Yesterday's Horizon programme on BBC2 talked about how most of us take up exercise to lose weight, but on its own it doesn't work. They showed that jogging for 15 minutes at 6mph uses up 16 calories. But a pound of unwanted fat is 3,500 calories. Most of us just don't have the time and the rest of us just don't want to exercise like this.

But there were some helpful suggestions. Maintaining a high calorie output just doing normal stuff can expend an extra 500 calories a day. So, if you walk instead of using the lift, stand instead of sitting, fidget instead of staying still, your body starts to use up extra calories even when you are asleep. For most of us, this seems a realistic approach. It is about being inefficient and wasting bodily energy, where most of our lives aim for efficiency (like using the remote instead of getting up to switch over).

I have blogged about these things many times. But the programme offered something new and interesting.

They showed that this kind of low level persistent activity can help us to move fat out of our bloodstream where it can clog our arteries and into our muscles where it can be used up.So it can protect against heart attacks and strokes. And that a few short bursts of high intensity exercise (HIT) is as effective as many hours on the treadmill. A Scottish researcher at Birmingham University (there was some nice footage of Glasgow in the programme!) shows that 3 minutes a week of HIT is all you need. Anything where you are working hard, for 3 shots of 20 seconds, in fact so hard that you are yelling to help you work harder, does the trick. And the trick is to get the fat stores in your muscles released so that the brain demands more energy from the fat stores around the organs. This can protect against diabetes and cardivascular disease.

The fat around our organs (fat above the waist) is the problematic fat. Hip and thigh fat on the other hand can be quite protective of good he

So after the programme I did 3 bursts on the exercise bike and will do the same 3 times a week for a month and see if I feel better.

Depression is a risk factor for obesity. How can that help when trying to manage our weight?

According to Sarah Markovitz in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, depression makes obesity more likely because it causes change in their immune system and how their hormones respond. But the research also shows that depression causes difficulty in generally taking personal care, getting up and about, overeating and having negative thoughts. This is the bit that I think is of general interest to people who worry about their weight.

While most of us who want to manage our weight better are not obese, many suffer from low self-esteem and low mood. So improving our mood and feeling better about ourselves is likely to have a positive impact on our ability to manage our weight. And if your experience of dieting for you is a series of failures, then dieting might worsen your mood........

Studies have shown that regular exercise can make you feel good (pleasure hormones are released about 20 minutes into brisk exercise - the dopamine rush). So the weight loss achieved by those who get into regular exercise and enjoy it, could be because they feel better about themselves and do less comfort eating.

Cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy can get you feeling better, treating yourself as a good friend rather than haranguing you and pointing out your weaknesses. We can get into the habit of aggressive and unkind self-talk. And you can get out of the habit too.

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.

Well, one of the outcomes is that the diet industry gets fat, while you will probably remain the same size. Click here for a BBC article about the diet industry banking on failure.

For most people, dieting leads to increased attention to food, thinking about it all the time. This results in cravings. Dr Andrew Hill of the University of Leeds shows this in his research . He also showed that when you restrict access to a particular food, the cravings for that food increases. So if you are on the yo-yo of Diet Deny and Deprive and banning a favourite food from your diet, you will think about that food more and more. And then you will violate your diet, and pig out. Having done that, you then beat yourself up as a failure, decide you are past caring and get straight back to your old ways of eating so any weight loss is regained.

An alternative is to be a bit more forgiving. Work out what your eating problem is. People who manage their mood by eating tend to overeat and stuff themselves. There are people who have to eat food if they see it, but if they don't see it (or smell it, or talk about it) then they are fine. There are people who have got into a habit of eating a chocolate bar at 3 in the afternoon. Most of us know what our bad eating habits are. Knowing what they are helps you to decide what action to take.

If you have low moods, then what might you do to make yourself feel better. If you eat it if you see it, don't fill your cupboards with food that just has to be eaten. Don't walk by the cake shop on your way to work.

Whatever you do, avoid Diet, Deny and Deprive. It only makes you unhappy.

This is an interesting and fun quiz on healthy eating!! Some of the answers are surprising. And there are other fun quizzes on this site too.

We are all bombarded with food information every day, and it is had to sort out the valuable food messages from all this confusion.

When we are trying to control our weight, we are automatically routed to think about dieting. But most people who go on diets end up putting weight on. Why is this. The cycle of Diet Deprive and Deny makes us even more interested in food. We get food-obsessed. And we start believing silly things. One of my clients the other day recounted this overheard conversation:

Mmm, this chocolate bar contains 150 calories....
Well, try the diet one, it is only 113.

Changing your way of eating so that you maintain a good weight and good health is not about just saving a few calories here and there. Hypnotherapy will help you identify your problem habits, work out a way to overcome them and then support your motivation, so that you automatically make the positive choices, without having to think about it. Much easier.

The reasons men and women give for taking exercise have been shown to be different. Research show that when exercising for health reasons (to get stronger, more supple, fitter) self-esteem is high for both sexes.

Women's motivation for exercise is more often related to weight and shape reasons than men. As I have said before, exercising for these reasons is linked to disordered eating and this research supports this. "Overall activity level was related to greater eating disturbance for women". These terms, disordered eating, eating disturbance, tend to be correlated to or result in low self-esteem, increased weight and for some, serious eating disorders.

