To lose weight, we need to change our eating habits. A crash diet might help in the short term, but we can't eat like that for months on end. Most of us know what our bad habits are. It might be chocolate or takeaways, or just eating till we are stuffed. It may be because we are troubled in some part of our life. Hypnosis helps to identify the problem areas and then helps you introduce good eating habits so you can manage your weight for the long-term.

Rather than be thinking about food all day in order to try to reduce the amount you eat, hypnosis embeds decisions about eating in your subconscious, so that new behaviours become automatic, with no effort. 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. If you are unhappy, then hypnotherapy can help you to feel more positive and optimistic.

It means you are not needing to use your willpower all day long to help you to limit your eating - which would only result in a big binge anyway.

A few months ago a client came for help in stopping his habit of eating chocolate and cheese when he got home. He was putting on weight. After discussion, it struck me that he came home starving and chocolate and cheese gave him urgently needed calories. He ate a tiny rapid breakfast, didn't stop for lunch, grabbed a snack around 3pm and came home to stuff himself with chocolate.

Often when we are worried about our weight, we skip meals. If we have a job which is overwhelming we will skip meals. It doesn't work.

My advice to this client was to eat more during the day, with a gap of no more than 4 hours between. A discussion about the contents of his cupboard and fridge demonstrated that the components of a meal were nowhere to be found. He felt he was eating too much (well, he was eating a lot of chocolate) and I felt he wasn't eating enough throughout the day.

So I was interested in this advice from  “Best Weight: A Practical Guide to Office-Based Weight Management", recently published by the Canadian Obesity Network. This is not a self-help book, but this snippet is relevant for everyone.

In our experience, the majority of patients who struggle with binge-eating episodes do not eat regularly throughout the day, and tend to struggle with binge behaviours from mid-afternoon onward. In these patients, the binge is likely precipitated by true physical "homeostatic" hunger (a need for calories) rather than a hedonistic emotional appetite (need for comfort foods). Well-distributed calories and the use of more satisfying protein-rich foods may be enough to resolve the disorder in these patients.

Before diagnosing someone with binge-eating disorder, you should first ensure that a subtle form of homeostatic hunger is not triggering or encouraging their binge behaviour. Have patients follow the eating instructions below to see whether their binge eating gets better:

• Breakfast containing a minimum of 350 kcal with at least 15 g of protein, to be consumed within 30 minutes of waking
• Snacking every 2.5 hours between meals with snacks containing 100–200 kcal and at least 8 g of protein
• Lunch containing a minimum of 300–400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• Dinner containing a minimum of 400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• For every hour of sustained exercise, add an additional 100–150 kcal that are primarily carbohydrate based

It is now normal for women to feel dissatisfied with their bodies. Even women of normal weight feel their bodies need improvement. It seems that men also suffer body dissatisfaction.

The relationship between body satisfaction, self-esteem, dieting and exercise were studied. Overall, the degree of body dissatisfaction felt by men and women was the same. The main difference is that men wanted to be heavier, whereas women wanted to be thinner.

And women reported exercising for weight control more than men. Unfortunately, exercising for weight control is associated with disregulated eating. Disregulated eaters think in very black-and-white terms. If they are not thin, then they are fat. If they are not perfect, then they are a complete failure. They starve themselves on a strict diet (restraining their eating), then go on a binge.  Their standards of perfection are too high. It is okay to be imperfect because that is the way things really are.

The things that may lead to the development of disordered eating are internalised and expressed at a very early age. Research with 8- to 10-year-old children showed that they express weight, dieting, and physique concerns that reflect Western sociocultural values and preoccupation with body weight and dieting. 

If this sounds like you, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy will help you learn how to manage these All or Nothing urges. Learning how to fail well is as important as learning how to succeed. Accepting ourselves as fallible requires us to confront our fears, so that failure is not awful, terrible or scary but something that we can manage with grace.

People whose food intake has been drastically reduced – examples include war and famine as well as restrictive diets – usually regain pretty quickly whatever weight they lost. The most famous experiment which proved this is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment carried out in the 50s by Ancel Keys and colleagues.

