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.

The diet industry is huge and growing. There are the foods for dieters (Kraft makes all the Weight Watchers food, as well as a wide range of chocolates and snack foods - a balanced portfolio.) the meal replacements, the slimming clubs, the diet books…….

If the diet industry was effective in getting us to lose weight, instead of  growing, it would be in decline. But diets do work for a short time. For some of us, they work well. And so we see the images of the person who has lost all that weight and we think, it will work for me too. We have another go, full of hope.

For most of us though, we do the diet, lose the weight, and within a year, it is all back on again. Yo-yo dieting. But we remember that it did work, and so we try it again. And again, getting heavier and heavier all the time.

Because we are not dealing with the root cause. We feel that the suffering imposed by the diet is good for us, and we deny and deprive ourselves, feeling that these virtues will keep us slim. High costs, but we are full of hope. It is a miserable life, so as soon as (or before) we achieve our weight goals, we go back to our old ways.

Counting calories, suffering hunger, getting on the scales, all these make us focus on food and our weight. And yet, we are really looking for a future when food is just a small part of our lives.

A better alternative is to establish a way of eating that is sustainable, automatic, routine. Where you enjoy your food, and maintain a healthy weight. Without shame or fear. Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy can get you into this new way of eating. Automatic. Routine, Sustainable.

Apparently most of us have given up on them already, but for those of you who are still on track - congratulations!

And many of us resolve to lose weight, but quickly fall back onto old habits. Why do we want to lose weight anyway? Well, the average person is 10 pounds heavier than our parent's generation, largely due to the easy access to cheap, palatable food. If we want cream cakes, we can buy them in just a few minutes. Our grandmothers had to bake them. So there is lots more temptation out there, in the shops and the adverts.

But sometimes it is because we feel our bodies are unacceptable, We don't love ourselves, our lives seem difficult and if only we could be thinner, then we would be happier in every way. Our bodies are to blame. This feeling is widespread in the West and as TV spreads more widely, women in other countries suffer this misery too. Research suggests there are 3 causes of body image distress - historic gender prejudice, media, and dieting.

Dieting has been shown not to work (see my other blog posts). Diet, deny and deprive is not a way to live for the long term.

Having a positive of yourself as a person will help you make positive changes to your eating patterns. Feeling good about yourself will help you sustain them. And this is why hypnotherapy works so well. We deal with the whole person, not just the spare tyre.

Womans Hour on Radio 4 devoted itself to dieting today. There were some interesting snippets. 97% of people who diet regain the weight lost. They suggested it was relatively easy to lose the weight, but hard to maintain the new lower weight. There are lots of fad diets around, and most will work for a short time, but very few of us could eat like that forever. Most of us think, I will go on a diet for 3 months, and then I will be fine. But we slip back into our old ways of eating.

My approach is to get you to challenge your eating habits, and make a series of small, easy changes, little and often. So that you don't think about food all the time, you don't starve yourself or make yourself a social pariah.

These little changes are each easy to make. No hardship at all. And gradually all these little changes build up and the benefits accumulate. In control of your eating once again. Straightforward, uncomplicated.

Get in touch and let's discuss how hypnotherapy will help you to manage your weight.

Trying to limit your food intake by dieting produces a tendency to overeat or even binge when restrictions are lifted (e.g. social disinhibition). The end result, paradoxically, is weight gain or re-gain.

This has been well described by Janet Polivy (Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto) who researches into the area of eating. She shows that food deprivation amongst dieters (achieved with intentional dietary restriction and restraint) produces a tendency to overeat, explaining why long-term dieting does not work.

Dr. Polivy's main interests have been and continue to be the influence of restrained eating and long-term dieting on behaviour. The discovery of the 'what the hell!' effect whereby dieting leads to binge eating has continued to foster further questions about the effects of trying to eat less than one would really like to. This includes studies of eating behaviour, cognitive and emotional reactions - contributing to and in reaction to food-related events. She has also been investigating the 'False Hope Syndrome' which characterises many of us who attempt self-change efforts such as dieting, identifying the factors that contribute to and maintain unrealistic expectations that lead to failure, and attributions and cognitions that promote repeated unsuccessful attempts. All very relevant.

My approach in this Weight Loss Clinic similarly focuses on the thought processes that contribute to unhelpful eating behaviours and the ways in which we can manage our environment to minimise the risks of unhelpful eating. Supported with hypnosis, this approach allows you to manage your eating in a sustainable and healthy way, without the constant worry of Diet, Deny and Deprive. Give me a call!

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.

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!

Well, I think that most of us know this.

When we are on diets, we are actively restraining ourselves from eating. Research has shown that this leads to attentional bias towards food cues. That is, we are more alert to things that make us think of eating, such as advertisements, cakes on display in a shop, the smell of cooking. And the more we think about food, the more likely we are to overeat.

If in addition, you are someone who already has a tendency to want to eat when you see food, then this attentional bias is increased.

One more reason why diets fail.

Hypnotherapy can help you to think less about food instead of obsessing, and to develop healthier eating habits.

If you have ever dieted, you will know about the weight loss plateau. That weight level that seems to stick, even though you are still being careful about what you eat. This weight loss plateau is one of the reasons why dieters get frustrated - so much care and control and you stay the same weight. The thought comes to mind "Why bother?" and next "What the hell".

Rudolph Leibel  of Columbia University has shown that there is a biological mechanism that tends to defeat efforts to reduce our weight. What happens is this: When the body sees that food is getting short, it reduces its metabolism, often rapidly and substantially, in order to keep you fit to survive these hard times  - with enough body fat to keep you ready for efficient reproduction. (Your body is really only interested in this part of you!)

So as you reduce your food intake, your body is reducing the calories it needs for maintenance, and you are chasing a moving target. So diets don't work. What can you do?

Small, regular changes to your eating habits will avoid the big weight changes (5%-10% of body weight) which trigger this effect. Increasing your activity even just a little will also help. Get yourself a pedometer and check how many steps a day you are doing, and do a bit every day to increase the steps within your normal daily behaviours. Sit less. And try hypnosis to keep you motivated.