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.

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.

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.

Try this quiz. These statements are examples of the most common types of emotional eating: depressed eating (items 1 – 3), anxiety/stress eating (4 – 6), angry eating (7 – 9), bored eating (10 – 12), lonely eating (13 – 15), and happy eating (16 – 18). Reviewing your responses to these statements should give you a general idea of your emotional eating tendencies. The first step in overcoming emotional eating is to become aware of your unique pattern.  Some people are anxious eaters, others lose their appetite when anxious but eat more when depressed. Hypnotherapy can help you manage your emotions and build a wider portfolio of ways of coping.

____ 1. When I am feeling “down” or “blue” a little snack will lift my mood.

____ 2. When I’m feeling depressed I have more desire to eat.

____ 3. If someone disappoints me I want to eat something.

____ 4. When I am feeling under pressure I have the urge to snack.

____ 5. I eat more when I am stressed than when I am calm.

____ 6. If I am worried or afraid of something I tend to eat.

____ 7. Sometimes when people irritate me I want to get something to eat.

____ 8. I have had something to eat to get back at someone who has upset me.

____ 9. When I get angry, eating will make me feel better.

____ 10. I look forward to eating something when I’m bored.

____ 11. I eat more than usual when there is nothing to do.

____ 12. If time is passing slowly, I look forward to having a snack.

____ 13. Being alone increases my appetite.

____ 14. I am less likely to eat when other people are around as I am when I’m by myself.

____ 15. Eating makes me feel better when I am lonely.

____ 16. I celebrate with food when I’m in a good mood.

____ 17. If I’m feeling really good, I don’t worry about my diet.

____ 18. When I’m happy, having a favorite snack makes me feel even better.

A few months ago a client came for help in stopping his habit of eating chocolate and cheese when he got home. He was putting on weight. After discussion, it struck me that he came home starving and chocolate and cheese gave him urgently needed calories. He ate a tiny rapid breakfast, didn't stop for lunch, grabbed a snack around 3pm and came home to stuff himself with chocolate.

Often when we are worried about our weight, we skip meals. If we have a job which is overwhelming we will skip meals. It doesn't work.

My advice to this client was to eat more during the day, with a gap of no more than 4 hours between. A discussion about the contents of his cupboard and fridge demonstrated that the components of a meal were nowhere to be found. He felt he was eating too much (well, he was eating a lot of chocolate) and I felt he wasn't eating enough throughout the day.

So I was interested in this advice from  “Best Weight: A Practical Guide to Office-Based Weight Management", recently published by the Canadian Obesity Network. This is not a self-help book, but this snippet is relevant for everyone.

In our experience, the majority of patients who struggle with binge-eating episodes do not eat regularly throughout the day, and tend to struggle with binge behaviours from mid-afternoon onward. In these patients, the binge is likely precipitated by true physical "homeostatic" hunger (a need for calories) rather than a hedonistic emotional appetite (need for comfort foods). Well-distributed calories and the use of more satisfying protein-rich foods may be enough to resolve the disorder in these patients.

Before diagnosing someone with binge-eating disorder, you should first ensure that a subtle form of homeostatic hunger is not triggering or encouraging their binge behaviour. Have patients follow the eating instructions below to see whether their binge eating gets better:

• Breakfast containing a minimum of 350 kcal with at least 15 g of protein, to be consumed within 30 minutes of waking
• Snacking every 2.5 hours between meals with snacks containing 100–200 kcal and at least 8 g of protein
• Lunch containing a minimum of 300–400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• Dinner containing a minimum of 400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• For every hour of sustained exercise, add an additional 100–150 kcal that are primarily carbohydrate based

Apart from greater social pressure in the Western world to be thin, there are social pressures which reduce women's opportunity to control their weight. These pressures are changing, though, as women become more economically resilient.

Leisure or recreational activity levels are lower for women than men, with a marked decline during adolescence. While boys continue to play football or ride their bikes, womens' physical activity declines with time.

When they are older, opportunities for physical activity for women are limited by greater caregiving responsibilities. They have less time for themselves. And indeed, their partners and family members often view any time spent at the gym or a dance class as "stolen" since they take the woman away from family responsibilities. There is often a lot of family negotiating to do when it comes to fitting in some exercise, and women's plans are often confounded by another family member's needs - so that the woman has to stay at home.

