When we get worried about our weight, we can start to obsess, thinking about food all the time. My approach aims to help you to manage your eating, without measuring, counting, restricting, denying and without using food for reasons other than nutrition and sociability. It is good to enjoy food, and even more so with friends. And you can do it without packing on the pounds and without anxiety. Here is a bit of a quiz. All of these ways of dealing with food are pretty unhealthy. Try my approach and enjoy your food while still controlling your weight, in an easy, automatic and sustainable way.

Do you eat in reaction to good or bad events? Like awarding yourself a cake if you win a contract? Or buying a takeaway when you get dumped?

Do you eat when you are not hungry? Out of boredom, habit, anxiety or some other emotion?

Do you sometimes go on a binge and eat and eat and eat till you feel stuffed and dreadful?

Do you drop in and out of dieting, trying anything, even the weird ones? Do you replace meals with drinks, even water?

Do you define foods as good, so you can eat them, and bad, so you can feel guilty when you eat them?

Do you eat the control your intake by limiting the range of what you eat? On the telly recently one woman had only eaten breakfast cereal with milk for years. Are you unwilling to extend the range and eat very selectively, maybe just bread rolls and chips?

Do you count, weigh, measure out your daily allowance and stick rigidly to it? Counting every last calorie?

Do you eat differently (more generously) when you are on your own? Do you try to fit in with the notion that real women nibble rather than eat?

Do you exercise furiously in order to reduce or control your weight? Exercise is good for your heart and lungs, flexibility, physical stamina and for the pleasure it can give you. But it takes 10 miles to burn off a mars bar.

Learn new habits with cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy. Enjoy your food and manage your weight.

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.