To lose weight, we need to change our eating habits. Most of us know what our bad habits are. It might be chocolate or takeaways, or just eating till we are stuffed. Hypnosis helps you to identify the problem habits and gets you to introduce good habits. But you might be eating to compensate for some emotional upset. Going on a diet is not going to help here, dealing with the upset is the place to start. A hypnotherapy session will begin by finding out if eating is the problem, or whether it is a symptom of an emotional disturbance. When you feel emotionally strong, then you are in a good position to think about changing your eating habits.

When the time comes to focus on your eating behaviour, when you have decided what changes you want to make,  these decisions are embedded in your subconscious through hypnosis. So 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.

It means you are not needing to use your willpower all day long - which would only result in a big binge anyway. And as I have blogged before, willpower is always in very short supply.

Cravings seem to arise out of the blue and we are overcome with the need to eat the craved item, often sweet things for women. Well, the key thing to know is that like a screaming child, if you ignore them, they eventually stop, and if you keep ignoring them, they will stop for ever altogether.

So how to ignore cravings.

Well, one way is to identify what is triggering them. It is not hunger. It could be your routine. For example, if you have always had a snack at 3.00pm your cravings will arrive on the dot. If you always eat in the car on the way home, they will be there too. If you walk past a sweet shop and always buy chocolate or crisps with your paper, you will repeat the actions on and on. So these are environmental and habit-based triggers for cravings. Change your route, have no food in the car, stop snacking at 3.00pm. And if the trigger is boredom, develop a portable hobby so that you can distract yourself. And if I might bang on about this again, if you always munch away at chocs and crisps in front of the telly, just turning the telly on turns your belly on.

Changing behaviour in these relatively small ways is quite easy. You don't have to deal with everything all at once. One or two a week is quite enough. Then what?

When cravings come, ignore them. Distract yourself. This could be by going for a walk, phoning a friend, washing the car. Just tapping your finger onto your hand for a few minutes is also quite distracting.

Cravings disappear in only a few minutes. You can handle that!

I have blogged and banged on many times about the combination of fat and sugar and fat and salt that hits our bliss point. Just think of chocolate and crisps. They really hit the spot. And they have been engineered to do so, designed to make us want more and more. Read what David Kessler has to say. He bangs on about this too.

We have nerve endings in our mouths that mean we can sense the ‘fattiness’ of food. In the Stone Age this was really important. Fat provides the densest source of calories and living in a cave with just a sheepskin on, you needed the calories to survive. It turns out that these nerve endings activate an addictive response that promotes more fat intake. Again, in the Stone Age it meant if you managed to find something that tickled your nerve endings, you could gorge on fatty foods and thus fend off starvation.

The researchers showed that a high-fat diet results in the vigorous activation in the small intestine of endocannabinoids (cannabis-like compounds produced in the body). It does this by altering the activity of enzymes that control endocannabinoid metabolism. Endocannbinoids are well known to play an important role in regulating rewarding, that is, pleasurable, feeding behaviours. The sensing of fat in the mouth sends a signal to the brain, which sends a signal to the gut, which triggers an addictive neural pathway, which reinforces fat consumption.

No wonder eating just one biscuit seems impossible. Eating just one handful of crisps inevitably leads to eating the whole bag. Trying to eat just one square of chocolate doesn't work either. We are hard-wired to eat till they are all gone. In the Stone Age fat was a rare treat. Nowadays we can scarcely avoid it. But our bodies have not adapted to this abundance.

My recommendation is to not buy these fat and sugar or fat and salt treats. But if you must, then buy them one pack at a time. Once the pack is opened you will eat the lot so buy the smallest you can find. After all, you know that in the hand is in the mouth. Do yourself a favour and reduce the risk.

You may be one of those people  who seems to be constantly struggling with your weight. It is now normal for women to feel dissatisfied with their bodies. Even women of normal weight feel their bodies need improvement.
 
Dieting is not easy to sustain. Denying yourself food you enjoy makes you feel deprived which makes you crave the forbidden food. This is one of the reasons most of the commercial slimming clubs let you eat chocolate and other treats. It is also hard to eat differently from your friends and family for more than a relatively short period. So most of us have to work hard to control our urges to eat, but with persistence we can drop a dress size. Why can't we sustain it? Nearly all dieters regain their lost weight.

So what is going on here? Some of us eat to feel better and to cope with the stress in our lives. Going on a diet is not going to help here. There are better ways to manage stress. Most of us eat significantly more than our grandparents. There is more food on offer, it is (relatively) cheap and we can buy it almost anywhere. Lots is ready to eat, we don't need to cook it. So this accessibility makes it more likely that we will eat more. Dieting will help where it identifies a new healthy routine for eating that you find comfortable. But if dieting for you is deprivation, then you might throw it all over if you make one tiny mistake.

