Most sorts of diets involve limiting the range of foods we can eat. Any restriction of this kind will result in weight loss. So a grapefruit and sausage diet will result in weight loss. The problem is that we can't sustain this sort of diet for a long time. It would make us miserable and eventually will make us unwell, because we need a wide range of nutrients to keep us healthy.

Once we have lost the weight we usually go back to our old ways, and those old ways were the cause of the increased weight. And many of us give up long before the weight has gone.

Instead of a fancy diet, we need to find a way of eating that fits our preferences and our way of life, so that we can lose weight and maintain a healthy weight for ever.

Hypnotherapy will help you identify this for you. Quickly and effectively.

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.

I tend to say weight management rather than weight loss. Why is that? Well, management sounds more active and involved, whereas loss doesn't sound very purposeful to me, in fact I feel there is a little hint of accidental and by chance. As well as that, for many people, losing weight is step 2. Step 1 is stopping the increase.

Purposeful weight management involves behaviour change. Eating differently. And in fact it is not really about managing weight either. It is about managing our eating. So with my clients I try to move the goal away from demanding their bodies to weigh less and be slimmer and towards changing their behaviours, focusing on all aspects of their eating-related behaviours.

And that is not just about eating less, though that will be result. It is about the daily routine, the shopping, where you eat, who you eat with. And of course how you feel about yourself. When you are feeling confident then you less likely to eat for comfort.

And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds every week. It is about changing to more helpful eating behaviours. It is about action. They may tell me that their goal is to achieve a better BMI or lose a certain number of pounds. To do this, requires action, and that is what I focus on, taking into account their lifestyle and work and home responsibilities etc.

And it is not about losing a certain number of pounds by the end of a particular period. When the eating behaviours change, the weight will change. But by how much and when?

Who knows? Setting a target may seem like a good idea, but if we continually fail, then it is likely we will just start on the cream buns again. And if there is a target you will be on the scales time and again, constantly checking and always finding the results unsatisfactory.

But what if you do lose weight? You achieve a target. What then? Do you go off the diet? Back to your old routines?  Or set yourself an even more challenging weight goal constantly chasing a moving target? Continuing the cycle of diet, deny and deprive. And if one day you will see the pointer on the scales go up and you might abandon your diet as a complete waste of time and go back to the cream buns. And some people believe their lives will suddenly become fabulous when the scales are friendly. More boyfriends, more money, more fun. And when the weight is just right for these magical happenings, disappointment sets in as reality strikes. Back to the buns.

But changing eating behaviours in a way that suits you is likely to be sustainable, and eventually automatic. Eating in the way that keeps your weight managed, without constantly having to think about it or worry about it. And this will make you feel in control, more contented and stop the constant fretting about your weight.

So the goal is to change eating behaviours bit by bit. Making little changes every month and bedding them in. Starting with the ones that are easiest or give the most rapid results. That success buoys you up, and keeps you on track. So losing weight is not the goal. Changing the way you eat is.

American researchers found burgers, chips and sausages programmed a human brain into craving even more sugar, salt and fat laden food.  Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found laboratory rats became addicted to a bad diet.

They tested rats and the rats which ate as much junk food as they wanted became very fat and started bingeing. When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found the rats on unlimited junk food needed even more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.

"They always went for the worst types of food and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats,” said Dr Kenny. "The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food." Read  more here.

This is what Dr David Kessler identified. He was a commissioner with the US Food and Drugs Administration. He claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty and trigger addictive neural pathways in the brain that many people really cannot stop eating these foods even when they have just eaten a full meal.  He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a "bliss point" when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more, so that they gain weight.

To help you overcome these addictions, try hypnosis.

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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.

You may be one of those people  who seems to be constantly struggling with your weight. It is now normal for women to feel dissatisfied with their bodies. Even women of normal weight feel their bodies need improvement.
 
