Do I have to exercise?

Well, to be honest, only reducing your calories will reduce your weight. I was going to say, only reducing the amount you eat - but that is not so. You can eat lots of water-rich food and lose weight. It is the calorie-dense food that we all need to avoid, even though it tastes lovely.

What exercise does is reduce the amount of abdominal fat. This fat is packed into the abdominal cavity and in between the internal organs. It is also called organ fat or visceral fat. This is the fat that you are losing when you find your waist is getting smaller. Abdominal fat is linked to cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome. This is the natural place for fat deposits in men, whereas for women it is the buttocks, hips and thighs. However, after the menopause, fat moves to the organs.

So, rather than keep miserably eying the scales, measure your waist. When you reduce your waist measurement, you are losing fat and are back on the healthy slopes. And a hypnotherapist will help you keep to your goals.

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Eat lots of different kinds of food

We get a lot of really important nutrients from vegetables and fruit. Beetroot for example contains betalains and is the only source of these protective nutrients in the UK (prickly pear contains them though).

Dark coloured fruit and veg have the most useful micronutrients.

The way to ensure that we get these beneficial nutrients is by eating a wide range of different food and eating more fruit and veg.

Fad diets tend to restrict what foods you can eat (that is one of the ways they work) but you can't keep on these restricted diets for the whole of your life. But eating a greater proportion of your food in the form of fruit and veg will help you control your weight and keep healthy.

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Cue to eat!

There are lots of ways in which we are cued to eat more, even when we are not hungry and even when we want to limit our intake.

Have you been at a friend's house where they fill your glass up as soon as it is empty? Because I am usually the driver, I have cottoned on to this, and never let my glass get empty after I have glugged down the first one. I know I am okay with 2 glasses, so the second one is not finally gulped until just before I leave.

The same goes for plates. In some restaurants, your plate is cleared away when you have finished and you are presented with a clean plate. The empty plate is a trigger to fill it up with more food, and you soon forget how much you had already eaten. The worst places for this is the eat-all-you-can buffet. All those bones and scraps bearing witness to your having already eaten a full meal, are wheeked away and you are presented with a clean plate which is a silent invitation to eat more.

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Why do you eat so many chips?

So far, we have understood that we go for chips, and other calorie stuffed food, because it makes us feel good - we get a "happy hit". Research carried out by Jeffrey Brunstrom and Peter Rogers at the University of Bristol, suggests that we eat lots of chips, because we know they don't give us that nice full feeling. We need to eat lots before we get any sense of being satisfied. And because they are loaded with oil, we end up eating too many calories.

It seems that we are looking for this sense of satisfaction- a feeling of a nice full tum - and we know that these calorie-stuffed foods just don't do it for us. Think about it, how many bags of crisps does it take before you get a nice full feeling? For me, the answer is never. I get that nice full feeling from porage, or rice or potatoes and gravy.

Better to eat water-rich foods, because they give us that nice feeling of a full tum.

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According to Weight Wise, if you've tried to lose weight, and have slipped back into your old ways of eating, you're not alone.

The key point here is slipping back into your old ways of eating. If you are going to control your weight, then changing your patterns of eating, and making those changes automatic, is the goal. You can do this bit by bit, making small changes every week. There are lots of tips here on my blog about the sorts of little changes that you can make. And gradually, these regular small changes accumulate so that your eating pattern helps maintain you at the weight you want, without thinking about food all the time.

They offer a great chart to help you monitor your weight and waist. Weight Wise has been developed by the British Dietetic Association and they talk a lot of sense and give lots of great tips.

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