné, Britta Barkeling, Stephan Rössner and Pål Rooth of Huddinge University Hospital in Stockholm show that eating with a blindfold decreased the intake of food, without making people feel less full. Eating blindfolded, therefore, may force us to rely more on internal signals.

Learning to recognise these internal, physiological cues of hunger and satisfaction will go a long way to controlling the amount that we eat. Just knowing that cravings and desires to eat come from external cues is really helpful. If you don't want to be always snacking, then don't have the snacks in the house. In the house is in the hand, in the hand is in the mouth.