Pamela Colby DHP DHA GQHP            

Clinical Hypnotherapist

It sounds obvious, but for all the finger wagging and dietrary advice around these days, we do seem to be in denial about fatness. America is and we are catching up. Many of us fib to ourselves a bit about our diets, but one thing is certain - If you stuff your face with cakes and biscuits you will be a fatty one day.

Restrictive diets, regardess of their success or failure in losing weight, increase stress and cortisol (the hormone linked to stress) in the body. If a person is not eating enough calories to provide their body with the energy they need, then they automatically begin to release the stress hormone.

Nobody is quite sure why it is but scientists are starting to think we all have a set point for weight. We are biologically determined to be a certain size, and our bodies fight hard to keep us at, or near that point. Therefore, the body will constantly tend to try to bring you back to whatever your normal body weight is.

That's not to say that dieting is useless. Experts reckon that 50% of our weight is determined by genetic factors like these, and 50% by what we eat and what we do. Genetics and development influence where this set point is tuned with regard to body fat.....It is likely that environmental factors can do so as well.

So if your set point is skinny, and you stuff yourself with pizza for a week, your metabolic rate will increase to try to compensate for the extra calories. But if your set point is heavier than you'd like and you try to lose a lot of weight, your body will fight hard to stop you doing it.

To counter the body's natural inclination to return to a set body weight, diets should be slow and steady. What's important about a set weight is that if you do want to change it, you have to be very slow. In fact, the best way to GAIN WEIGHT is to go on a very low-calorie or crash diet. Ultimately, your body will fight against it every step of the way!

There are those who are naturally thin, it may be really quite hard to get fat. .....(Makes you sick doesn't it).... Evidence for that has been around for years. In 1967 medical researcher Ethan Sims carried out an experiment on prisoners in the US. He asked them to gain an extra 25% of their body weight, in return for early release.

However hard they tried, some of the prisoners couldn't do it, even though they were consuming 10,000 calories a day.

That result was repeated in an experiment for a BBC Horizon documentary in 2009. Ten volunteers gorged themselves on pizza, ice cream, chocolate and chips for a month and did no exercise, and several found it very difficult to put on serious amounts of weight. - In other words, for some people it seems to be almost impossible to become obese. And many of those who do pile on pounds find it quite easy to return to a normal weight when they stop gorging.

Managing your weight is not always about weight loss - Some people have issues around food which have taken over their lives and sometimes the lives of their families.... (Anorexia/Bulimia)

...... So! if you have these kinds of issues or; your problem is more of the typical weight loss variety, were you feel chocolate makes your clothes shrink or; you are the perfect weight ..... for someone who is 3" taller than you .... ?

We can tailor programmes to explore your relationship with food & body image, that can help you to reach your goals. Please call to discuss or email your query.