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!)

Do you eat for emotional reasons? Of course you do—everybody does! Soon after birth we develop powerful emotional connections to feeding, eating, and food.

We celebrate happy occasions with food. We eat to express love, have fun, soothe a hurt, and reward ourselves for a job well done. These days, with food readily accessible and inexpensive, eating is an easy way to add pleasure to our lives. Emotional eating only becomes a problem when it’s used to cope with or avoid difficult and uncomfortable feelings.

If you feel your emotional connection to food is causing problems for you, these suggestions may help.

• Avoid labeling yourself.  Labels become self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead, label the behaviour. Behaviours can be explored and changed. For example. Eating when I feel stressed. Using food for comfort. Eating as a form of entertainment.
• Get back to the basics. To identify emotional triggers, ask “Am I hungry?” whenever you feel like eating. And then grade it out of 10. In fact, most of us no longer really know what hunger feels like. For me, my eyes feel tight, nothing to do with the belly at all! If there are no physical signs of hunger, it’s likely that the urge to eat was triggered by environmental or emotional cues. Much of our eating (and more besides) is triggered by external signals and our response is automatic. For example, driving on the way home, expecting your tea, starts you thinking about food. Seeing a picture of a dinner makes you think about food.
  
• Leave judgment at the door. Guilt and shame can trigger bingeing and then feeling bad.
  
• Be a caring friend for yourself. When you eat for emotional reasons, you are simply trying to feel better. What could you do instead?
• Cravings are time-limited. They soon pass. Distract yourself and you will be surprised to find that you have forgotten all about the craving. Treat them like an annoying child. The more you give in, the more they will whinge.
• Respond instead of react.  Eating is a choice. When you identify the triggers, you can then choose how you'll respond to your triggers instead of reacting automatically.
• Read the need. Your desire to eat when you aren't hungry is a clue that you have unmet needs and uncomfortable feelings. Recognising that they are gives you the chance to deal with them.
  
• Avoid labeling emotions as good or bad, or positive or negative. All emotions are information that you can use to better understand your interpretation of an experience and help you recognise your true needs.

It's Easter, so chocolate eggs on the horizon. Some foods just hit the spot and chocolate - that conspiracy of fat and sugar - is certainly one of them. But if we want to control our weight, we might label these foods as Bad and Banned, and therefore when we eat them we are overwhelmed with guilt, shame, anger and all sorts of unpleasant emotions because we think we have lost control.

Just thinking these foods are bad and banned makes them (of course) more desirable. And all those bad feelings you have after eating them just prove to you that they should be banned. And the more you ban them the more you want them.

And if you use food as a treat or to comfort yourself, you are likely to stock them up in the house, in case of emergency. And in the house is in the mouth, so you are back on the treadmill.

It doesn't have to be like this. You can enjoy eating chocolate without bingeing.

Hypnosis can help you develop other sources of pleasure and comfort so that the anxiety surrounding eating is reduced. And you will find that you can eat anything you want without eating everything.