The National Institute for Clinical Excellence is recommending that all food manufacturers stop using transfats.

We all know that saturated fats ( in dairy products and red meat) are bad for you. But transfats are even worse.

They damage the cells of our bodies. Each cell has an outer membrane made up of a phospho-lipid bi-layer. That is a layer of phosphorus molecules and a layer of fat molecules. Transfats inhibit the proper working of this bi-layer, because transfats are rigid and stiff whereas other fats are pliable and soft. If the membrane around the cell is not working, the cell can't work as well as it should.

You find transfats (also known as hydrogenated fats) in manufactured food due to high temperature cooking. Even healthy vegetable oils become transfats when heated. So your chip  oilmight be healthy sunflower, but after 2 or 3 heatings, the oil turns into transfats and must be thrown away.

Instead of chips try this. Cut spuds into 6 or 8 wedges and put in a bowl. Pour over a tablespoon or two of healthy oil (rapeseed is cheaper than olive and just as good, often just called vegetable oil and is pale in colour) and add a bit of salt. Mix together with your hands. Cook in the oven for 20 mins at 180C. Cost 40p and much better than oven chips which take just as long!

If you are back on a diet again to try to control your weight, then you will have learned something.

Dieting has not worked for you. Are you meeting the same people in the lose weight clubs? Maybe it is not working for them either.

Yo-yo dieting is when you go on a diet, lose weight, regain it all (and a bit more sometimes) then back onto a diet. Yo-yo dieting has  been linked to illness such as cardiovascular disease. As well as feeling very depressing.

There are fashions and fads in dieting, but one thing remains true. They don't work for the long-term. We just cannot live for 20 years following one of these diets.

So what to do instead. Well, nothing new, nothing we don't all know. We need to change our pattern of eating. And we want something that doesn't require us to be on the misery of diet, deny and deprive. We want to feel easy about our eating. Comfortable. And we don't want to be constantly thinking and agonising about our eating and our weight.

So, try hypnosis. Find out the eating behaviour that gives you the most trouble, and get rid of it with hypnosis. Making small changes every week, till you are eating in a way that you find easy and which helps you control your weight. Rather than a huge change, tight dietary restraint, and the depressing recognition that after stopping the restrictive diet, all that weight will come on again.

Try hypnosis.

I am not a great one for counting calories, but I know that 100 calories is not a lot.  It is 2,000 steps. Walking from one bus-stop to the next or using the stairs at work. Or half a bag of crisps or a small bar of chocolate.

J. O. Hill, H. R. Wyatt, G. W. Reed, and J. C. Peters (2003) report in the magazine Science that an increase in net expenditure of 100 calories a day can stop the increase in obesity in 90% of the population. Just walking an extra 2,000 steps, you might never gain another pound.

Chocolate contains alkaloids, including theobromine and phenethylamine which have physiological effects on the body that include elevating serotonin levels in the brain. Serotonin is a happy hormone. Low levels of serotonin are linked to mood disorders. One of the primary actions of antidepressants is to raise brain serotonin levels and so get rid of low mood.


People who feel they are too fat don't feel good about themselves. Sometimes they can feel terrible. And a lot of people who worry about their weight eat chocolate - a conspiracy of fat and sugar if there ever was one!

Natalie Rose and colleagues from the University of California have an article in the May 2010 copy of Archives of Internal Medicine. They report that participants in their study who screened positive for possible depression had significantly more chocolate consumption (8.4 servings per month) than those not screening positive (5.4 servings per month) for depression.

In fact, those with the highest depression scores reported even higher chocolate consumption (11.8 servings per month).

So if you are unhappy about your weight and yet keep eating chocolate, consider hypnosis as a way to overcome feelings of depression or low mood. Better for your health than using chocolate. And then get stuck in to controlling your weight in a sustainable, automatic and healthy way. With hypnosis again of course!

There is huge pressure on us these days to fit in with the current fashionable shape. And our failure to achieve a perfect body can leave some of us in serious distress, ruining our lives.

Just as we don't all have the same shoe size, so our bodies are all different. And the majority are not like the models we see. Their weights are now 23% less than the average, whereas in the past, they were 8% lighter.

Our perceptions of the ideal body weight have changed in line with this. The ideal is now much lower than it was before. So we are now chasing an ideal weight which has moved down with fashion trends.

No wonder we all feel so rotten about our appearance. Hypnotherapy can help you to improve your body image, so that you are comfortable being who you are. If then you want to lose weight, you will find it increasingly easy.

 Love the skin you are in, as they say on the telly.

And the same applies for all interventions.

So, if you have managed to lose weight, keep on with the treatment. (Most of us stop things once we have reached our goal. We stop driving lessons once we have passed the test. But in fact, we practice driving afterwards, which is a form of training. We tend to stop using the bus.)

If you have lost weight on a diet, the weight will come back on as soon as you stop, unless you change your eating patterns (a new intervention). If you go back to your old ways of eating, your old weight will come back again. Most dieters regain the weight they have lost. Depressing thought.

Hypnosis helps with making the behavioural changes necessary for a lower weight. To lose weight, we have to eat less, and hypnosis helps us with sticking to the plan.

Making small changes to our lifestyles makes it more likely we will gradually adapt to more healthy eating behaviours for ever. And hypnosis gives just that bit of extra support to help us keep on track.

The June 2010 edition of the  Journal of the American Dietetic Association includes an interesting study reviewing food commercials on TV in the United States. The researchers  taped food advertisements during 84 hours of prime time TV and 12 on Saturday mornings. In 3,000 ads, 800 food items were promoted.

Their results suggest that a diet consisting of observed food items would provide

• 2,560% of the recommended daily servings for sugars,
• 2,080% of the recommended daily servings for fat,

But only:

• 40% of the recommended daily servings for vegetables,
  
• 32% of the recommended daily servings for dairy, and
  
• 27% of the recommended daily servings for fruits

Advertising works, which is why it is done. We may not eat only the foods advertised, but we take in this information, and as a result, we do eat the foods advertised and it helps us to get fat.

This is not just a problem in the US. It is here too. Have a careful look next time the ads come. Mostly the ads are for the things that we ought not to eat. Only a few are for the healthy stuff.

Here are some simple techniques to help you curb your unhelpful eating behaviours.

1. Use a smaller plate. A filled plate is always more encouraging than a half-empty plate.
2. Eat slowly. This gives the stretch receptors in your stomach the time to notice the food.
3. Never eat watching the telly, working at the computer, walking or anything else. When you eat, do nothing else.  This way you will notice what you eat and enjoy it more, and be more aware of when you are full.
4. When you start to feel full, stop eating. The Japanese stop eating when they think they are 80% satisfied.
5. Practice leaving half your plate of food uneaten. Decide which half you will eat, eat that half and then push the plate away and be finished. Many of us were brought up to eat everything on the plate, and we need to unlearn this.
6. Buy small packages. We tend to consider one package to be one portion, so small is good.
7. Try hypnotherapy to help you change your unhelpful behaviours.