Socially acceptable forms of physical activity may be fewer for women than men, particularly in some ethnic groups. This includes swimming for some groups, dancing for others. And then there are safety concerns that affect times and places available for physical activity.

So if you are having trouble committing to physical activity, you are not alone. Don't beat yourself up about it. A hypnotherapist will help steel your resolve, and suggest ways to empower you.

Some of us just eat for something to do, because we feel bored. The sort of food we eat at times like this is very unlikely to be a simple ham salad. More likely, a packet of biscuits. Boredom eating tends to be automatic eating. What is that then?

Automatic eating is the eating that just seems to continue till the packet is finished. Like munching through a bag of crisps while you are watching the telly. The bag is empty before you know it. The hand to mouth continues until there is nothing left to eat.

Automatic eating makes us fat. We have no idea how much we have eaten, because we didn't really notice we were doing it. Hand, mouth, hand, mouth. So the inbuilt system that tells us we are full doesn't work. We just not paying attention, not to the food or to the signals from our body.

Automatic eating tends to be hand food, eaten while you are doing something else. Because you don't know you are doing it, it follows that when you kick this habit, you won't feel deprived because you weren't aware anyway.

Hypnotherapy to the rescue. Out with the habit, quickly and permanently.

Most of what we do during the day is automatic. We don't consider and ponder everything we do. We would be exhausted. We do things instinctively, intuitively. This saves us time and energy. What we do gets triggered by various cues - for example, at its most simple, we answer the phone when it rings, we drive on at a green light.

We also eat automatically. So in an airline, when the food is put in front of us, we eat it, hungry or not. And the most automatic eating of all is handfood - the food we eat with our hands. Pizza, cake, crisps, nuts, biscuits. For most of us, handfood is what puts on the pounds.

If you want to lose weight, check out the handfood you eat. Count up the calories and prepare to be shocked. It is likely to work out at the calorie content of an entire meal. If this could be your issue, then your resolution might be "I will only eat food on crockery with cutlery". Straightforward. Easy to remember. Effective.

And if you feel you couldn't imagine life without crisps, give me a call and see how easy it is to change!

Even the stars don't match up to their pictures in the magazines and other advertising. Women's daily exposure to "images of perfection" is linked to depression, insecurity and eating disorders, says a study by 40 doctors, psychologists and academics. It makes us mentally ill. (And dieting to try reach these impossible peaks of perfection makes us physically ill.)

"Kate Winslet's famous curves have been trimmed for a front cover and Keira Knightley's bust enlarged for a film poster. Madonna's biceps have been reduced for a magazine portrait, while veteran model Twiggy's wrinkles vanished in an advertisement for anti-ageing cream.The technique of flattening tummies, shaping thighs, removing laughter lines and adding extra gloss to hair is now commonplace among photographers attempting to produce perfect images of the body beautiful". This text was from the Independent newspaper. The French are trying to ban airbrushing. And in South America, they are trying to ban Barbie for the same reasons - unrealistic images of women make them ill.

What is the moral here? These images we see in the media are not real people. Even the stars, who spend all day working on looking wonderful, need to be airbrushed to look this good. They have become brands, products. A few years ago, Joan Collins said that maintaining her slim shape, lovely face and huge hair was her work, her job, and she devoted most of the day to preparing herself for going out to be seen.

This is unachievable for the rest of us. We shouldn't waste our lives trying.

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.

For many of us, it is boredom. We are wanting something to do with our hands. This is often the case when watching telly. Snacking in front of the telly is a risk factor for obesity. But what was that? Bored while watching telly? Maybe it is time to do something more rewarding like martial arts, or yoga, or going to the cinema, or phoning someone. Or taking up knitting or pottery. Many of us have got out of the way of hobbies. Our lives are complicated and it seems just too much extra hassle to get involved. But it is one of the best ways of controlling our weight.

For others of us, it is habit. 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 without the 3pm snack, these cravings go. 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. Alcohol lowers your general ability to resist. If you eat before you go out drinking, you will be less likely to succumb to a takeaway on the way home.