We can all find a little space for something particularly delicious and tempting. Our stomachs (normally the size of our fist) are very stretchy.

But what is making us eat when we are not hungry. Well, there are a number of reasons. If any seem to apply to you, think about how you can avoid them.

Some of us eat to calm or comfort ourselves. We feel bad about ourselves and food helps us feel relaxed. But then after that, we feel guilty, dissappointed and angry, so the comfort just doesn't last long enough. Learning to feel good about yourself, to overcome anxiety, is the first place to start. And hypnosis is a good place to start.

And then there is habit. Like putting two slices of toast in the toaster (because there are two slots) and eating both when one would do. Or cake with coffee. Or crisps with wine or beer. If we regularly eat a little snack at 3.00pm, then our bodies get used to it. Even if we have had plenty to eat, our bodies cry out for the 3.00pm intake. After a couple of days however, these cravings go. When are you snacking? Habits are learned and so can be unlearned.

Refined carbohydrates make your blood sugar peak and trough dramatically so you feel hungry soon after. This includes sugary foods, white flour, sweets, cakes and biscuits. If you don't buy them, you won't eat them. Remember, in the hand is in the mouth.

Of course, if something looks and smells delicious, our body responds positively, with lots of encouraging saliva flow, which itself makes you hungry. As for me, I don't want to resist a mango, but I trained myself to resist chocolate, and now it doesn't interest me. (I continue to be amazed.)

Alchohol lowers your general ability to resist. If you eat before you go out drinking, you will be less likely to succumb to a calorie-packed takeaway on the way home.

Just eating an extra 150 calories a day will increase steady state weight by 10 pounds.

What does 150 calories look like? Well, a 35g bag of Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps is 184 calories. Cadbury Cream Eggs come in at 173.6 calories.

For most of us, it is the snacks and the eating between meals, that put on the weight. A hypnotherapist can make avoiding snacks completely automatic.

Saving just 150 calories a day goes a long way to avoid getting heavier every year. So losing weight doesn't seem quite so difficult any more, does it?

Eating a large portion does not make you feel more satisfied than eating a small one. That's good news isn't it? So when you eat a smaller portion, you don't physically feel any less content. This research was carried out at Penn State University. So it means that if you serve yourself a smaller portion, you will feel fine. The easiest way to do this is to use a smaller plate. That way you can deceive your eyes about the size of the portion. When your eyes see a full plate, all of you feels that you are not being short-changed.

They also show that people eat more when they are given a larger portion. Indeed, most of us will eat whatever is put in front of us. We do it on an aeroplane, and we do it at home as well!

Saving just 150 calories a day is all you need to do to lose weight. This is an easy way to do it.

Think of fizzy pop as liquid sweeties. Irn-Bru contain over 140 calories in an 330ml can. That is more than 9 teaspoons of sugar. You wouldn't put that much sugar in your tea.

But on top of that, chewing our calories helps us to know when we have eaten enough and so helps us to avoid overeating.

Nowadays most of us never really feel hungry, so we no longer recognise the bodily sensations which tell us when we are hungry or when we are full. Scientists have found out that the complex aromas in food help us to feel satisfied and so stop us from overeating.

How can this help us? Well, to get the benefit from these responses, we need to give our bodies time. So eating small bites slowly lets these aromas do their work and help us to feel full.

Drinking our calories doesn't trigger these responses.

But you might say, I drink no-cal drinks. Well, research has shown that this is no strategy for weight loss. Why is that? Well, it could be that your body is expecting calories from that drink, and so triggers hunger pangs so we eat (probably high-cal snacks) or it could be that somehow we believe that the no-cal drink is all we need to do for weight control. Either way, research shows that it does not work. See my blog of 6 June 2010.

So what is the answer? We don't need fizzy pop. We might like it, but we don't need it. It makes us fat without us even noticing. You can live without fizzy pop. Give it up!

So far, we have understood that we go for chips, and other calorie stuffed food, because it makes us feel good - we get a "happy hit". Research carried out by Jeffrey Brunstrom and Peter Rogers at the University of Bristol, suggests that we eat lots of chips, because we know they don't give us that nice full feeling. We need to eat lots before we get any sense of being satisfied. And because they are loaded with oil, we end up eating too many calories.

It seems that we are looking for this sense of satisfaction- a feeling of a nice full tum - and we know that these calorie-stuffed foods just don't do it for us. Think about it, how many bags of crisps does it take before you get a nice full feeling? For me, the answer is never. I get that nice full feeling from porage, or rice or potatoes and gravy.

