How many times have you been on a diet? How many times has it been successful? The perfect answer should be that you have never been on a diet. The second best is that you went on a diet once and it worked. Back to reality. The diet industry is vast and enormously profitable; which demonstrates that diets do not work. If they worked, then there would be no overweight people.

Diets do not work because they do not deal with the underlying reason for overweight. They also fail because they deprive you of something that you want. Regretfully there is a biological law that says if you eat more calories than you consume, you will store the remainder as fat. Also, diets do not deal with issues of the metabolic rate.

The only way to lose weight is to consume the body’s stored reserves of fat. Eating less than you consume is the only way you can bring this about. You need to either take in less or consume more by exercise.

You may overeat out of habit or you may be a compulsive overeater. Compulsive eating is very common; many people eat to reduce stress or to give themselves comfort. On the opposite side of the scale, an anorexic is usually seeking more control over his or her environment and so does one of the only things remaining.

The Clinic has a programme to control weight by changing the eating patterns. This should be a change for life rather than a diet and then return to overeating. After a weight control programme, you would eat smaller portions at meal times; you would never eat between meals. In addition, you would have a preference for meals of a better quality with a lower fat content, and finally, when your body says it is full, you would stop eating.