Most sorts of diets involve limiting the range of foods we can eat. Any restriction of this kind will result in weight loss. So a grapefruit and sausage diet will result in weight loss. The problem is that we can't sustain this sort of diet for a long time. It would make us miserable and eventually will make us unwell, because we need a wide range of nutrients to keep us healthy.

Once we have lost the weight we usually go back to our old ways, and those old ways were the cause of the increased weight. And many of us give up long before the weight has gone.

Instead of a fancy diet, we need to find a way of eating that fits our preferences and our way of life, so that we can lose weight and maintain a healthy weight for ever.

Hypnotherapy will help you identify this for you. Quickly and effectively.

Do you remember the Roly Polys? They were Les Dawson's dance group. Most of them were overweight, one certainly obese, but they danced really well. Overweight maybe, but fit, supple and energetic.

Research has shown that obesity doesn't necessarily make you ill. Just measuring your BMI is not going to tell you whether your weight is a health risk. So concludes research by obesity expert Dr Aryan Sharma of Canada. He has now developed a scale of risk, from stage 0 where the risk is low to stage 4 where surgical interventions might be needed.

So what is the difference between healthy obese people (stages 0 and 1) and obese with health risks or damage (stages 3 and 4)? He found 3 key differences. People at stages 0 and 1 had (1) better cardiovascular strength, (2) ate more fruit and vegetables and (3) they had no history of weight cycling. So what does that mean?

Cardiovascular strength comes from physical activity. Dancing like the Roly Polys, walking to the shops, gardening, standing rather than sitting. Weight cycling is where your weight goes up and down, usually through intentional weight loss (dieting). People at stages 0 and 1 were not seeking intentional weight loss. However, those at higher stages were found to have had many episodes of weight loss and regain. They were on diets, losing weight, only to put it all back on again. This is also known as yo-yo dieting. Dieting has been shown to cause weight increase. (There are other ways of managing your weight, which may surprise you.)

So those people who were at health risk as a result of their obesity were inactive, going on and off diets and not eating fruit and veg (and this begs the question, what were they eating instead? It tends to suggest little cooking since cooking uses veg, which might make you think it might be snack foods, but that is just a supposition.)

So, if you are obese, you don't need to lose weight to reduce your health risk. Eat a greater proportion of your daily food as fruit and veg, get up and about a bit more and don't diet. Come and see me abo

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.

When we get worried about our weight, we can start to obsess, thinking about food all the time. My approach aims to help you to manage your eating, without measuring, counting, restricting, denying and without using food for reasons other than nutrition and sociability. It is good to enjoy food, and even more so with friends. And you can do it without packing on the pounds and without anxiety. Here is a bit of a quiz. All of these ways of dealing with food are pretty unhealthy. Try my approach and enjoy your food while still controlling your weight, in an easy, automatic and sustainable way.

Do you eat in reaction to good or bad events? Like awarding yourself a cake if you win a contract? Or buying a takeaway when you get dumped?

Do you eat when you are not hungry? Out of boredom, habit, anxiety or some other emotion?

Do you sometimes go on a binge and eat and eat and eat till you feel stuffed and dreadful?

Do you drop in and out of dieting, trying anything, even the weird ones? Do you replace meals with drinks, even water?

Do you define foods as good, so you can eat them, and bad, so you can feel guilty when you eat them?

Do you eat the control your intake by limiting the range of what you eat? On the telly recently one woman had only eaten breakfast cereal with milk for years. Are you unwilling to extend the range and eat very selectively, maybe just bread rolls and chips?

Do you count, weigh, measure out your daily allowance and stick rigidly to it? Counting every last calorie?

Do you eat differently (more generously) when you are on your own? Do you try to fit in with the notion that real women nibble rather than eat?

Do you exercise furiously in order to reduce or control your weight? Exercise is good for your heart and lungs, flexibility, physical stamina and for the pleasure it can give you. But it takes 10 miles to burn off a mars bar.

Learn new habits with cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy. Enjoy your food and manage your weight.

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.

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.

The generation that was told to eat everything on their plate find leaving food very tricky.These suggestions from your childhood are persistent and powerful.

So when you go to the fridge and see the remains of a meal, there is a powerful urge to eat it, to avoid waste. Don't tidy your fridge by eating up the contents. Feeling guilty about waste can interfere with our goal to avoid overeating.

So what can we do? Well, hypnosis can embed new suggestions, permitting you to throw food away. In hypnosis, you can learn to always leave your plate half eaten. Breaking the instruction to eat everything up needs a bit of support. However, many of us feel strongly about food waste. Hypnosis can help you develop new habits, simple things like cooking smaller quantities so that you get just the right portion size. You may feel that to be eco-friendly, you can't use the oven to heat up or bake just a small portion, so you might cook a bit more and freeze the rest. You might keep a dog - scraps and bones are apparently the ideal diet! What might be the best approach for you?

But your belly is not the bin. Don't fill it with rubbish.

It is now normal for women to feel dissatisfied with their bodies. Even women of normal weight feel their bodies need improvement. It seems that men also suffer body dissatisfaction.

The relationship between body satisfaction, self-esteem, dieting and exercise were studied. Overall, the degree of body dissatisfaction felt by men and women was the same. The main difference is that men wanted to be heavier, whereas women wanted to be thinner.

And women reported exercising for weight control more than men. Unfortunately, exercising for weight control is associated with disregulated eating. Disregulated eaters think in very black-and-white terms. If they are not thin, then they are fat. If they are not perfect, then they are a complete failure. They starve themselves on a strict diet (restraining their eating), then go on a binge.  Their standards of perfection are too high. It is okay to be imperfect because that is the way things really are.

The things that may lead to the development of disordered eating are internalised and expressed at a very early age. Research with 8- to 10-year-old children showed that they express weight, dieting, and physique concerns that reflect Western sociocultural values and preoccupation with body weight and dieting. 

If this sounds like you, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy will help you learn how to manage these All or Nothing urges. Learning how to fail well is as important as learning how to succeed. Accepting ourselves as fallible requires us to confront our fears, so that failure is not awful, terrible or scary but something that we can manage with grace.

 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.