For both genders, exercising for weight loss, tone, and attractiveness reasons was highly correlated with measures of disturbance. The researchers note that these motivations for exercise "can be used to identify people who might develop eating disorders and/or body image disturbance".

Exercising for health is great. But it is not the most effective way to lose weight if that is your goal. It brings with it a range of potential concerns. With hypnotherapy, you can learn to accept your shape the way you are, and at the same time, learn some effective ways to manage a healthy weight. Losing weight without these risks.

One of my clients told me that she had "been on a diet for 30 years on and off, but was stubbornly one stone overweight". Clearly dieting doesn't work for her.

Jennifer Savage and Leann Birch from Pennsylvania State University have just published research on this very problem!

176 women were followed over four years to see how their weight changed. There were 3 types of women identified.

1. Those making no effort to control their weights
2. Those using healthy weight loss strategies
3. Those using unhealthy strategies

The results showed that women who used a mix of healthy and unhealthy strategies  gained significantly more weight (about 9 pounds) than the other groups. Those who were following a healthy weight loss strategy gained about 2 pounds over the 4 years. Those who didnt try to control their weight put on about 3 pounds in the 4 years. This was after taking account in the statistical analysis of the results of things like education, income and initial BMI.

Interestingly, the group who used a mix of unhealthy and healthy strategies demonstrated the most anxiety about their weight and had poorer eating attitudes (things like defining certain foods as bad). So they worried about their weight a lot, tried all kinds of things to help them lose weight, tried to restrain their eating and despite this gained really quite a lot of weight in those 4 years. It is this involvement of anxiety that makes hypnotherapy such a useful help when trying to control your weight.

So what were the strategies these women were using to control their weight?

Healthy strategies included reducing calories and amount of food, eliminating sweets, junk food and snacks, increasing activity, eating more fruit and vegetables, eating less fat or less high-carb food, and eating less meat.

Unhealthy strategies included skipping meals, diet pills, meal replacement drinks, appetite suppressant drugs, laxatives, enemas, diuretics, and fasting. The women who used these strategies gained quite a lot of weight. The report also suggests that women who worry about their weight are more likely to try these unhealthy strategies. So it could be that encouraging weight worries may only make women take action which makes weight problems worse in the long run.

It is possible that women who follow healthy weight control strategies are more successful simply because these strategies are more sustainable. Unhealthy strategies can lead to loss of control, overeating and bingeing, which over time results in increased weight. In fact, one of the key precursors to bingeing is restrained eating. So what determines how succesful you will be are the strategies you use to try to control your weight.

Although the women who used healthy strategies did not on the whole lose weight, they were successful in keeping the weight gain down to a reasonable level.

But this study does confirm what has been reported many, many times. Dieting makes you fat.

Research literature is full of reports that people whose food intake has been limited, for example through dieting, typically regain whatever weight they lost after the intake restraints are removed. This graph is taken from an article in the Journal of Nutrition. It shows that after 2 to 3 years about half of those who lost weight have regained it, and after a longer period nearly everyone has. This is the data that is used to show that 95% or so of all dieters go back to their old weight.

Once the dietary restriction is over, the weight creeps back on. So if you are going on a restrictive diet, then it needs to be sustained. This is the tricky bit. For most of us, dieting is hard, boring, antisocial, and it makes us think about food all the time. So sustaining this way of eating for life seems impossible and depressing.

Indeed, it is shown in this same article, that when we restrict our food intake, our body gets defensive and prepares for famine. This report states that  "when weight loss occurs, resting metabolism declines by an amount significantly in excess of that expected from the loss in metabolically active tissue. We have observed a drop of 24.6% in daily resting energy expenditure when the body weight of rats was reduced (by caloric restriction) by 14.9%"

This means that when we dramatically reduce our intake, our bodies adjust by needing less. Drat!! So what to do? Gradually changing eating patterns, in the direction of the desired pattern, little and often, will help to reassure your body that there is no risk of starvation, so that it does not try to defend itself.

Hypnotherapy can help you to identify the eating patterns you want to get rid of and give you the confidence and optimism that they can be changed, easily, effectively and permanently. Give it a try.

According to the Scotsman yesterday, there are more Christmas pounds this year due to most of us staying in because of the snow.

You don't need to lose these pounds all at once in a blitz diet. On the whole, diets have been found to fail. Getting back to your normal routines will shift some of those extra pounds. But to ensure that they are not still with you in 2012, here are some tips.

Add a bit of extra physical effort to your day. This might mean using the stairs rather than a lift or walking a few hundred yards every day rather than using the car or bus. Using public transport has been shown to have a beneficial effect on weight loss. Take the long way round to the shops. Go up and down stairs a lot at home. Stand rather than sit. A few small changes like this will get your body working a bit harder.

Decide not to eat out or use takeaways in January.

Give up eating in front of the telly.

Weigh yourself once a week.

And if you decide that 2011 is the year to really gain control of your weight, give me a call. Hypnotherapy has been shown to work - fast, effective and safe.