Better to eat water-rich foods, because they give us that nice feeling of a full tum.

Till now, we have understood that we go for chips, and other calorie stuffed food, because it makes us feel good - we get a "happy hit". Research carried out by Jeffrey Brunstrom and Peter Rogers at the University of Bristol, suggests something different - that we eat lots of chips etc because we know they don't give us that nice full feeling. We need to eat lots of chips or chocolates before we get any sense of being satisfied. And because they are loaded with oil or sugar we end up eating too many calories.

It seems that we are looking for this sense of satisfaction- a feeling of a nice full tum - and we know that these calorie-stuffed foods just don't do it for us. Think about it, how many bags of crisps does it take before you get a nice full feeling? For me, the answer is never.

Water-rich foods, such as potatoes, vegetables, fruit fill us up quickly, with more full feelings per calorie than snack foods.

Estimating portion size is difficult for all of us, but developing rules of thumb will be handy. Because we have got used to larger portions in restaurants, our estimate of calorie content of a meal gets confused.

Research by Brian Wansink and colleagues shows that everyone (normal weight, underweight and overweight, men and women) has difficulty in estimating the calorie content of a large plate of food, whereas they accurately assess the calories in a more normal portion.

If we are overweight, we tend to have larger portions. That means that those of us who are overweight are making these wrong estimates frequently. As a result, we are underestimating the calorie content of most of our meals, we overeat and so we put on weight. What to do?

These researchers suggest that you should estimate the calories and then double them. A normal meal might be 500 calories. If you are overweight and you know that you are eating a large portion, then advise yourself that this meal probably contains 1,000 calories - half your day's allowance.

Counting calories is dull, but having a fair idea of the calorie content of your meals is handy. It allows you to develop useful rules of thumb when you are seriously trying to control your eating.

This is drawn from Weighty Matters.

A man in Canada is trying a month-long experiment of following Canada's Food Guide. He is writing a blog about his experiences aiming at reaching a specified goal weight (the weight needed to give him a body mass index of 25).

The writer of Weighty Matters is an obesity doctor. He is not  a fan of using numbers as weight management goals. So he doesn't care for BMI or numbers of pounds lost, or target weight, "because frankly they overlook the bigger picture - reality. Fact is, the best goal is whatever weight you reach when you're living the healthiest life you can enjoy. But put that aside for now. The important question to ask regardless is, "So is he enjoying his life?"

Not according to his newspaper articles and blog entries he isn't.

According to them he's been saving up his calories for supper and in so doing often finding himself starving and battling hunger demons (like the ones that live in Pizza shops). He reports being "desperate" for steak because his Food Guide approach doesn't allow him to eat large ones. He reports being tired and finding it difficult to find 60 minutes a day of exercise. He reports that he fell off his new wagon within one month of embarking on it. He notes that on at least one occasion when he ate more than he planned in the daytime he compensated and went to bed following a dinner consisting solely of a plate of green beans with two slices of toast. He reports that the "red numbers" on the scale motivate him and help him with what he feels his efforts require - "focus, attention and willpower".

In short, he's on a diet."

The doctor writing Weighty Matters says that there's no way that this man doing the Food Guide eating plan has adopted a long term approach. "He's dieting and both anecdotally and in the medical literature, diets fail in the long term over 95% of the time."

So what type of diet behaviours does the Food Guide man admit to? By using the scale as a source of support, he's chosen the dark side of weight loss, letting the seduction of the numbers inspire him to greater acts of willpower - a problem when the scale stops whispering sweet nothings into his ear. By saving calories until the end of the day and cultivating blindly restrictive food limits, he's cultivating hunger which will lead him to battle hunger - a battle that if fought frequently, eventually just gets too irritating and bitter to fight. By trying to cram 60 minutes of exercise a day into likely a very busy and youthfully all over the place lifestyle, he's liable to get frustrated with the exercise and simply let the whole thing go. He appears to be trying to live the healthiest life he can tolerate - and for me, that's the definition of a diet.

Dieting involves blind restrictions in calories or foods or simply the purposeful acceptance of hunger as a necessity in life.

Living, healthy living, may involve a change in structure and organizing (such as eating more frequently with the inclusion of protein) but by definition must exclude suffering, blind restrictions, forbidding foods and hunger."

And diets don't work. We can't sustain them because they are unpleasant. But we can change our eating behaviour in sustainable ways, and hypnosis will help you to lose weight.

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.