American researchers found burgers, chips and sausages programmed a human brain into craving even more sugar, salt and fat laden food.  Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found laboratory rats became addicted to a bad diet.

They tested rats and the rats which ate as much junk food as they wanted became very fat and started bingeing. When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found the rats on unlimited junk food needed even more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.

"They always went for the worst types of food and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats,” said Dr Kenny. "The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food." Read  more here.

This is what Dr David Kessler identified. He was a commissioner with the US Food and Drugs Administration. He claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty and trigger addictive neural pathways in the brain that many people really cannot stop eating these foods even when they have just eaten a full meal.  He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a "bliss point" when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more, so that they gain weight.

To help you overcome these addictions, try hypnosis.

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It's Easter, so chocolate eggs on the horizon. Some foods just hit the spot and chocolate - that conspiracy of fat and sugar - is certainly one of them. But if we want to control our weight, we might label these foods as Bad and Banned, and therefore when we eat them we are overwhelmed with guilt, shame, anger and all sorts of unpleasant emotions because we think we have lost control.

Just thinking these foods are bad and banned makes them (of course) more desirable. And all those bad feelings you have after eating them just prove to you that they should be banned. And the more you ban them the more you want them.

And if you use food as a treat or to comfort yourself, you are likely to stock them up in the house, in case of emergency. And in the house is in the mouth, so you are back on the treadmill.

It doesn't have to be like this. You can enjoy eating chocolate without bingeing.

Hypnosis can help you develop other sources of pleasure and comfort so that the anxiety surrounding eating is reduced. And you will find that you can eat anything you want without eating everything.

We often worry that other people think we are fat, when in fact they are not bothered one way or the other. The result of this belief though makes us self-conscious and feel that we ought to lose weight in order to meet the expectations of other people. And when we fail, we feel we have let them down, as well as feeling that we have failed ourselves.

Recent research sought to examine the role women's husbands may play in determining their body satisfaction. 172 (mean age = 37.53 years) European American women were assessed (using the Body Figure Rating Scale) for their own body satisfaction, their perceptions of their husbands' satisfaction with their bodies, and their husbands' actual satisfaction with their bodies. The women's weight status was assessed using body mass index (BMI). Results indicated that wives were much more dissatisfied with their bodies than were their husbands and that wives thought their husbands were much more dissatisfied with their bodies than the husbands actually were.

Another result of the study suggested that the wives' BMI didn't affect their husband's satisfaction with their wives bodies nearly as much as the women themselves. They were much more concerned about their being fat and felt their husbands shared this concern.

What can we make of this? Women as a whole are pretty tough on themselves in relation to their weight and shape. We tend to project this dissatisfaction onto other people and then imagine them thinking hurtful thoughts. It is another way of beating ourselves up.

If you are overweight, it is a great idea to lose weight. But do it for the good of your health, rather than to achieve some imaginary goal of pleasing someone else.

Well, average weight has been going up for the past 30 years or so, and research links this with the industrialisation of food production. In the past, if we wanted to eat, we had to make a significant effort. Now, our fridges are constantly full of delicious food cooked by someone else. So easy to eat without effort.

And a lot of the food we eat is handfood. Biscuits, burgers, crisps. This sort of food tends to be eaten automatically, without thought. Hand mouth hand mouth, and you look in the packet and  to your surprise you discover it is all gone. For most of us, this is the risky stuff.

This easy access to attractive calorie dense food means it is harder than in previous generations to control our weight. And new research in the Lancet shows that between 1980 and 2008, mean BMI worldwide increased by 0·4 kg/m² per decade for men and 0·5 kg/m² per decade for women. Click here to get your BMI. These averages are for the whole world. The trend is ever upwards.

This is the impact of the obsogenic environment, where it the world that we are living in that actively contributes to overweight.  But we can beat this. By becoming aware of the daily risks, spotting the eating habits that make us put on weight,  we can learn to manage our weight effectively. Hypnosis helps.

Research literature is full of reports that people whose food intake has been limited, for example through dieting, typically regain whatever weight they lost after the intake restraints are removed. This graph is taken from an article in the Journal of Nutrition. It shows that after 2 to 3 years about half of those who lost weight have regained it, and after a longer period nearly everyone has. This is the data that is used to show that 95% or so of all dieters go back to their old weight.

Once the dietary restriction is over, the weight creeps back on. So if you are going on a restrictive diet, then it needs to be sustained. This is the tricky bit. For most of us, dieting is hard, boring, antisocial, and it makes us think about food all the time. So sustaining this way of eating for life seems impossible and depressing.

