For some of us, it is just the sight of food. See it, want it, eat it.

Advertisers benefit from this by showing us appetising foods with lots of happy people enjoying them. TV food advertising has been shown to make us eat significantly more of anything. Just watching the ads makes us rush to the cupboards. This sort of eating is not related to meals. It tends to be hand food - biscuits, crisps, sweets. And it is eaten without much thought - hand, mouth, hand, mouth. This sort of eating is called automatic eating. You scarcely know how much you have eaten. In fact, we look into the crisp packet and are astonished the

Researchers conducted 2 experiments. First, children aged 7-11 watched a cartoon including food ads. They ate 45% more snack food while watching the show than children who watched the same cartoon with non-food ads.

They show that just half an hour a day watching telly the would lead to a weight gain of nearly 10 pounds a year (we are talking about children here) unless they cut down their other calorie intake or increased their physical activity.

In a second experiment,adults watched TV interspersed with snack food ads. They ate significantly more than those who saw ads with a nutritional or healthy food message. These effects persisted even after the TV viewing.

Adults and children increased eating of any foods in the house, not just those advertised.

“This research shows a direct and powerful link between television food advertising and calories consumed by adults and children,” said Jennifer Harris, PhD, the study’s lead author and director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center. “Food advertising triggers automatic eating, regardless of hunger, and is a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic".

What to do about this if you are wanting to control your weight? Watch less telly. Don't always have snack foods in the house to tempt you when the ads give you the munchies.

Some of us just eat for something to do, because we feel bored. The sort of food we eat at times like this is very unlikely to be a simple ham salad. More likely, a packet of biscuits. Boredom eating tends to be automatic eating. What is that then?

Automatic eating is the eating that just seems to continue till the packet is finished. Like munching through a bag of crisps while you are watching the telly. The bag is empty before you know it. The hand to mouth continues until there is nothing left to eat.

Automatic eating makes us fat. We have no idea how much we have eaten, because we didn't really notice we were doing it. Hand, mouth, hand, mouth. So the inbuilt system that tells us we are full doesn't work. We just not paying attention, not to the food or to the signals from our body.

Automatic eating tends to be hand food, eaten while you are doing something else. Because you don't know you are doing it, it follows that when you kick this habit, you won't feel deprived because you weren't aware anyway.

Hypnotherapy to the rescue. Out with the habit, quickly and permanently.

Most of what we do during the day is automatic. We don't consider and ponder everything we do. We would be exhausted. We do things instinctively, intuitively. This saves us time and energy. What we do gets triggered by various cues - for example, at its most simple, we answer the phone when it rings, we drive on at a green light.

We also eat automatically. So in an airline, when the food is put in front of us, we eat it, hungry or not. And the most automatic eating of all is handfood - the food we eat with our hands. Pizza, cake, crisps, nuts, biscuits. For most of us, handfood is what puts on the pounds.

If you want to lose weight, check out the handfood you eat. Count up the calories and prepare to be shocked. It is likely to work out at the calorie content of an entire meal. If this could be your issue, then your resolution might be "I will only eat food on crockery with cutlery". Straightforward. Easy to remember. Effective.

And if you feel you couldn't imagine life without crisps, give me a call and see how easy it is to change!