Or perhaps you did reach your chosen weight, but then stopped the hated diet and almost straight away, all the weight was back, leaving you feeling like a failure. Sounds familiar? Then read on.

So Why Are Diets So Bad?
To understand what is happening when you diet, you need to understand how your body works, and how it was originally designed.

Imagine how life must have been when our bodies were first designed or evolved. Food had to be found and was sometimes very scarce, and sometimes plentiful. Our bodies had to be able to cope with these two extremes and they developed the ability to store fat whenever there was any spare food, so we could survive when there was little or no food available.

By the way, have you ever wondered why more children are born in September in the northern hemisphere than any other month? There's more food available then, so nature has made us more fertile around December/January time - nature's clever isn't it?

So, when food is plentiful, our bodies store any spare food as fat. When food is scarce, our bodies lower their metabolic rate so as to conserve as much energy as possible, and use the stored fat as food, but should there be any spare food at all, even when food is scarce, then every tiny part of this excess is stored as fat. In that way, people can stay alive even in the hard times.

So what do you think a diet looks like to our bodies? It looks just like a food shortage and our bodies react by slowing our metabolisms, which makes us sluggish and listless and conserves energy, and by storing any excess food as fat. So you struggle to keep to this unnatural eating regime and you do manage to lose weight. You now stop dieting because you're sick of eating things you might not normally choose and having to avoid all the things you like. You start to eat just a little more, and perhaps a few "junk" foods again and what does your body then think? Food is plentiful again. And what does your body do? It stores as much spare food as possible as fat in case the shortage returns again (as it will when you go on the next diet), and all the weight comes piling back on! Weeks or even months of dieting undone in a few days.

So, unless you stick to the diet for the rest of your life, your weight will continue to bounce from high to low to high again as you start to diet and then stop again when you've had enough of it.

Diets really can and do make people depressed and ill.

So What Can You Do?
Unless you have a medical problem (and it's always worth consulting your doctor if you are in any doubt) you are over weight simply because you are eating more than your body needs. Your only real options are to:

• Reduce your food intake
• And improve the quality of the food you are eating - ie less or no junk food
• And increase your exercise

Ok, I hear you say, I thought that was what I did when I dieted? Well yes it was, but you were doing it by cutting out certain foods and food types, so the diet wasn't natural and snacks were all too tempting. And the reason you stopped dieting was? Well, mainly because you were sick of it and wanted a "normal" life back again.

So how can we change this?
You need to re-program your body to want to eat less, and to want to eat better food, and to want to exercise. Bit of a tall order? It might seem so, but it can be quite easy with our help.

Before we start though, it is useful to take a look at where the problem really is.

So what have these habits got you doing?

• You have a drink and reach for a biscuit.
• You have a meal and "fancy" a dessert afterwards
• You buy a drink in the pub and also buy some crisps.
• It's eleven o'clock, time for a snack
• One o'clock, time for lunch
• It's six o'clock, time for dinner
• You pass a fast food outlet and feel hungry - remember, you weren't hungry before you saw it, so are you really hungry? No, you just have these associations between the outlet and being hungry - you've been hypnotised!
• You feel a bit down and buy some chocolate. Why? Because the advertising industry has got us thinking that this will make you happy again. Why? Because they make money that way.

You get the picture. Take a look at your own life and see how many things are done out of habit. Doing things by habit is not necessarily a bad thing since it frees up our mind for more important decisions. But eating out of habit is not so good because it easily, and often, leads to over-eating. It's better to eat when you are hungry, not just because you ate at this time yesterday, and definitely not just because we fancy a sweet bar.

I know that we live quite regulated lives, and often have a fixed lunch break etc., so we often have to eat at fixed times whether we are hungry or not, but we don't have to eat the same amount each time, simply out of habit. If you're not very hungry, then don't each so much. But habit dictates that we eat more or less the same each day - and this is generally too much otherwise we wouldn't keep being overweight. Many manufactured foods contain chemicals that leave you hungry after eating them - gets you to buy more.

So we need to break this eating habit and simply eat enough, and no more, than we need. Ok, that's easy to say, but how can we do this? We need to change the entire way we view food and eating. And the best way to do this is by using guided self-hypnosis. Note this is self-hypnosis and is in no way related to any stage or TV show you may have seen where volunteers are hypnotised to do stupid and degrading things.