Dieting is not easy to sustain. Denying yourself food you enjoy makes you feel deprived which makes you crave the forbidden food. This is one of the reasons most of the commercial slimming clubs let you eat chocolate and other treats. It is also hard to eat differently from your friends and family for more than a relatively short period. So most of us have to work hard to control our urges to eat, but with persistence we can drop a dress size. Why can't we sustain it? Nearly all dieters regain their lost weight.

So what is going on here? Some of us eat to feel better and to cope with the stress in our lives. Going on a diet is not going to help here. There are better ways to manage stress. Most of us eat significantly more than our grandparents. There is more food on offer, it is (relatively) cheap and we can buy it almost anywhere. Lots is ready to eat, we don't need to cook it. So this accessibility makes it more likely that we will eat more. Dieting will help where it identifies a new healthy routine for eating that you find comfortable. But if dieting for you is deprivation, then you might throw it all over if you make one tiny mistake.

And if you want immediate results, then every day that the weight has not gone down, you will feel frustrated and annoyed. To lose weight, the first goal is to stop gaining weight. So every week that the scale does not go up is a success. This is better than beating yourself up when you only lose one pound a week.

Have a look at your eating habits. Is there any habit you have got into that you know is going to end up on the hips?  Do you buy a chocolate bar every time you get petrol?  Choose not to. For others it might be 2 slices of toast in the morning. Maybe thinking it is wasteful not to use the second slot. So to meet your green credentials and help to manage weight, cut the one slice in two. For most of us, we are eating the equivalent of a whole extra meal in the form of sweets, biscuits, takeaways, crisps and drinks. Things are grandparents considered to be very special treats rather than everyday items.

Sad, perhaps, but true. Women need less energy to run their bodies than men do, and therefore need to eat less than men, even of the same weight, height, age etc etc etc. So it follows that if you eat the same as your man, unless he is really teeny weeny, then either he will shrivel away to nothing or the woman will put on weight.

Women 's portions need to be smaller than men's. How can we achieve this?

The easiest way is to use a smaller plate yourself. This will make it easier for you to estimate a healthier portion. Large plates give us a subliminal message that large portions are okay.

When you have got used to using a smaller plate (it takes a weekend), you no longer have to think about food all the time. Your plate size does it for you.

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?

A few months ago a client came for help in stopping his habit of eating chocolate and cheese when he got home. He was putting on weight. After discussion, it struck me that he came home starving and chocolate and cheese gave him urgently needed calories. He ate a tiny rapid breakfast, didn't stop for lunch, grabbed a snack around 3pm and came home to stuff himself with chocolate.

Often when we are worried about our weight, we skip meals. If we have a job which is overwhelming we will skip meals. It doesn't work.

My advice to this client was to eat more during the day, with a gap of no more than 4 hours between. A discussion about the contents of his cupboard and fridge demonstrated that the components of a meal were nowhere to be found. He felt he was eating too much (well, he was eating a lot of chocolate) and I felt he wasn't eating enough throughout the day.

So I was interested in this advice from  “Best Weight: A Practical Guide to Office-Based Weight Management", recently published by the Canadian Obesity Network. This is not a self-help book, but this snippet is relevant for everyone.

In our experience, the majority of patients who struggle with binge-eating episodes do not eat regularly throughout the day, and tend to struggle with binge behaviours from mid-afternoon onward. In these patients, the binge is likely precipitated by true physical "homeostatic" hunger (a need for calories) rather than a hedonistic emotional appetite (need for comfort foods). Well-distributed calories and the use of more satisfying protein-rich foods may be enough to resolve the disorder in these patients.

Before diagnosing someone with binge-eating disorder, you should first ensure that a subtle form of homeostatic hunger is not triggering or encouraging their binge behaviour. Have patients follow the eating instructions below to see whether their binge eating gets better:

• Breakfast containing a minimum of 350 kcal with at least 15 g of protein, to be consumed within 30 minutes of waking
• Snacking every 2.5 hours between meals with snacks containing 100–200 kcal and at least 8 g of protein
• Lunch containing a minimum of 300–400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• Dinner containing a minimum of 400 kcal with at least 15 g of protein
• For every hour of sustained exercise, add an additional 100–150 kcal that are primarily carbohydrate based