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.

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 so you can lose weight?

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 cues 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! And to make it easier, try hypnosis.

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.

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

Maybe you remember Mr Creosote from the Monty Python sketch? He tried to squeeze in one last mint wafer before he burst.

But what is it that 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.

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 without the snack, these cravings go completely. When are you snacking?

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. Then you gain weight.

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 can never resist a mango, but I have trained myself (with some effort, but successfully) to resist chocolate, and now it doesn't interest me at all.

And sometimes we eat for something to do, and sometimes because we need comfort. A better long-term solution is to identify solutions to these issues.

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

There's an ad for Special K in Glasgow Central Station which has taken my notice.

A fabulously sexy woman in a red satin dress (yes, it could be you) clearly eats lots of strawberry and chocolate Special K. The word strawberry is less pronounced than CHOCOLATE.

So, here juxtaposed are the words Chocolate with the image of a sexy beautiful woman. The message is Yes, you can be beautiful and wear red figure hugging satin dresses and eat chocolate too. What a fabulous message.

But it is not true for most of us. For most of us, if we eat chocolate, we just get fat. If we are young, we can get away with it until we grow older with the habit.

Our behaviour is triggered by many tiny cues and the advertising world is able to manipulate our responses to these cues really effectively. Thus the Galaxy girl is not a size 16 sitting at home on her own feeling miserable, but a sexy slinky woman, confident, happy. And we all want to be like her, so we better eat Galaxy.

Hypnosis can make you stop desiring chocolate, so that eating it becomes a choice.

When you ask someone what they ate over the last 2 days, they will tell you what they had for each of the 3 formal meals.

They will not mention the automatic eating or mindless munching that takes place outwith a formal meal. But this is the stuff that piles on the weight for most of us.

We only have a limited amount of willpower. Use it to limit your access to the foods eaten outside of mealtimes. This trend to constant munching is pretty new and it is driven by advertising.  I remember a sweet advertised as one "you can eat between meals without spoiling your appetite". And another "finger of fun" that was "just enough until it's time to eat" - what were they doing with that finger of fun unless they were eating it, eh?

Now we are encouraged to eat as a displacement activity, when there is nothing else to do, to overcome boredom. In the past we might have had hobbies, or spent time with our friends going to the pictures or for a walk. Now we go and eat. Or we invite our friends over and stuff ourselves with chocolate and marshmallows, or crisps and popcorn.

What are your outside of mealtimes eating habits? Recognising them will help you give them up so you can manage your weight. And hypnosis will help too.