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 eating for pleasure. 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.  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.

_Most of what we do is automatic. If you think about it,  we could not actively consider every single action. We would be exhausted and get very little achieved in the day. Our brain is very clever at putting us on automatic pilot. Eating is no different. Our brain reminds of occasions when eating has occurred in the past and our bodies respond with hunger signals. And if our brain gets just a hint of a food cue, those hunger signals start too.

As a result, if we have been in the habit of snacking at 3pm, then our brain will be on the lookout for the time and our tums will rumble. If you have been used to eating a snack while Eastenders is on, the theme tune will get the juices going and the cupboard doors opening. Knowing this, means we can take action to avoid it.

Hypnosis works by helping you become aware of these occasions and stick to decisions you have made about ho

We will all put weight on over Christmas and New Year. It is inevitable. Christmas is the time for feasting. The feasting starts a week or two before Christmas and ends just after New Year. With parties and drinks, and extra food on the table and more meals each day, it is unsurprising that we will all put on a few pounds. We can deal with them in the New Year.

But over the holiday we don't need to eat everything we see. For some of us, me included, when I see a table full of so many different delicious foods, I want some of everything. Psychologists have noticed this too. When there is a lot of variety on offer, eating just one of everything means we eat much much more. So if you want to avoid some of those extra pounds, you might choose to have just one of just half of what we see.

But Christmas and New Year are the times of plenty and we want to enjoy them. When the New Year comes round, time to make a resolution to eat more helpfully during 2012! Happy Christmas.

Christmas is getting closer. This is the time when friends and family gather together and enjoy the pleasure of a shared meal. And snacks, and drinks, and sweets. Sometimes the eating seems like its never-ending. We do eat more at Christmas. That's a fact. We spend longer at the table, we go to parties, we visit friends. But we still have a choice.

Hypnosis works to help you spot the chances to make a choice, and then to make it.

There will be a bit more weight around the hips after Christmas. After such festivities it is almost inevitable. Hypnosis will help you make those New Year Resolutions stick for the long term, easily and automatically.

Most of our every day lives are determined not by conscious intention or deliberate choice, but by our unconscious and automatic responses to features in our environment. Of course, we make some active choices or decisions every day. We know about those, because the conscious us was actively involved. We might be a bit sceptical about the idea that most of what we do is automatic and preconscious, not passing through the thinking part of our brains before action takes place.

Research by John Bargh and colleagues has great significance to those of us wanting to manage our weight. We respond to cues around us without thinking. So if we are watching the telly and a food ad comes on, we go and get a snack, without consciously making the connection. If we regularly snack in front of the telly, just the sight of the telly on makes us get a snack. Those trying to sell us stuff know about these cues and triggers too. At my local service station above the rows of sweets and crisps by the till it says HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER. What do you think the automatic response might be?

We can help ourselves by starting to note any automatic eating. Am I eating (sometimes we are completely unaware of it) and why might I be eating? Am I hungry? Am I eating because the person sitting next to me is munching something? Or because it is 3pm and I always nip out for snack at this time?  Most automatic eating is hand food, and the action is hand, mouth, hand, mouth. Spot these and you are on the way to managing your eating.

Hypnosis helps you to break this automatic behaviour.

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.

I tend to say weight management rather than weight loss. Why is that? Well, management sounds more active and involved, whereas loss doesn't sound very purposeful to me, in fact I feel there is a little hint of accidental and by chance. As well as that, for many people, losing weight is step 2. Step 1 is stopping the increase.

Purposeful weight management involves behaviour change. Eating differently. And in fact it is not really about managing weight either. It is about managing our eating. So with my clients I try to move the goal away from demanding their bodies to weigh less and be slimmer and towards changing their behaviours, focusing on all aspects of their eating-related behaviours.

And that is not just about eating less, though that will be result. It is about the daily routine, the shopping, where you eat, who you eat with. And of course how you feel about yourself. When you are feeling confident then you less likely to eat for comfort.

And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds every week. It is about changing to more helpful eating behaviours. It is about action. They may tell me that their goal is to achieve a better BMI or lose a certain number of pounds. To do this, requires action, and that is what I focus on, taking into account their lifestyle and work and home responsibilities etc.

And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds by the end of a particular period. When the eating behaviours change, the weight will change. But by how much and when?

Who knows? Setting a target may seem like a good idea, but if we continually fail, then it is likely we will just start on the cream buns again. And if there is a target you will be on the scales time and again, constantly checking and always finding the results unsatisfactory.

But what if you do lose weight? You achieve a target. What then? Do you go off the diet? Back to your old routines?  Or set yourself an even more challenging weight goal constantly chasing a moving target? Continuing the cycle of diet, deny and deprive. And if one day you will see the pointer on the scales go up and you might abandon your diet as a complete waste of time and go back to the cream buns. And some people believe their lives will suddenly become fabulous when the scales are friendly. More boyfriends, more money, more fun. And when the weight is just right for these magical happenings, disappointment sets in as reality strikes. Back to the buns.

But changing eating behaviours in a way that suits you is likely to be sustainable, and eventually automatic. Eating in the way that keeps your weight managed, without constantly having to think about it or worry about it. And this will make you feel in control, more contented and stop the constant fretting about your weight.

So the goal is to change eating behaviours bit by bit. Making little changes every month and bedding them in. Starting with the ones that are easiest or give the most rapid results. That success buoys you up, and keeps you on track. So losing weight is not the goal. Changing the way you eat is.

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.

Big isn't better Eating a large portion does not make you feel more satisfied than eating a small one. That's good news isn't it. So if you eat a smaller portion, you won't physically feel any less content. This research was carried out at Penn State University. They also show that people eat more if they are given a larger portion. Indeed, most of us will eat what is put in front of us. (We do it on an aeroplane, and we do it at home as well!)

So it means that if you serve yourself a smaller portion, you will feel fine. The easiest way to do this is to use a smaller plate. That way you can deceive your eyes about the size of the portion. When your eyes see a full plate, all of you feels that you are not being short-changed.

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

But what 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.

Some of us eat to calm or comfort ourselves. We feel bad about ourselves and food helps us feel relaxed. But then after that, we feel guilty, dissappointed and angry, so the comfort just doesn't last long enough. Learning to feel good about yourself, to overcome anxiety, is the first place to start. And hypnosis is a good place to start.

And then there is habit. Like putting two slices of toast in the toaster (because there are two slots) and eating both when one would do. Or cake with coffee. Or crisps with wine or beer. 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 however, these cravings go. When are you snacking? Habits are learned and so can be unlearned.

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.

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 don't want to resist a mango, but I trained myself to resist chocolate, and now it doesn't interest me. (I continue to be amazed.)

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