Lots of people exclaim that they couldn't imagine life without chocolate. But we didn't eat it till the 17the Century.  It was first discovered by the Spanish Conquistador Cortez when he defeated the Aztec King Montezuma in 1519. Perhaps our love affair with chocolate is the real Montezuma's Revenge.

And many people experience powerful cravings for chocolate, which they feel are overwhelming. Why is this and what can we do about it? After all, if we are wanting to lose weight, eating chocolate at 150 calories an ounce won't help. 150 extra calories a day could end up meaning 10 pounds heavier at the end of the year.

There are a number of possible reasons for these cravings. Here are a few.

1. We allow ourselves for whatever reason to get overhungry. See my earlier blog. Eat regularly, little and often (every 4 hours during the working day).
2. We read lots of magazines and watch lots of telly, so we get a lot of advertising messages encouraging us to eat chocolate. Next time you are settled down to watch your favourite programmes, make a written note of the products being advertised and the time. It is not random. Research demonstrates that the foods advertised on the telly (not a lot of adverts for broccoli I notice) trigger cupboard raiding. If chocolate is in the house, whoops, it is in the mouth.
3. We have unresolved emotional problems. There are chemicals in chocolate which lift our mood. So some people might be using chocolate to self-medicate, instead of seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist.
4. Chocolate manufacturers know what our brains are hard-wired to like - the sweet sugar hit, the smooth creamy texture. And we think we shouldn't so we mentally ban it, then the cravings come. If we give in to the cravings, the cycle begins again. Read this great article from the BBC on recent research about chocolate cravings.
5. We have got in the habit of fulfilling our every desire. You're worth it. You deserve it. Why shouldn't you be allowed to treat yourself, you have worked hard. Why shouldn't we have it if we want it? This kind of thinking usually ends up costing us dear. We have got out of the habit of a bit of self-denial which builds our resilience to protect us when the hard times come.

Is it eating too much or exercising too little? Well, it is probably more complicated than that.

An obese friend of mine has an electric pepper grinder, so that saves her a few calories of effort every day. And there's the zapper for the telly, on-line ordering from the supermarket. All saving us energy. And we are much less active generally. We sit more. At work, at home in front of the computer or in front of the telly. So the change in our society has made it harder for us to be active as part of our every day.

And we all eat so much more than we did 30 years ago. Food is cheaper, even with the recent price hikes. Whether we like it or not, we respond to cues to eat. Calorie-dense foods are widely advertised on the telly as well as all those cooking programmes. These keep us thinking about food and eating. We become conditioned by these cues to respond by eating. And then that can become a habit, like how we associate eating crisps with relaxing in front of the telly. Eating has become something we do automatically, without thinking. And we cook less at home, because we are busier than ever before. So we eat more engineered-to-taste-fantastic food from the chill cabinet in the supermarket. We eat more takeaways where the amount of fat can only be guessed at. And plate sizes have increased so portions are bigger. So eating has never been easier. Research has shown that the 10 pound increase in average weight in the last 30 years is a result of eating food prepared outside the home.

There is a lot of social pressure to eat, not just from friends offering us biscuits, but from the way food is presented to us every day in the media and in the shops. While at the same time, there is a lot of pressure on us to be fashionably thin.

Hypnosis will help you understand your particular responses to eating cues, so you can make some simple changes which are easy to follow and sustainable. But, note this. It is far easier to not eat 500 calories than it is to burn it off.

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.

Speed of eating turns out to be one of the earliest predictors of obesity. And obesity is a risk factor for diabetes.

In a study by Robert Berkowitz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, rapid eating (higher number of mouthfuls per minute) of a single laboratory testmeal was a remarkably strong predictor of subsequent weight gain in kids.

At 4 years of age, 32 children of overweight mothers and 29 children of normal weight mothers were given a test meal in a controlled laboratory setting. Mouthfuls of food per minute at this single meal not only predicted changes in BMI from 4 to 6 years but also changes in skinfolds and total body fat.

But what about you? People who eat rapidly are at risk of being overweight. Research has shown that obese people eat fast and maintain the same rate of eating throughout a meal, whereas normal weight people slow down their rate of eating towards the end. Slowing down allows the stretch receptors to signal to your brain that your stomach is full. Eating quickly means you pass the Full point and reach Stuffed before your brain is ready to receive the information.

Another interesting piece of research by Yvonne Linne at Huddinge University Hospital in Sweden, hows that eating with a blindfold decreased the intake of food, without making people feel less full. The researchers gave their subjects meals of varying sizes. No matter the amount on the plate, the subjects felt satisfied after eating.  What does this mean then? Eating blindfolded may force us to rely on internal signals to tell us when we have had enough to eat. And it means if you use a smaller plate, you will feel just as satisfied.

Most of us have stopped using internal signals to guide our eating, and we are getting overweight as a result. With practice, we can start to identify when we are hungry (most of us never feel hunger) and when we are full. Hypnotherapy can help you to get to know your internal

So, focusing on your internal cues helps you reduce weight. To help you achieve this:

• eat slowly (putting your hands in your lap between mouthfuls really slows you down)
• do nothing else whilst eating (no telly, no radio, no reading)
• use a small plate

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.