In the Minnesota Experiment, 36 normal, healthy men were restricted to half their normal calories for 6 months. Although this was described as a study of "semistarvation,"  cutting the men's rations to half of their former intake is precisely the level of caloric deficit used to define "conservative" treatments for obesity (Stunkard, 1993)

One of the results was that the men became intensely preoccupied with food which interfered considerably with their ability to concentrate on their usual activities. Food became the pre-eminent topic of conversation and fantasy. (Is this ringing any bells?) They also started behaving oddly, for example, hoarding unnecessary items.

When the experiment had finished, the men were gradually reintroduced to normal food. During this rehabilitation time, many of the men lost control of their appetites and "ate more or less continuously" Even after 12 weeks of rehabilitation, the men frequently complained that they experienced an increase in hunger immediately following a large meal. One of the men ate immense meals of 5,000-6,000 (double the daily intake of normal people) and only an hour later started snacking.

What can we learn from this if we are wanting to lose weight? Drastic reductions in our intake will make us food-obsessed and this obviously doesn't help us to eat less. And then we binge, losing control, feeling angry with ourselves and putting all that weight back on. A more helpful approach is to eat normally and healthily, without snacking. And hypnosis will help.

Trying to limit your food intake by dieting produces a tendency to overeat or even binge when restrictions are lifted (e.g. social disinhibition). The end result, paradoxically, is weight gain or re-gain.

This has been well described by Janet Polivy (Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto) who researches into the area of eating. She shows that food deprivation amongst dieters (achieved with intentional dietary restriction and restraint) produces a tendency to overeat, explaining why long-term dieting does not work.

Dr. Polivy's main interests have been and continue to be the influence of restrained eating and long-term dieting on behaviour. The discovery of the 'what the hell!' effect whereby dieting leads to binge eating has continued to foster further questions about the effects of trying to eat less than one would really like to. This includes studies of eating behaviour, cognitive and emotional reactions - contributing to and in reaction to food-related events. She has also been investigating the 'False Hope Syndrome' which characterises many of us who attempt self-change efforts such as dieting, identifying the factors that contribute to and maintain unrealistic expectations that lead to failure, and attributions and cognitions that promote repeated unsuccessful attempts. All very relevant.

My approach in this Weight Loss Clinic similarly focuses on the thought processes that contribute to unhelpful eating behaviours and the ways in which we can manage our environment to minimise the risks of unhelpful eating. Supported with hypnosis, this approach allows you to manage your eating in a sustainable and healthy way, without the constant worry of Diet, Deny and Deprive. Give me a call!

Anxiety, depression and negative body image can have an impact on your eating habits and nutrition. In addition, poor or inadequate nutrition can add to depression and anxiety by increasing fatigue, lowering energy levels, reducing your ability to enjoy life and affecting your mood. Fluctuations in anxiety may, in some cases, be worsened by poor nutritional habits.

So what does this say about diets.

Dieting involves restrictions in calories or foods or simply the purposeful acceptance of hunger as essential.

By saving calories until the end of the day and cultivating blindly restrictive food limits, we cultivate hunger which will leads us to battle hunger. This battle with hunger if fought frequently will eventually just gets too irritating and bitter to fight. Too unpleasant. Too draining.

The risk is not just binge eating and to hell with self-control, but hurtful self-talk, leading potentially to depression and more serious eating disorders.

Cutting down on your eating and watching what you eat is a really good idea for health. But following highly restrictive diets, which don't result in long-term weight loss, is not worth the risk. Use hypnosis to get control of your eating behaviours in a sustainable way so you can lose weight without anxiety or distress.

So you have decided enough is enough and you are going to lose weight once and for all, starting now.

What do you do? Skip meals? Go on a fast? Try pills?

These are considered unhealthy weight loss strategies, and on the whole, they don't work. It requires a high degree of self-control and restraint. And restraint is often followed by a binge. Most women who wish to lose weight use this strategy, possibly also trying to eat more healthily and maybe low-carb too. Restrained eating like this (fasting, skipping meals, eating lettuce) is unsustainable, especially for those of us who before we decided to do something about our weight, were all over the place. Eating takeaways, drinking a lot, snacking on crisps and chocolate.

If your diet is all over the place, then try hypnotherapy to get into a more regular and healthy way of eating. Making it sustainable and automatic.

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.