A study by University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher Barry Braun compared a group of volunteers who sat all day (they even used wheelchairs to visit the bathroom) to a group that didn't sit down at all. The difference in energy expenditure, he told The New York Times, was hundreds of calories – but the level of appetite hormones and hunger in the two groups remained identical. This is significant, because after a very hard workout, you feel hungry. And hundreds of calories a day - let's say 200 - means half a pound weight loss each week.

So how can we use this insight. Sit less. Stand rather than sit at work if you can. Fidget, get up and down if you are watching the telly. Even unvigorous movement uses up those calories.

There's an ad for Special K in Glasgow Central Station which has taken my notice.

A fabulously sexy woman in a red satin dress (yes, it could be you) clearly eats lots of strawberry and chocolate Special K. The word strawberry is less pronounced than CHOCOLATE.

So, here juxtaposed are the words Chocolate with the image of a sexy beautiful woman. The message is Yes, you can be beautiful and wear red figure hugging satin dresses and eat chocolate too. What a fabulous message.

But it is not true for most of us. For most of us, if we eat chocolate, we just get fat. If we are young, we can get away with it until we grow older with the habit.

Our behaviour is triggered by many tiny cues and the advertising world is able to manipulate our responses to these cues really effectively. Thus the Galaxy girl is not a size 16 sitting at home on her own feeling miserable, but a sexy slinky woman, confident, happy. And we all want to be like her, so we better eat Galaxy.

Hypnosis can make you stop desiring chocolate, so that eating it becomes a choice.

Eating less is clearly an important goal in losing weight. Getting a clearer idea of the reasons for eating too much will help us to regain control.

For some of us it is habit. We have got used to eating a bag of crisps with our pint, or eating a cake with our coffee. Maybe we are shopping and eating in the way we did when we were young and active.

For some of us, it is an expression of difficult feelings about ourselves. If we feel unloved, worthless, unattractive, lonely, betrayed, ashamed or guilty, or any number of complex emotions, then we might overeat in order to feel better, to feel in control.

Hypnotherapy deals with these unhelpful feelings. Once you feel comfortable again about who you are, you will have the confidence and the energy to reorganise your eating patterns. Learning to love ourselves, warts and all.

The old saying goes Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper.

The underlying notion is that you can work your breakfast off, but a big dinner will just get stored as fat.

Molly Bray and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama, in the International Journal of Obesity, showed that mice fed a high-fat meal at the beginning at the start of their day managed better than when they were given a high-carb breakfast. Scientists use mice because their bodies respond similar to ours (surprisingly).

But when the high-fat meal was for dinner, they gained weight and developed aspects of metabolic syndrome.

Importantly, these changes were independent of daily total or fat-derived calories.

This study adds to the growing evidence that biological rhythms profoundly influence energy balance.  When we eat certain foods may be as important as the composition of those foods.

Changing our eating habits is key to changing our weight. And if you need help, try hypnosis!