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.

Is it eating too much or exercising too little? Well, it is probably more complicated than that.

An obese friend of mine has an electric pepper grinder, so that saves her a few calories of effort every day. And there's the zapper for the telly, on-line ordering from the supermarket. All saving us energy. And we are much less active generally. We sit more. At work, at home in front of the computer or in front of the telly. So the change in our society has made it harder for us to be active as part of our every day.

And we all eat so much more than we did 30 years ago. Food is cheaper, even with the recent price hikes. Whether we like it or not, we respond to cues to eat. Calorie-dense foods are widely advertised on the telly as well as all those cooking programmes. These keep us thinking about food and eating. We become conditioned by these cues to respond by eating. And then that can become a habit, like how we associate eating crisps with relaxing in front of the telly. Eating has become something we do automatically, without thinking. And we cook less at home, because we are busier than ever before. So we eat more engineered-to-taste-fantastic food from the chill cabinet in the supermarket. We eat more takeaways where the amount of fat can only be guessed at. And plate sizes have increased so portions are bigger. So eating has never been easier. Research has shown that the 10 pound increase in average weight in the last 30 years is a result of eating food prepared outside the home.

There is a lot of social pressure to eat, not just from friends offering us biscuits, but from the way food is presented to us every day in the media and in the shops. While at the same time, there is a lot of pressure on us to be fashionably thin.

Hypnosis will help you understand your particular responses to eating cues, so you can make some simple changes which are easy to follow and sustainable. But, note this. It is far easier to not eat 500 calories than it is to burn it off.

This is an interesting and fun quiz on healthy eating!! Some of the answers are surprising. And there are other fun quizzes on this site too.

We are all bombarded with food information every day, and it is had to sort out the valuable food messages from all this confusion.

When we are trying to control our weight, we are automatically routed to think about dieting. But most people who go on diets end up putting weight on. Why is this. The cycle of Diet Deprive and Deny makes us even more interested in food. We get food-obsessed. And we start believing silly things. One of my clients the other day recounted this overheard conversation:

Mmm, this chocolate bar contains 150 calories....
Well, try the diet one, it is only 113.

Changing your way of eating so that you maintain a good weight and good health is not about just saving a few calories here and there. Hypnotherapy will help you identify your problem habits, work out a way to overcome them and then support your motivation, so that you automatically make the positive choices, without having to think about it. Much easier.

Portion sizes have doubled over the last 20 years.

American researchers at New York University found that when McDonald’s first started in 1955, its hamburger weighed around 1.6 ounces - 28 grammes. We would think that was pretty mean if we were served it today. The basic hamburger now weighs 100grammes.

I had a look at McDonalds website. There is loads of information, but no mention of the calories in each product. Well, it was hidden away if it is there at all. Find the calories here instead!

McDonalds are an easy target in many ways, because they do provide information. Your local takeaway doesn't measure and count, so you have no idea of the calorie content. I am not a great fan of calorie counting in detail, but if you are trying to control your eating, then it really does help to have a broad idea of where the calories are coming from. I suggest that for most of us, it is not coming from our 3 daily meals.

A double cheeseburger is 440 calories. That is a quarter of the rule of thumb daily allowance of 2,000 calories for women. A basic hamburger is 250 calories, without the regular fries, which are 274 cals. No wonder we all gain weight. This sort of eating is called "hedonic" by the medics. It is fun eating, extra to your normal 3 meals a day. At these calories, you could easily find your "hedonic" eats add up to more than your daily meals. Oops.

 There has been lots of research to support the miserable idea that we get fatter when we are trying to lose weight.What a horrible discovery after weeks of struggling with a diet, eating food we don't want and don't like!

When we are on a diet, we think only of food. We buy special diet foods, we read slimming magazines full of articles about food. We spend much more time than normal thinking about food when we are on a diet.

