You may know about Oprah Winfrey's weight loss history. It is now quite famous. She began dieting at around 10stone, after gaining about a stone, which was troubling her. That diet got her back to her previous weight, but when her weight reached 15 stone she went on a more drastic diet for 4 months and got back down to 10 stone again. But within a few years she had gained even more weight and was nearly 17 stone. She hired a team of trainers and dieticians who set her eating and exercise programmes and ensured she stuck to them. At the end, she was down to just over 11stone. But 4 years later she was over 14stone.

What does this tell us?

Firstly, it has to tell us that diets don't work. Anything that requires such radical changes to our lifestyle is unsustainable. We end up heavier than when we started. There is lots of information and evidence about why this happens. The fact that diets result in increased weight has been interesting researchers for many years.

Secondly, failing to manage our weight is not a sign of weakness. Look at Oprah's example. She clearly has loads of willpower and determination. She kept at a tight eating and exercise programme for a long time and her job requires willpower too. She is clearly a strong woman with no shortage of self-discipline or willpower.

But diets are not the only approach to managing our weight. (Well, what I really mean is manage our eating). We know about diets because they are well-advertised - there are books, magazines, diet foods, diet clubs and lots more. The diet industry is huge, worth billions.

Other approaches work better for the long-term. We can harness a whole range of psychological tools to identify what changes to make and to protect us from overwhelming urges and cravings. Setting realistic goals helps. And making small changes every so often helps too. And with hypnosis, these changes can form part of our automatic behaviour, so that we don't think about food all the time.

If you are wanting to manage your weight, then I can help you with a wide range of psychological techniques to suit your personality and eating behaviours. But in the meantime, here are some tips.

Don't go on a diet. Research shows time and again they make you fat.

Don't ban certain foods. This only makes them more desirable.

Most of us want to lose weight. Even normal weight people believe they should be thinner. And yet as a population, we are gaining weight. The average weight has gone up by over 10 pounds since the 70s. And yet there are diet foods in the supermarket, slimming clubs are busy, and we all have a pretty clear idea of what constitutes healthy eating. Despite all of this, most of us continue to gain weight. So what to do?

Well, the research shows that diets don`t work. Most people who go on diets put on more weight. But you can lose weight and keep it off. How`s that then?

Making little changes to your diet works well.Rather than completely change the way you eat, what little changes could you make? Well, for me, first of all over a weekend I gave up sugar in my tea and coffee. Nasty at first, but I prefer it now. Then I gave up milk in my tea. My weight stabilised a bit lower down the scale. I focused on breakfast for my next trick. Rather than 2 slices of toast, I cut one slice in half. (I realised I thought it was inefficient using just half the toaster!) That change took my weight down by 8 pounds over about 3 months. What now? My current change is to cut out the butter on the breakfast toast. I just have the jam. I am on day 3, after a friend hypnotised me. So far so good.

So, small changes. Get them bedded in and move onto the next. If you can reduce your food intake by 150 calories a day in each change, then you will be able to reduce your weight and maintain it. A hypnotherapist can help you focus on the best change to make and help you stick with it, until it becomes second nature.

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.

Many of my clients tell me that their lives will be much better if only they could lose weight. They will be happier, more successful at work and more likely to find a life partner.

To an extent this way of thinking suggests waiting until the weight has gone before getting on with important aspects of life - "I will defer looking for a partner until I am thinner". When our happiness is contingent on our being thinner, then happiness might elude us. We go on a diet, the results don't come quickly enough and we give up, feel bad about ourselves for failing, so we start eating again and continue to defer cherished goals.

So will we really be happier if we are thinner? Certainly feeling bad about ourselves can drive weight gain but will weight loss actually improve mood?

This question has been addressed by Anthony Fabricatore and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania in a paper just published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The authors analysed 31 research studieson the relationship between weight loss and depression, involving 8,000 people.

Comprehensive lifestyle modification was found to be better at reducing symptoms of depression than control (where nothing was done to the patients) and non-dieting interventions. Lifestyle modification was also marginally better in improving mood than dietary counseling or exercise-alone programs. Exercise-alone programmess were superior to control interventsions in reducing symptoms of depression

Nearly all active interventions reduced symptoms of depression but there was no relationship between the amount of weight lost and the reduction in depression symptoms.

This analysis suggests that the lifestyle modifications intended to reduce weight tend to improve mood, rather than losing weight leading to less depression. 

This of course would not be hard to believe given the evidence that both dietary intake of certain (unhealthy) nutrients as well as increased physical activity can significantly decrease symptoms of depression.

So my clients who tell me that they that they would be so much less depressed if only they could lose some weight, is not borne out by these results. A more varied and active lifestyle will probably improve their mood irrespective of whether or not they actually lose weight. So get out more, go to that Zumba class, meet more people, walk to work, eat fewer crisps, watch less telly. You will feel better, and you are more likely then to lose weight.

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.

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!

Most women in the West are disappointed by their bodies and want to lose weight. At New Year, and now in Lent, we make resolutions. How you word these resolutions will go a long way towards success.

