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.

Yesterday's Horizon programme on BBC2 talked about how most of us take up exercise to lose weight, but on its own it doesn't work. They showed that jogging for 15 minutes at 6mph uses up 16 calories. But a pound of unwanted fat is 3,500 calories. Most of us just don't have the time and the rest of us just don't want to exercise like this.

But there were some helpful suggestions. Maintaining a high calorie output just doing normal stuff can expend an extra 500 calories a day. So, if you walk instead of using the lift, stand instead of sitting, fidget instead of staying still, your body starts to use up extra calories even when you are asleep. For most of us, this seems a realistic approach. It is about being inefficient and wasting bodily energy, where most of our lives aim for efficiency (like using the remote instead of getting up to switch over).

I have blogged about these things many times. But the programme offered something new and interesting.

They showed that this kind of low level persistent activity can help us to move fat out of our bloodstream where it can clog our arteries and into our muscles where it can be used up.So it can protect against heart attacks and strokes. And that a few short bursts of high intensity exercise (HIT) is as effective as many hours on the treadmill. A Scottish researcher at Birmingham University (there was some nice footage of Glasgow in the programme!) shows that 3 minutes a week of HIT is all you need. Anything where you are working hard, for 3 shots of 20 seconds, in fact so hard that you are yelling to help you work harder, does the trick. And the trick is to get the fat stores in your muscles released so that the brain demands more energy from the fat stores around the organs. This can protect against diabetes and cardivascular disease.

The fat around our organs (fat above the waist) is the problematic fat. Hip and thigh fat on the other hand can be quite protective of good he

So after the programme I did 3 bursts on the exercise bike and will do the same 3 times a week for a month and see if I feel better.

Childhood obesity is a problem in Scotland. As the Scottish Government reports, in 2009, almost a third of children (29.7%) were outwith the healthy weight range (31.0% of boys and 28.3% of girls).

The usual response is to focus on overweight children and get them to eat less and get more active. Canadian research shows that there is no marked differences in physical ac­tivity between overweight and lean children, at least not when corrected for the increased ef­fort it takes to move larger bodies. Based on actual measurements of physical activity using sophisticated accelerometric devices, only 5% of Canadian adults and children meet the recommended levels for vigorous physi­cal activity per week. It is probably the same in Scotland. If only 5%, then not just the overweight are inactive.

New research from Germany looked at why some children get fat and some remain lean, given that they seem to behave more or less the same way and live in the same environment.  They tested the following risk factors on children's BMI: maternal BMI, mater­nal smoking in pregnancy, low parental socioeconomic status, lack of breast feeding and high TV viewing time .

It turns out that the estimated effects of all risk factors (except lack of breastfeeding) on BMI were greatest for children who have the highest BMI. In other words, it is not that lean children don’t also watch a lot of TV or have mothers who smoked during pregnancy. It’s that fatter children are more sensitive to these factors than thinner children.

Thus, children who are genetically predis­posed to obesity are far more likely to pack on the pounds when spending hours in front of the TV than children who are genetically less prone to put on weight. The same could probably be said for overeating or any of the other environ­mental drivers of obesity, which have greater effects in promoting weight gain in some children than in others.

So, what to make of this then? It seems a bit of a lottery. Children who are genetically sensitive to becoming overweight will eat and behave just the same as other children, but they get fat and the others don`t. As a parent, this says one thing to me. Protect all children from the risk because we have no real way of knowing who is sensitive.

That means, going out for walks with your children, encouraging them to take up dancing or drumming or football, whatever physical exercise pleases them. Reduce the obsogenic risks in the household - that is, don`t buy biscuits, sweets, takeaways routinely. Reduce screen time to less than 4 hours a day. Our modern lifestyle provides the great risk of obesity.

This is a constant complaint of clients who get in touch with me. Why on earth do I persist in eating even when I am not hungry?

A current telly advert is encouraging a Good Mother to feed her family even though they have said they are not hungry. Sometimes I despair! It is hard enough managing our eating when we are accosted every day with little encouragements to eat, little cues that trigger our eating - ads in the paper (even in slimming mags), ads on the telly, so many food shops and so many takeaways. We are affected more than we realise by these constant hints to eat.

So the latest advert by Galloway cheese has me shouting at the telly. The family is at home and the Good Mother asks if they are hungry. No, they are not. They are all busy doing their thing, enjoying themselves and not thinking about food. So the Good Mother decides We will see about that, and fills a dish with nachos or crisps, grates on a cheesy topping and brings it to them, fragrant and melting. Well, I was right, she suggests, you were hungry. Well, not until the food was stuck in front of them they weren't.

Most of us don't put on weight by eating 3 meals a day. It is the fun snacks like this that make us fat. So we don't need advertisers to do more of what is not in our best interests.

Well, after that rant I feel much better.

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.

This conundrum has been known for some time, but there is further research by , David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD,  a Harvard professor and Founding Director of the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) clinic at Children’s Hospital, Boston.

He refers to research showing that rats get fatter when fed on artificial sweeteners than if fed on sucrose - normal sugar. The hypothesis is that the sweeteners interfere with our body's regulatory systems. The body thinks - Whoopee, calories on the way - then the sweetness comes, but big disappointment, no calories. So we start to seek out calories from somewhere else.

Another important comment he makes is that artificial sweeteners are really, really sweet, and we get hooked on this intense sweetness. As a result, natural sweetness, such as fruit, just is not sweet enough. Artificial sweeteners train us to want this intense sweetness. Note that they are only available in manufactured foods, notably in sugar free fizzy drinks, all of which are heavily advertised.

So, help yourself by avoiding fizzy drinks. Drink more water. To help you lose weight.

We get a lot of information from the media. Some of what we get from the media is what a woman ought to be like, rather than what she is like. Apparently only 5% of women could achieve the slender Barbie woman proposed to us by the media. The Western ideal of woman is now starting to affect women in developing countries, and they are now suffering from disordered eating, like bulimia or anorexia.

This site has a go at showing how the media affect us. It shows that advertisers show images of men as active and doing stuff, or being funny. The images of woman, curiously, find them lying on the ground, crouching, or crawling.

Western culture exerts pressure on women to conform to the current fashionable body shape, even though women have always come in all shapes and sizes. This pressure leads to unhappiness.

Research carried out by Northumbria University showed how Western culture is starting to put pressure on South African women to conform to Western ideals of beauty and the preferred body shape. In the past, South African women had to be fat in order for their husbands and fathers to demonstrate their prosperity. So in one way, the report suggests, this is a sign of empowerment. On the other hand, the women also say that they want to be thin to please their men, who are also developing preferences for the Western ideal. The women said they wanted to be like the women in the adverts.

Striving after unachievable ideals of body shape only make us unhappy. When we are unhappy, we eat to comfort ourselves and lo, we put on weight. Try hypnotherapy and break free.