And if you want immediate results, then every day that the weight has not gone down, you will feel frustrated and annoyed. To lose weight, the first goal is to stop gaining weight. So every week that the scale does not go up is a success. This is better than beating yourself up when you only lose one pound a week.

Have a look at your eating habits. Is there any habit you have got into that you know is going to end up on the hips?  Do you buy a chocolate bar every time you get petrol?  Choose not to. For others it might be 2 slices of toast in the morning. Maybe thinking it is wasteful not to use the second slot. So to meet your green credentials and help to manage weight, cut the one slice in two. For most of us, we are eating the equivalent of a whole extra meal in the form of sweets, biscuits, takeaways, crisps and drinks. Things are grandparents considered to be very special treats rather than everyday items.

Lots of people exclaim that they couldn't imagine life without chocolate. But we didn't eat it till the 17the Century.  It was first discovered by the Spanish Conquistador Cortez when he defeated the Aztec King Montezuma in 1519. Perhaps our love affair with chocolate is the real Montezuma's Revenge.

And many people experience powerful cravings for chocolate, which they feel are overwhelming. Why is this and what can we do about it? After all, if we are wanting to lose weight, eating chocolate at 150 calories an ounce won't help. 150 extra calories a day could end up meaning 10 pounds heavier at the end of the year.

There are a number of possible reasons for these cravings. Here are a few.

1. We allow ourselves for whatever reason to get overhungry. See my earlier blog. Eat regularly, little and often (every 4 hours during the working day).
2. We read lots of magazines and watch lots of telly, so we get a lot of advertising messages encouraging us to eat chocolate. Next time you are settled down to watch your favourite programmes, make a written note of the products being advertised and the time. It is not random. Research demonstrates that the foods advertised on the telly (not a lot of adverts for broccoli I notice) trigger cupboard raiding. If chocolate is in the house, whoops, it is in the mouth.
3. We have unresolved emotional problems. There are chemicals in chocolate which lift our mood. So some people might be using chocolate to self-medicate, instead of seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist.
4. Chocolate manufacturers know what our brains are hard-wired to like - the sweet sugar hit, the smooth creamy texture. And we think we shouldn't so we mentally ban it, then the cravings come. If we give in to the cravings, the cycle begins again. Read this great article from the BBC on recent research about chocolate cravings.
5. We have got in the habit of fulfilling our every desire. You're worth it. You deserve it. Why shouldn't you be allowed to treat yourself, you have worked hard. Why shouldn't we have it if we want it? This kind of thinking usually ends up costing us dear. We have got out of the habit of a bit of self-denial which builds our resilience to protect us when the hard times come.

Well, one of the outcomes is that the diet industry gets fat, while you will probably remain the same size. Click here for a BBC article about the diet industry banking on failure.

For most people, dieting leads to increased attention to food, thinking about it all the time. This results in cravings. Dr Andrew Hill of the University of Leeds shows this in his research . He also showed that when you restrict access to a particular food, the cravings for that food increases. So if you are on the yo-yo of Diet Deny and Deprive and banning a favourite food from your diet, you will think about that food more and more. And then you will violate your diet, and pig out. Having done that, you then beat yourself up as a failure, decide you are past caring and get straight back to your old ways of eating so any weight loss is regained.

An alternative is to be a bit more forgiving. Work out what your eating problem is. People who manage their mood by eating tend to overeat and stuff themselves. There are people who have to eat food if they see it, but if they don't see it (or smell it, or talk about it) then they are fine. There are people who have got into a habit of eating a chocolate bar at 3 in the afternoon. Most of us know what our bad eating habits are. Knowing what they are helps you to decide what action to take.

If you have low moods, then what might you do to make yourself feel better. If you eat it if you see it, don't fill your cupboards with food that just has to be eaten. Don't walk by the cake shop on your way to work.

Whatever you do, avoid Diet, Deny and Deprive. It only makes you unhappy.

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.

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.

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

Going without a meal is frequently used as a weight control method, often as a response to overindulgence the day before. It doesn't work. It has been shown to result in bingeing in response to the feelings of hunger. It is regarded as one of the unhealthy strategies.

New research by Mikael Symmonds and colleagues from the University College London,  shows that hunger influences the level of risk that people will take.

Animals take more risk to get food when they are hungry so the researchers wanted to see if this applies to humans, and tested a group of people to find out if they would take more economic risks when hungry.

They found a very close relationship with hunger and higher risk taking - hungry people take more risks and are more impulsive than when they have just eaten. The research also suggests that dieting may make people more prone to taking risks.

Similarly, they find that hungry people are likely to take more risks with their food choices and eat all the wrong sort of foods (chocolate, crisps, takeouts etc) than people who are less hungry.

So what to make of this.

1. Don't go food shopping when you are hungry - you will buy all the wrong stuff.
2. Don't skip meals.

If you are near Glasgow or Annan, try hypnosis with me to try a better way to lose weight.