I have just received a marketing email about fat burning coffee. That sounds just the ticket. Does this work?

If it did, we would all have heard about it and would all be thin.

It is possible that some drink or other speeds up our metabolism a bit so more calories could well be lost. Calories might well be burned, but would we lose weight? It takes 10,000 steps a day to burn off 1 pound a week. So how much of this coffee would we have to drink?

Most of all though, the problem is belief in Magic. These marketeers are selling Magic. When we are looking for Magic, we are not looking to make the changes to our habits that are necessary for long term weight maintenance. Those changes don`t have to onerous. Just a few small changes every month and you can manage your weight.

Well, the simple answer is, when we are feeling good, when things are generally going well. When the ducks are in a row.

That gives you the greatest chance, because you will be willing to accept changing your eating behaviour as a process rather than demanding that your weight gets lower NOW!

When we decide to lose weight, it is usually because we think our body is not satisfactory. The trouble is that body dissatisfaction is related to lower levels of self-esteem. The relationship is significantly stronger for women than for men, and, curiously, about the same for both traditional and feminist women.

For both sexes, more negative attitudes towards one's body are related to greater proneness to depression.  You can read more of this research here.

Women have so accepted the new norms about body shape (these are social constructs, made-up ideas, and have nothing to do with the actual shape of human bodies) that body dissatisfaction is the norm too. Women are likely to perceive themselves as overweight or slightly overweight, regardless of their actual weight, and most want to lose weight. Men get dissatisfied with their bodies, too, and the number is increasing. Men perceive themselves as underweight and want to gain weight - so they can meet the social construct that men are muscly and strong.

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.

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.

Going without a meal is frequently used as a weight control method, often as a response to overindulgence the day before. It doesn't work. It has been shown to result in bingeing in response to the feelings of hunger. It is regarded as one of the unhealthy strategies.

New research by Mikael Symmonds and colleagues from the University College London,  shows that hunger influences the level of risk that people will take.

Animals take more risk to get food when they are hungry so the researchers wanted to see if this applies to humans, and tested a group of people to find out if they would take more economic risks when hungry.

They found a very close relationship with hunger and higher risk taking - hungry people take more risks and are more impulsive than when they have just eaten. The research also suggests that dieting may make people more prone to taking risks.

Similarly, they find that hungry people are likely to take more risks with their food choices and eat all the wrong sort of foods (chocolate, crisps, takeouts etc) than people who are less hungry.

So what to make of this.

1. Don't go food shopping when you are hungry - you will buy all the wrong stuff.
2. Don't skip meals.

If you are near Glasgow or Annan, try hypnosis with me to try a better way to lose weight.

Yes, dieting is drastic. Better to relearn how to feel good, deal with stress and make healthy eating automatic so you lose weight. Hypnosis will help.

So this is a statement of intent. How to translate that goal into action? There is so much that gets in the way. Peter Gollwitzer,  Professor of Psychology at New York University, has done a lot of work on this.

For a start, we have busy lives, so no matter that we are keen to carry out these goals, we might just forget. Or we slip into habitual behaviours that seem to make it impossible to achieve our goal. For me, if the gym class starts later than getting home time, then I slip into my being at home habits, and just can't face leaving the house once more.

Identifying the goal is the first thing to do. Goal implementation is the next stage. Sounds so simple, but most of us don't do it. In my case, it would be Find a class that starts immediately after work, and on that day, don't go home.

What is your goal, and what do you need to do to achieve them? And if you need further help, try hypnosis

Cravings seem to arise out of the blue and we are overcome with the need to eat the craved item, often sweet things for women. Well, the key thing to know is that like a screaming child, if you ignore them, they eventually stop, and if you keep ignoring them, they will stop for ever altogether.

So how to ignore cravings so you can lose weight?

Well, one way is to identify what is triggering them. It is not hunger. It could be your routine. For example, if you have always had a snack at 3.00pm your cravings will arrive on the dot. If you always eat in the car on the way home, they will be there too. If you walk past a sweet shop and always buy chocolate or crisps with your paper, you will repeat the actions on and on. So these are environmental cues and habit-based triggers for cravings. Change your route, have no food in the car, stop snacking at 3.00pm. And if the trigger is boredom, develop a portable hobby so that you can distract yourself. And if I might bang on about this again, if you always munch away at chocs and crisps in front of the telly, just turning the telly on turns your belly on.

Changing behaviour in these relatively small ways is quite easy. You don't have to deal with everything all at once. One or two a week is quite enough. Then what?

When cravings come, ignore them. Distract yourself. This could be by going for a walk, phoning a friend, washing the car. Just tapping your finger onto your hand for a few minutes is also quite distracting.

Cravings disappear in only a few minutes. You can handle that! And to make it easier, try hypnosis.

According to Weight Wise, if you've tried to lose weight, and have slipped back into your old ways of eating, you're not alone.

The key point here is slipping back into your old ways of eating. If you are going to control your weight, then changing your patterns of eating, and making those changes automatic, is the goal. You can do this bit by bit, making small changes every week. There are lots of tips here on my blog about the sorts of little changes that you can make. And gradually, these regular small changes accumulate so that your eating pattern helps maintain you at the weight you want, without thinking about food all the time. Hypnosis can help you to determine which changes will be the most effective, and then help you make them permanent and automatic.

Weight Wise offer a great chart to help you monitor your weight and waist. Weight Wise has been developed by the British Dietetic Association and they talk a lot of sense and give lots of great tips.