For some of us, it is just the sight of food. See it, want it, eat it.

Advertisers benefit from this by showing us appetising foods with lots of happy people enjoying them. TV food advertising has been shown to make us eat significantly more of anything. Just watching the ads makes us rush to the cupboards. This sort of eating is not related to meals. It tends to be hand food - biscuits, crisps, sweets. And it is eaten without much thought - hand, mouth, hand, mouth. This sort of eating is called automatic eating. You scarcely know how much you have eaten. In fact, we look into the crisp packet and are astonished the

Researchers conducted 2 experiments. First, children aged 7-11 watched a cartoon including food ads. They ate 45% more snack food while watching the show than children who watched the same cartoon with non-food ads.

They show that just half an hour a day watching telly the would lead to a weight gain of nearly 10 pounds a year (we are talking about children here) unless they cut down their other calorie intake or increased their physical activity.

In a second experiment,adults watched TV interspersed with snack food ads. They ate significantly more than those who saw ads with a nutritional or healthy food message. These effects persisted even after the TV viewing.

Adults and children increased eating of any foods in the house, not just those advertised.

“This research shows a direct and powerful link between television food advertising and calories consumed by adults and children,” said Jennifer Harris, PhD, the study’s lead author and director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center. “Food advertising triggers automatic eating, regardless of hunger, and is a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic".

What to do about this if you are wanting to control your weight? Watch less telly. Don't always have snack foods in the house to tempt you when the ads give you the munchies.

This is a constant complaint of clients who get in touch with me. Why on earth do I persist in eating even when I am not hungry?

A current telly advert is encouraging a Good Mother to feed her family even though they have said they are not hungry. Sometimes I despair! It is hard enough managing our eating when we are accosted every day with little encouragements to eat, little cues that trigger our eating - ads in the paper (even in slimming mags), ads on the telly, so many food shops and so many takeaways. We are affected more than we realise by these constant hints to eat.

So the latest advert by Galloway cheese has me shouting at the telly. The family is at home and the Good Mother asks if they are hungry. No, they are not. They are all busy doing their thing, enjoying themselves and not thinking about food. So the Good Mother decides We will see about that, and fills a dish with nachos or crisps, grates on a cheesy topping and brings it to them, fragrant and melting. Well, I was right, she suggests, you were hungry. Well, not until the food was stuck in front of them they weren't.

Most of us don't put on weight by eating 3 meals a day. It is the fun snacks like this that make us fat. So we don't need advertisers to do more of what is not in our best interests.

Well, after that rant I feel much better.

Just eating an extra 150 calories a day will increase steady state weight by 10 pounds.

What does 150 calories look like? Well, a 35g bag of Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps is 184 calories. Cadbury Cream Eggs come in at 173.6 calories.

For most of us, it is the snacks and the eating between meals, that put on the weight. A hypnotherapist can make avoiding snacks completely automatic.

Saving just 150 calories a day goes a long way to avoid getting heavier every year. So losing weight doesn't seem quite so difficult any more, does it?