So, say your resolution is "I am going to lose weight". How do you know? Just saying it, as we all know, doesn't magic the weight off.

At the moment on the telly, you can get food hampers sent to your home cooked by a chef. And that probably works. But what will happen when you decide you have lost enough weight, or you can't afford the hampers, or your family are sick of you having hamper food and they are still eating your cooking?

Slimming techniques which include unsustainable approaches are just that. Unsustainable. And as soon as you stop the treatment, the weight comes back on. Losing weight requires something to change. A change in our pattern of eating. And so the best idea is to focus on what exactly that change might be. Most of us know what causes us to keep putting on weight. So think what yours might be.

For one of my clients, it was a Chinese meal every Friday. She ate well the rest of the time, in fact was very careful. Just one session of hypnosis and she broke the habit. Her resolution was "I will no longer bother with the Friday night takeaway". For another, it was buying biscuits for the visitors and eating them herself. Just knowing that she was colluding with herself helped her stop buying the biscuits in the first place. Don't forget - In the house is in the mouth. Her resolution was "I will not buy biscuits with the weekly shop". If she had an overwhelming need for a biscuit, there would be none in the house. She would have to get up and go out and buy enough for the immediate need.

But for others it might be eating for self comfort. If you are an emotional eater then deal with that first. Get feeling good and strong, so that you no longer need to comfort yourself with food. Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy is just the ticket for making friends with yourself. And then you feel strong enough to deal with the habit side of eating.

So if you plan to lose weight, exactly what change are you going to make? It doesn't have to be all at once, bit by bit is good. What is the bad eating habit you want to change, and what exactly can you do to change it? Here are some examples of well-worded resolutions:

I will have just one slice of toast for breakfast
I will not buy biscuits for the cupboard
I will use a smaller plate so I can eat a smaller portion
At eat-all-you-can buffets, I will use the salad plate
I shall say no to crisps and biscuits

Our bodies are surprisingly finely tuned. Just 150 calories a day more than we need - and the weight goes on. So, cut out 150 calories a day and the weight will come off.

I have said before that exercise will not really help in losing weight. Exercise is good for its own sake as it maintains your health and makes you feel good (so you might eat less). Cutting down by 250 calories a day is much easier than exercising it off.

Indeed, you may have noticed that you consider walking to the bus stop with the goal of exercising away that chocolate bar. Wishful thinking because to work off 4 ounces of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk needs you to walk 5 miles (10,000 steps) at a fast pace.

We often make mistakes about weight control strategies. For example, drinking diet fizzy pop doesn’t help us reduce weight. We tend to compensate for it by eating something else, taking the view that diet pop is the diet!

But doing nothing and lying about is generally a bad thing.

Peter Katzmarzyk and colleagues at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center examined the links between time spent sitting (at school, work, and at home) and mortality (death) in a representative sample of more than 17,000 Canadians. They report that time spent sitting was associated with increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality (there was no association between sitting and cancer death). Individuals who sat the most were about 50% more likely to die during the follow-up period than individuals who sat the least, even after controlling for age, smoking, and physical activity levels.

The researchers also examined the association between sitting and mortality after control for body weight in some cases. They report that sitting remains a significant predictor of mortality. This suggests that all things being equal (body weight, physical activity levels, smoking, alcohol intake, age, and gender) the person who sits more is at a higher risk of death than the person who sits less.(Fidgetting has been shown to be an effective strategy. So don’t listen when people tell you to stop!)

Most of us are sedentary throughout the work day and so most of us are at risk. And at home too, we spend little time working in the kitchen, cooking, laying the table, washing up. Even in front of the telly we don’t get up to change the channel. Our whole environment seems to be geared to minimising effort.

What to do? Throughout the day to move about and fidget as much as possible. Seek out opportunities to make more effort. Walk whenever possible.

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.

It is normally just a few pounds, and getting back to our normal routines will shift some of them. But we can do a few things to speed the process along, so that we don't enter 2011 with 2009 Christmas bulges.

What has caused those extra pounds? For most of us, we said Oh Heck, and bought  mince pies, sweets and biscuits, mostly for family and visitors,  and just to be sociable, we tucked into them. Hunt them out now, all those beltbusters, and remove them from the home. Take them round as welcome gift to people with growing children, feed them to the ducks, or steel yourself and bin them. The Christmas self-indulgence is over. New Year, New You!

Avoid eating out and takeaways for a month or so. You have had the Great Feast, now is the time for a bit of famine. Meals eaten at home tend to have fewer calories and fewer courses.

Practice eating smaller portions. After the Great Stuffing, most of us will welcome a bit less food. Use a smaller plate, or fill more than half the half the plate with veg, which is less calorie dense than meat. Practice leaving some of the food on the plate. Use a paper napkin, and when you have finished, screw up the napkin and put it into the plate. That will make it harder for you to continue eating.

Just these few changes will help. Making a few small changes every month means that by the end of 2011 you will have developed eating habits that will help you manage your weight.