Most of us want to lose weight. Even normal weight people believe they should be thinner. And yet as a population, we are gaining weight. The average weight has gone up by over 10 pounds since the 70s. And yet there are diet foods in the supermarket, slimming clubs are busy, and we all have a pretty clear idea of what constitutes healthy eating. Despite all of this, most of us continue to gain weight. So what to do?

Well, the research shows that diets don`t work. Most people who go on diets put on more weight. But you can lose weight and keep it off. How`s that then?

Making little changes to your diet works well.Rather than completely change the way you eat, what little changes could you make? Well, for me, first of all over a weekend I gave up sugar in my tea and coffee. Nasty at first, but I prefer it now. Then I gave up milk in my tea. My weight stabilised a bit lower down the scale. I focused on breakfast for my next trick. Rather than 2 slices of toast, I cut one slice in half. (I realised I thought it was inefficient using just half the toaster!) That change took my weight down by 8 pounds over about 3 months. What now? My current change is to cut out the butter on the breakfast toast. I just have the jam. I am on day 3, after a friend hypnotised me. So far so good.

So, small changes. Get them bedded in and move onto the next. If you can reduce your food intake by 150 calories a day in each change, then you will be able to reduce your weight and maintain it. A hypnotherapist can help you focus on the best change to make and help you stick with it, until it becomes second nature.

Most sorts of diets involve limiting the range of foods we can eat. Any restriction of this kind will result in weight loss. So a grapefruit and sausage diet will result in weight loss. The problem is that we can't sustain this sort of diet for a long time. It would make us miserable and eventually will make us unwell, because we need a wide range of nutrients to keep us healthy.

Once we have lost the weight we usually go back to our old ways, and those old ways were the cause of the increased weight. And many of us give up long before the weight has gone.

Instead of a fancy diet, we need to find a way of eating that fits our preferences and our way of life, so that we can lose weight and maintain a healthy weight for ever.

Hypnotherapy will help you identify this for you. Quickly and effectively.

Most of our every day lives are determined not by conscious intention or deliberate choice, but by our unconscious and automatic responses to features in our environment. Of course, we make some active choices or decisions every day. We know about those, because the conscious us was actively involved. We might be a bit sceptical about the idea that most of what we do is automatic and preconscious, not passing through the thinking part of our brains before action takes place.

Research by John Bargh and colleagues has great significance to those of us wanting to manage our weight. We respond to cues around us without thinking. So if we are watching the telly and a food ad comes on, we go and get a snack, without consciously making the connection. If we regularly snack in front of the telly, just the sight of the telly on makes us get a snack. Those trying to sell us stuff know about these cues and triggers too. At my local service station above the rows of sweets and crisps by the till it says HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER. What do you think the automatic response might be?

We can help ourselves by starting to note any automatic eating. Am I eating (sometimes we are completely unaware of it) and why might I be eating? Am I hungry? Am I eating because the person sitting next to me is munching something? Or because it is 3pm and I always nip out for snack at this time?  Most automatic eating is hand food, and the action is hand, mouth, hand, mouth. Spot these and you are on the way to managing your eating.

Hypnosis helps you to break this automatic behaviour.

To lose weight, we need to change our eating habits. Most of us know what our bad habits are. It might be chocolate or takeaways, or just eating till we are stuffed. Hypnosis helps you to identify the problem habits and gets you to introduce good habits. But you might be eating to compensate for some emotional upset. Going on a diet is not going to help here, dealing with the upset is the place to start. A hypnotherapy session will begin by finding out if eating is the problem, or whether it is a symptom of an emotional disturbance. When you feel emotionally strong, then you are in a good position to think about changing your eating habits.

When the time comes to focus on your eating behaviour, when you have decided what changes you want to make,  these decisions are embedded in your subconscious through hypnosis. So if you are trying to cut out chocolate, your subconscious alerts you to this helpful decision, and keeps you out of the shop and encourages you to say no. Little by little this becomes normal behaviour and eating chocolate is something you just don't think about any more.

It means you are not needing to use your willpower all day long - which would only result in a big binge anyway. And as I have blogged before, willpower is always in very short supply.

I have just received a marketing email about fat burning coffee. That sounds just the ticket. Does this work?

If it did, we would all have heard about it and would all be thin.

It is possible that some drink or other speeds up our metabolism a bit so more calories could well be lost. Calories might well be burned, but would we lose weight? It takes 10,000 steps a day to burn off 1 pound a week. So how much of this coffee would we have to drink?

Most of all though, the problem is belief in Magic. These marketeers are selling Magic. When we are looking for Magic, we are not looking to make the changes to our habits that are necessary for long term weight maintenance. Those changes don`t have to onerous. Just a few small changes every month and you can manage your weight.

People often think about hunger and appetite in the same way, as
though the words were interchangeable. But the drivers
within the body are quite different.
• Hunger is the body’s way of telling you of a physiological need for food. It occurs when blood glucose levels decline and hormones, such as ghrelin, rise. The body’s response to these fluctuations is symptoms of hunger which might include a rumbling belly. Other symptoms can include frowning, headaches, tiredness, rattiness. For me, I feel strain around my eyes when I am hungry. Hunger drives us to eat in order to restore our body’s homeostatic levels. And the drive is very powerful indeed. When we are overhungry we will eat anything, ideally something full of fat and sugar. Once homestasis is achieved, satisfaction — hunger’s opposite — is reached.
• Appetite on the other hand is a psychological desire to eat, based more upon eating experiences, such as memories of good food, or other sensory cues such as taste, smell or texture of food. While hunger occurs only when the body needs food, appetite can occur at any time, irrespective of the body’s need for energy. Appetite is why many still reach for pudding after a large meal. Appetite can be correlated with the hedonic (fun-loving) centres of the brain. In such cases, the physiological cues of satisfaction, such a full stomach, higher glucose levels and changes in hormone levels and mix — are overridden. You know you are full, you know you are not hungry, but you eat the cake anyway. Not hunger, but appetite.

