_Most of what we do is automatic. If you think about it,  we could not actively consider every single action. We would be exhausted and get very little achieved in the day. Our brain is very clever at putting us on automatic pilot. Eating is no different. Our brain reminds of occasions when eating has occurred in the past and our bodies respond with hunger signals. And if our brain gets just a hint of a food cue, those hunger signals start too.

As a result, if we have been in the habit of snacking at 3pm, then our brain will be on the lookout for the time and our tums will rumble. If you have been used to eating a snack while Eastenders is on, the theme tune will get the juices going and the cupboard doors opening. Knowing this, means we can take action to avoid it.

Hypnosis works by helping you become aware of these occasions and stick to decisions you have made about ho

Hunger is the most powerful driver, because without it, we might forget to eat, and eating is essential. But these days most of us rarely get really hungry but the fear of hunger is powerful too.

My cat is a stray and I found her when she was scavenging in my friend’s kitchen. She was skinny and scared. After coming to stay with me she became as fat as fat because food, all of a sudden, was freely available, but starvation had been a daily risk. These are the rules my cat was following, to deal with the serious risk of lack of food and starvation:

• Always eat when food is available
• Always eat as fast as possible
• Always eat as much as possible
• Always eat anything put in front of you

We are animals too, so we can end up following these same rules, even though food is easily accessible and starvation is unlikely. Hypnotherapy can help you by embedding suggestions in your mind to help you overcome these hard-wired behaviours to avoid putting on too much weight.

We usually talk about losing weight, and I think that is a bit too abstract or most of us. We might think about a goal weight and express a desire to reach it. Again, for me, a bit too abstract. And we know that the goal is in the future, and things get a bit less urgent and a bit vaguer. To manage our weight we need to manage our eating and we can make those changes one or two at a time. Hypnosis helps by bedding those changes in, so they become automatic and sustained.

So, if you know that you just eat too much of everything, start eating half of any plate of food in front of you. Some of us were taught to eat everything on the plate, so this new behaviour might need some practice.

Before you eat anything, consult your hunger quotient. How hungry are you at the moment on a scale of 0-10? If it is less than 5, you don’t need to eat. There is always food available later. For some of us, a better question is when did you last eat anything at all? If it was less than 3 hours ago, you wil not be hungry. You might have the desire to eat and your appetite might be strong, but this is not hunger. Most of us have forgotten the difference.

When you eat, eat slowly. Completely finish one mouthful before preparing the next one. Research has shown that if you train yourself to eat slowly, and indeed, if you reduce your eating speed during the meal, you will eat less.

And that is another tip. Eat meals rather than snacks. Snacking is a new habit and since we started doing it, the average weight has increased by over 10 pounds.

We will all put weight on over Christmas and New Year. It is inevitable. Christmas is the time for feasting. The feasting starts a week or two before Christmas and ends just after New Year. With parties and drinks, and extra food on the table and more meals each day, it is unsurprising that we will all put on a few pounds. We can deal with them in the New Year.

But over the holiday we don't need to eat everything we see. For some of us, me included, when I see a table full of so many different delicious foods, I want some of everything. Psychologists have noticed this too. When there is a lot of variety on offer, eating just one of everything means we eat much much more. So if you want to avoid some of those extra pounds, you might choose to have just one of just half of what we see.

But Christmas and New Year are the times of plenty and we want to enjoy them. When the New Year comes round, time to make a resolution to eat more helpfully during 2012! Happy Christmas.

Christmas is getting closer. This is the time when friends and family gather together and enjoy the pleasure of a shared meal. And snacks, and drinks, and sweets. Sometimes the eating seems like its never-ending. We do eat more at Christmas. That's a fact. We spend longer at the table, we go to parties, we visit friends. But we still have a choice.

Hypnosis works to help you spot the chances to make a choice, and then to make it.

There will be a bit more weight around the hips after Christmas. After such festivities it is almost inevitable. Hypnosis will help you make those New Year Resolutions stick for the long term, easily and automatically.

Most of us want to lose weight. Even normal weight people believe they should be thinner. And yet as a population, we are gaining weight. The average weight has gone up by over 10 pounds since the 70s. And yet there are diet foods in the supermarket, slimming clubs are busy, and we all have a pretty clear idea of what constitutes healthy eating. Despite all of this, most of us continue to gain weight. So what to do?