Indeed, it is shown in this same article, that when we restrict our food intake, our body gets defensive and prepares for famine. This report states that  "when weight loss occurs, resting metabolism declines by an amount significantly in excess of that expected from the loss in metabolically active tissue. We have observed a drop of 24.6% in daily resting energy expenditure when the body weight of rats was reduced (by caloric restriction) by 14.9%"

This means that when we dramatically reduce our intake, our bodies adjust by needing less. Drat!! So what to do? Gradually changing eating patterns, in the direction of the desired pattern, little and often, will help to reassure your body that there is no risk of starvation, so that it does not try to defend itself.

Hypnotherapy can help you to identify the eating patterns you want to get rid of and give you the confidence and optimism that they can be changed, easily, effectively and permanently. Give it a try.

People whose food intake has been drastically reduced – examples include war and famine as well as restrictive diets – usually regain pretty quickly whatever weight they lost. The most famous experiment which proved this is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment carried out in the 50s by Ancel Keys and colleagues.

In the Minnesota Experiment, 36 normal, healthy men were restricted to half their normal calories for 6 months. Although this was described as a study of "semistarvation,"  cutting the men's rations to half of their former intake is precisely the level of caloric deficit used to define "conservative" treatments for obesity (Stunkard, 1993)

One of the results was that the men became intensely preoccupied with food which interfered considerably with their ability to concentrate on their usual activities. Food became the pre-eminent topic of conversation and fantasy. (Is this ringing any bells?) They also started behaving oddly, for example, hoarding unnecessary items.

When the experiment had finished, the men were gradually reintroduced to normal food. During this rehabilitation time, many of the men lost control of their appetites and "ate more or less continuously" Even after 12 weeks of rehabilitation, the men frequently complained that they experienced an increase in hunger immediately following a large meal. One of the men ate immense meals of 5,000-6,000 (double the daily intake of normal people) and only an hour later started snacking.

What can we learn from this if we are wanting to lose weight? Drastic reductions in our intake will make us food-obsessed and this obviously doesn't help us to eat less. And then we binge, losing control, feeling angry with ourselves and putting all that weight back on. A more helpful approach is to eat normally and healthily, without snacking. And hypnosis will help.

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!

We are all really suggestible - surprisingly so - click here to see how when students are told that chocolate flavoured yoghurt is strawberry, they really believe it! This is based on research by Brian Wansink, of Cornell University.

This is very helpful. It means when your eyes see your meal served on a small plate, you will feel satisfied when you finish the plate. Likewise, when you see a huge plate filled to the brim, you eat it as well. Somehow, being served a large full plate gives you permission to overeat. On the other hand, when your portion is placed in the centre of a huge plate, you feel rather done down. You can harness your suggestibility to your own benefit!

Hypnosis is all about suggestion. If you have decided to give up puddings, that decision will be reinforced by suggestions that you no longer wish to eat a pudding, that it is unnecessary and that indeed you prefer not to.

Now that you realise just how suggestible we all are, you can be confident that hypnosis for weight control is going to help!

There is huge social pressure on women in particular to be slim, even though we come in all shapes and sizes.

In the 50s this was done with girdles. I remember well the ads for the Playtex living girdle. In the 70s, we just had to be thin, and dieting become the norm. In the 80s and 90s, we had to be fit too, exercising to get a slim, toned body. Now, the move is towards cosmetic surgery.

This demonstrates the change from external control of body shape to internal controls.

The strong implication of the social pressures is that exercising helps achieve the ideal, and so having a thin, toned body is evidence of personal effort. Inability to achieve this look is attributed to insufficient effort.

As a result, we can feel defeated, ashamed, humiliated and unacceptable. The message from these social norms is that beauty is a matter of effort, worth limitless expenditure of energy and money. If we fail to attain the ideal, we are personally to blame. Our fault.

We don't have to buy into these ideals. We can be healthy and fit and lead happy and fulfilling lives without buying in. Give hypnosis a try to find a more healthy way to achieve a healthy weight.

When Rubens was painting, voluptuous women were considered beautiful. Attractiveness stereotypes have been with us for centuries, but the particular ideal changes with fashion. The current beauty ideal is unrealistically thin. Using younger and younger models, with immature body shapes, demonstrates how unrealistic it is. And as the beauty ideal gets thinner, real women have been getting bigger. So the difference between ideal and actual just keeps growing.

In times of famine, people tend to get thin. When food is freely available, people get fat. We in the Western world have easy access to plentiful supplies of the widest range of palatable foods at very low prices. Thus the social pressure to achieve unrealistically thin bodies is even harder because at the same time we are receiving messages to eat. Particularly messages to eat for fun.

To help you maintain a healthy body image in a healthy body, try hypnosis.