Childhood obesity is a problem in Scotland. As the Scottish Government reports, in 2009, almost a third of children (29.7%) were outwith the healthy weight range (31.0% of boys and 28.3% of girls).

The usual response is to focus on overweight children and get them to eat less and get more active. Canadian research shows that there is no marked differences in physical ac­tivity between overweight and lean children, at least not when corrected for the increased ef­fort it takes to move larger bodies. Based on actual measurements of physical activity using sophisticated accelerometric devices, only 5% of Canadian adults and children meet the recommended levels for vigorous physi­cal activity per week. It is probably the same in Scotland. If only 5%, then not just the overweight are inactive.

New research from Germany looked at why some children get fat and some remain lean, given that they seem to behave more or less the same way and live in the same environment.  They tested the following risk factors on children's BMI: maternal BMI, mater­nal smoking in pregnancy, low parental socioeconomic status, lack of breast feeding and high TV viewing time .

It turns out that the estimated effects of all risk factors (except lack of breastfeeding) on BMI were greatest for children who have the highest BMI. In other words, it is not that lean children don’t also watch a lot of TV or have mothers who smoked during pregnancy. It’s that fatter children are more sensitive to these factors than thinner children.

Thus, children who are genetically predis­posed to obesity are far more likely to pack on the pounds when spending hours in front of the TV than children who are genetically less prone to put on weight. The same could probably be said for overeating or any of the other environ­mental drivers of obesity, which have greater effects in promoting weight gain in some children than in others.

So, what to make of this then? It seems a bit of a lottery. Children who are genetically sensitive to becoming overweight will eat and behave just the same as other children, but they get fat and the others don`t. As a parent, this says one thing to me. Protect all children from the risk because we have no real way of knowing who is sensitive.

That means, going out for walks with your children, encouraging them to take up dancing or drumming or football, whatever physical exercise pleases them. Reduce the obsogenic risks in the household - that is, don`t buy biscuits, sweets, takeaways routinely. Reduce screen time to less than 4 hours a day. Our modern lifestyle provides the great risk of obesity.

Research by Kings College London shows that children with low self-esteem are overweight as adults, and this link is stronger with women.

Professor David Collier, one of the researchers, said that this is not about people with deep psychological problems, as all the anxiety and low self-esteem were within the normal range. So helping children to feel better about themselves and less anxious will help reduce the risk of being overweight as adults. For women, self-esteem is strongly linked to how we feel about our attractiveness. We can feel and be attractive even with ordinary bodies, we don't need to be perfect. But if you feel bad about yourself, your confidence low, then you can see that dieting isn`t going to deal with any excess weight. Until you feel good about yourself, any unhelpful eating behaviours, like comfort eating, will continue to defeatThis is an important message for young people, especially girls. As I have blogged before:

• don't talk about dieting in front of the children
• don't express anxiety about your body

And on the practical front, don't have fun foods like chocolate, biscuits, cakes, crisps, fizzy pop in the house all the time and available as everyday consumables. Treat treats as treats.

Yesterday the Scottish Government published summary statistics showing changes in overweight and obesity in Scotland between 1995 and 2009. It shows an upward trend of obesity and overweight. This is a serious health problem for Scotland.

In 2009 almost two-thirds of men aged 16-64 (66.3%) and more than half of women (58.4%) were overweight (including obese). I bet most people think that overweight is a woman's problem! Certainly women worry about it more than men. In 1995 the figures were 55.6% for men. So 20% more men are obese or overweight in just 14 years. In 1995 47.2% women were classified as overweight or obese, so by 2009 the number had gone up by 21%.

The increase was greater amongst those who were obese (including morbidly obese) where the percentage for men increased from 15.9% to 26.8%  (over a quarter of the population and up 68%)between 1995 and 2009 and from 17.3% to 26.4% for women. So more than a quarter of Scotland's population is obese. Obesity has risen faster than general overweight.

In 2009, almost a third of children (29.7%) were outwith the healthy weight range (31.0% of boys and 28.3% of girls). For boys, prevalence increased between 1998 and 2008, followed by a sharp decline in 2009. For girls the corresponding figures were very similar each year and did not vary significantly. The Scottish Government has established a National Indicator to reduce the rate of increase in the proportion of children with their BMI outwith a healthy range by 2018.

Well, it is great for a few weeks so you can squeeze back into an outfit for a special event, like a wedding or the summer holiday.

But there are a few problems with dieting if your goal is long term weight reduction. One is that once you reach the desired weight, you stop the diet. It is a bit like stopping the medicine once the symptoms go when you have a chronic illness. As soon as you stop taking the medicine, the symptoms come back. Restraining your eating, as when you are dieting, is a risk factor for bingeing as well as more serious eating disorders. You will know that when you are dieting you are fixated on food, your weight and your body image. Restraining your eating (being good, missing lunch to save the calories, depriving yourself of foods you enjoy) tends to result in major lapses – the What the Hell effect. One breach of your diet and you feel that you have blown it, a failure. This social stress results in us eating significantly more food than when we are feeling okay. You might as well eat the rest of the packet of biscuits and indeed, most of us in these circumstances stuff in the equivalent of a big meal. And this overeating becomes another stress, because it makes you feel that you are completely unable to control your eating, making you feel bad about yourself, lowering your self esteem

Research has shown that dieters tend to describe themselves in negative terms, and have low self-esteem, heightened social anxiety, and body dissatisfaction.

So, if you want to lose weight, is there an alternative to dieting? Yes, there is. Come and see me and find out. (Or read some more of this blog for some free tips!)