A study from Bristol University shows that diet foods encourage overeating. When we are faced with a meal that we know is low-calorie, we just eat more to compensate. Our perception of how full we will feel after a meal affects our portion size. So, when we know it is low-calorie, we just serve ourselves a bit more to make up. Otjher research tells us that once a packet is opened, the contents tend to get eaten. So if we buy a 2-portion meal, but there is only one of us, we will eat the lot.

The researchers, who studied the responses of 76 people to 18 different foods, found that people quickly learnt if food offered fewer calories per serving and upped their portion size to compensate. "We know from experimental studies that eating large portions does not necessarily mean that you eat less at a subsequent meal, so this can lead to an increase in calorie intake overall,"  said one of the researchers.

Hypnotherapy can help you to stay aware of these risks as you seek to reduce your food intake.

One of my clients 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!

176 women were 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
2. Those using healthy weight loss strategies
3. Those using unhealthy strategies

The results showed that women who used a mix of healthy and unhealthy strategies  gained significantly more weight (about 9 pounds) than the other groups. Those who were following a healthy weight loss strategy gained about 2 pounds over the 4 years. Those who didnt try to control their weight put on about 3 pounds in the 4 years. This was after taking account in the statistical analysis of the results of things like education, income and initial BMI.

Interestingly, the group who used a mix of unhealthy and healthy strategies demonstrated the most anxiety about their weight and had poorer eating attitudes (things like defining certain foods as bad). So they worried about their weight a lot, tried all kinds of things to help them lose weight, tried to restrain their eating and despite this gained really quite a lot of weight in those 4 years. It is this involvement of anxiety that makes hypnotherapy such a useful help when trying to control your weight.

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, diet pills, meal replacement drinks, appetite suppressant drugs, laxatives, enemas, diuretics, and fasting. The women who used these strategies gained quite a lot of weight. The report also suggests that women who worry about their weight are more likely to try these unhealthy strategies. So it could be that encouraging weight worries may only make women take action which makes weight problems worse in the long run.

It is possible that women who follow healthy weight control strategies are more successful 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. In fact, one of the key precursors to bingeing is restrained eating. So what determines how succesful you will be are the strategies you use to try to control your weight.

Although the women who used healthy strategies did not on the whole lose weight, they were successful in keeping the weight gain down to a reasonable level.

But this study does confirm what has been reported many, many times. Dieting makes you fat.

I have said before that exercise will not really help in losing weight. Exercise is good for its own sake as it maintains your health and makes you feel good (so you might eat less). Cutting down by 250 calories a day is much easier than exercising it off.

Indeed, you may have noticed that you consider walking to the bus stop with the goal of exercising away that chocolate bar. Wishful thinking because to work off 4 ounces of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk needs you to walk 5 miles (10,000 steps) at a fast pace.

We often make mistakes about weight control strategies. For example, drinking diet fizzy pop doesn’t help us reduce weight. We tend to compensate for it by eating something else, taking the view that diet pop is the diet!

But doing nothing and lying about is generally a bad thing.

Peter Katzmarzyk and colleagues at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center examined the links between time spent sitting (at school, work, and at home) and mortality (death) in a representative sample of more than 17,000 Canadians. They report that time spent sitting was associated with increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality (there was no association between sitting and cancer death). Individuals who sat the most were about 50% more likely to die during the follow-up period than individuals who sat the least, even after controlling for age, smoking, and physical activity levels.

The researchers also examined the association between sitting and mortality after control for body weight in some cases. They report that sitting remains a significant predictor of mortality. This suggests that all things being equal (body weight, physical activity levels, smoking, alcohol intake, age, and gender) the person who sits more is at a higher risk of death than the person who sits less.(Fidgetting has been shown to be an effective strategy. So don’t listen when people tell you to stop!)

Most of us are sedentary throughout the work day and so most of us are at risk. And at home too, we spend little time working in the kitchen, cooking, laying the table, washing up. Even in front of the telly we don’t get up to change the channel. Our whole environment seems to be geared to minimising effort.

What to do? Throughout the day to move about and fidget as much as possible. Seek out opportunities to make more effort. Walk whenever possible.