One of the difficulties with dieting is the well known yo-yo effect. You get all enthusiastic, go wholeheartedly into the new diet, lose some pounds; then after a few weeks, or a few months, the enthusiasm starts to slip, you've done really well, and you want to give yourself a treat or a day off, then that day happens once a week, twice a week, three times a week and the treat happens once a week, once a day, three times a day...

The pounds slip back on, the clothes slowly tighten up again, and you look in the mirror one morning and think I was doing so well...

or no matter what you do, how closely you stick to the diet, nothing much happens. Others lose pounds, you lose ounces, or even gain them. Life is so unfair

or you spend the whole 'diet-time' thinking about food, thinking about what you can and can't eat, counting calories, or points, or sins. Until you get fed-up with the whole thing and give it up for a while

and then it all starts all over again.

The trouble, I hasten to add, is not with what the diets suggest you eat. The vast majority of them provide good healthy rules for eating that will provide you with a nutritious and balanced intake of food. And lots of people do lose weight using these tried, tested and very successful methods.

But the weight doesn't stay off.

The reason is the reasons for weight accumulation are not being addressed.

One of the assumptions made is that weight is purely the product of what you put into your mouth and how much energy you expend. Lots of energy expenditure i.e. active life, low calorie intake equals weight loss. Sedentary lifestyle, high calorie intake equals weight gain. That's simple maths and it's perfectly true. You eat fewer calories than you expend and your body has to get those extra calories from somewhere. It gets them from the fat it has carefully stored away under your skin, for just such an emergency.

So why do you have so much difficulty eating less than you expend?

This is the territory that isn't normally explored.

If it was explored you would find associations with food and being good buried in the subconscious. When you were good as a young child, sweets, candy, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, were the reward for that goodness. When you pleased your parents, this is frequently the treat that was given. But very soon that got twisted and you assumed that if you didn't get it, you had been bad. And so eating this sort of food gave your subconscious mind the message 'I am a good and/or loveable person'. The only reason your subconscious would need to be re-assured about that is if it didn't believe it already. But when you stop giving yourself these 'treats', then at a subconscious level, you feel you must have been bad and you are driven to eat something forbidden just to reassure yourself that you really are good.

Now, when hypnosis is used in weight control, the focus is not purely on changing your eating habits. The focus is on changing you deep down inside. Or more accurately, correcting a view of you (someone who is not loveable) that is mistaken, and bringing back to the front the more correct view of you which is that you are as special and as loveable as everyone else.

Unquestionably diet needs to change. But by reminding you of the truth about you, we release a power, or an energy, that starts to work with you rather than against you. When you work purely to a diet plan, without addressing underlying subconscious issues (and I've only touched on one here - there are many more) there are two of you. One wanting to be slim, and one needing the re-assurance of treats. And the one needing the re-assurance of treats will work to sabotage the diet plan - because their needs have been ignored.

And so while the hypnotherapist works on improving how you feel about yourself, they also install post-hypnotic suggestions that will make it much easier for you to not only have no desire to eat the foods full of calories, but also assist you in achieving a pleasure in eating foods that are good for you that outweighs any pleasure you ever obtained from eating sugary sweet sickly foods.

When you already feel good about yourself, you have no need to demonstrate that by eating foods that are bad for you. Wholesome, attractive, tasty, well-prepared food is what you deserve - always.

Michael Hadfield

Michael J. Hadfield is 54 years old, born in Liverpool, England. In 1996, after many years spent in the computer industry, he developed an interest in psychology and trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and has since helped many people to live a normal life again after struggling with psychological problems such as phobias, stress, chronic anxiety, over-eating, smoking, stammering, shyness, low self-esteem and lack of confidence.

Michael also has a well-developed interest in spirituality. This interest led to a connection with an 'inner wisdom' or intuitive sense that has helped and guided him on many occasions and is especially attuned to the needs of clients for therapy.

On the 'fun' side of life Michael has a passion for photography and gardening and a small selection of his photographs can be seen on the pages of his website. He was a regular 'ornamentals' contributor, of both words and pictures, to Organic Gardening magazine for many years, with several of his photographs appearing on the cover of this magazine. His work has also appeared in Amateur Gardening, North West Gardener, and Practical Photography magazines.

He continues to explore his interest in health, healing, and the mind/body connection, with a particular fascination for the psychological causes of physical illness as well as the use of Pyschoneuroimmunological techniques for the healing of physical diseases such as cancer.