Well, the research shows that diets don`t work. Most people who go on diets put on more weight. But you can lose weight and keep it off. How`s that then?

Making little changes to your diet works well.Rather than completely change the way you eat, what little changes could you make? Well, for me, first of all over a weekend I gave up sugar in my tea and coffee. Nasty at first, but I prefer it now. Then I gave up milk in my tea. My weight stabilised a bit lower down the scale. I focused on breakfast for my next trick. Rather than 2 slices of toast, I cut one slice in half. (I realised I thought it was inefficient using just half the toaster!) That change took my weight down by 8 pounds over about 3 months. What now? My current change is to cut out the butter on the breakfast toast. I just have the jam. I am on day 3, after a friend hypnotised me. So far so good.

So, small changes. Get them bedded in and move onto the next. If you can reduce your food intake by 150 calories a day in each change, then you will be able to reduce your weight and maintain it. A hypnotherapist can help you focus on the best change to make and help you stick with it, until it becomes second nature.

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.

Most of our every day lives are determined not by conscious intention or deliberate choice, but by our unconscious and automatic responses to features in our environment. Of course, we make some active choices or decisions every day. We know about those, because the conscious us was actively involved. We might be a bit sceptical about the idea that most of what we do is automatic and preconscious, not passing through the thinking part of our brains before action takes place.

Research by John Bargh and colleagues has great significance to those of us wanting to manage our weight. We respond to cues around us without thinking. So if we are watching the telly and a food ad comes on, we go and get a snack, without consciously making the connection. If we regularly snack in front of the telly, just the sight of the telly on makes us get a snack. Those trying to sell us stuff know about these cues and triggers too. At my local service station above the rows of sweets and crisps by the till it says HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER. What do you think the automatic response might be?

We can help ourselves by starting to note any automatic eating. Am I eating (sometimes we are completely unaware of it) and why might I be eating? Am I hungry? Am I eating because the person sitting next to me is munching something? Or because it is 3pm and I always nip out for snack at this time?  Most automatic eating is hand food, and the action is hand, mouth, hand, mouth. Spot these and you are on the way to managing your eating.

Hypnosis helps you to break this automatic behaviour.

To lose weight, we need to change our eating habits. Most of us know what our bad habits are. It might be chocolate or takeaways, or just eating till we are stuffed. Hypnosis helps you to identify the problem habits and gets you to introduce good habits. But you might be eating to compensate for some emotional upset. Going on a diet is not going to help here, dealing with the upset is the place to start. A hypnotherapy session will begin by finding out if eating is the problem, or whether it is a symptom of an emotional disturbance. When you feel emotionally strong, then you are in a good position to think about changing your eating habits.

When the time comes to focus on your eating behaviour, when you have decided what changes you want to make,  these decisions are embedded in your subconscious through hypnosis. So if you are trying to cut out chocolate, your subconscious alerts you to this helpful decision, and keeps you out of the shop and encourages you to say no. Little by little this becomes normal behaviour and eating chocolate is something you just don't think about any more.

It means you are not needing to use your willpower all day long - which would only result in a big binge anyway. And as I have blogged before, willpower is always in very short supply.

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.

People often think about hunger and appetite in the same way, as
though the words were interchangeable. But the drivers
within the body are quite different.
• Hunger is the body’s way of telling you of a physiological need for food. It occurs when blood glucose levels decline and hormones, such as ghrelin, rise. The body’s response to these fluctuations is symptoms of hunger which might include a rumbling belly. Other symptoms can include frowning, headaches, tiredness, rattiness. For me, I feel strain around my eyes when I am hungry. Hunger drives us to eat in order to restore our body’s homeostatic levels. And the drive is very powerful indeed. When we are overhungry we will eat anything, ideally something full of fat and sugar. Once homestasis is achieved, satisfaction — hunger’s opposite — is reached.
• Appetite on the other hand is a psychological desire to eat, based more upon eating experiences, such as memories of good food, or other sensory cues such as taste, smell or texture of food. While hunger occurs only when the body needs food, appetite can occur at any time, irrespective of the body’s need for energy. Appetite is why many still reach for pudding after a large meal. Appetite can be correlated with the hedonic (fun-loving) centres of the brain. In such cases, the physiological cues of satisfaction, such a full stomach, higher glucose levels and changes in hormone levels and mix — are overridden. You know you are full, you know you are not hungry, but you eat the cake anyway. Not hunger, but appetite.