Gwenn Henkel is a Certified Medical Hypnotherapist, Certified Hypnoanesthesiologist, and Master Hypnotherapist. She teaches at the Palo Alto School of Hypnotherapy and offers private sessions by appointment.

We have all heard the guy on television who says, "Oh, my diet works great! I've lost thousands of pounds!" Did you know that 61% of adults and 13% of children in this country are obese? Obesity is now the number one cause of death above smoking! A study reported in the Washington Post states that only one out of two hundred individuals who go on a diet will actually keep the weight off one year later. Even though it is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country to instruct, guide and inform you as to what diet to go on or how to stick with it, the sad truth is that diets just don't work!

So why even in the face of such dismal statistics, do we continue the relentless quest to find the right diet? I believe it is because we are desperate! The pain of being overweight in a society that places such a high premium on the outward appearance can be overwhelming. This is especially a serious problem for our young children. With the role models (and models being the key word here), the peer pressure and the pain endured by an overweight child, or teenager or adult, creates fertile ground for the opportunistic marketer who has the operators standing by,... to take your order for the new lose weight while you sleep anti-cellulite fat-burning thigh-shrinking diet pill. And you know what? We'll buy it! WeÌll be reaching for our credit cards with one hand and dialing 1-800 with the other!

Overweight people are generally not heavy for the lack of trying. Most of the overweight clients I see have tried everything possible by the time they have come to see me. All of them feel like failures. One of the first things they need to understand is that it is the DIET, which has failed, and not the person on the diet! Let's look at some of the facts about why diets don't work. First, the physiological reasons.

It is now commonly accepted that our brain has a mechanism for controlling the amount of fat in our bodies. It is commonly referred to as the "fat thermostat" or "set point." When you go on a low calorie restricted diet, your brain doesn't really know the difference between a short-term restriction in food intake and the big famine! So what does it do? It begins to function from a primitive survival standpoint and shuts everything down. Your set point rises and metabolism slows way down.

2. It actually takes less energy at a cellular level to store fat than to burn it and it takes less energy to burn lean muscle tissue than it does to burn fat. So the very things you don't want to happen begin to happen. Sure, if you stick with it long enough, you will lose weight. Diets sometimes work extremely well for losing weight. But when you go off the diet you will find that your metabolism has adjusted to the new regime and now any amount of food that would have caused you to maintain or even lose weight before will now actually cause you to gain weight!

Bob Schwarts describes in his book, Diets Don't Work, a clinic for chronically underweight people who have difficulty gaining weight. (Imagine that!) He says that they actually are put on a diet, much to their wide-eyed disbelief, and they begin to panic when they lose five or more pounds the first few days. They would come back to their instructor and throw the diet in his face, saying to take his lousy diet back! They wanted to go back to their normal way of eating. He would say that was just fine because that was exactly what he was going to tell them to do next. You guessed it; they immediately put the weight back on and even more! They were then put back on the diet and then taken off again. The results were that of "controlled yo-yo dieting." They would continue to put on extra weight every time they resumed eating in their normal ways. They would have eventually put on an extra ten pounds or more and they were happy!

The yo-yo syndrome of lose-gain-lose-gain also results in a significant change in body-fat content since we tend to lose lean muscle tissue and regain fat. Even if you weigh the same as you did a few years ago, you would not look the same if you have gone up and down in your weight over a period of years.

Now for the emotional dynamics of why diets don't work. Being on a diet is an unnatural relationship with food. Diets are usually started on a Monday and waking up on that "D-Day Monday" you feel dark and gloomy, like your best friend just died! Suddenly everything that you ate on Sunday the day before is out of limits for you. Guilt and deprivation loom over you and now you have to struggle with what you can eat and can't eat. All of these feelings are the reason why sooner or later you go off the diet. (Usually sooner.)

Naturally slender people don't struggle with what they eat. You might just think that they are more disciplined or have more will power.

Now of course there is the young Hollywood model or actress who exercises a seemingly inhuman degree of discipline in her food choices, because her career depends upon a few pounds one way or the other.

In reality, she may be pathologically obsessed with food, counting calories in her sleep and literally living in dread and fear of a quarter-pound gain.

One of the other psychological culprits is termed the "cycle of guilt." Because of the reasons just cited, we are inevitably going to give in to the feelings of restrictiveness and "cheat." Then we feel guilty. Always followed by, "I promise I will not eat another cookie again," etc., etc. Another year that weight has been gained and lost and gained again, only to promise this next year will be different.

Habits such as our eating behavior are controlled in the subconscious mind, that part of our mind, which lies below the conscious awareness and yet so strongly affects out behavior. Willpower is a tool of the conscious mind and thus is simply the wrong tool for the job when it comes to making permanent changes in our eating behavior. Clinical hypnosis gives us access to the subconscious mind and allows us to make changes in a natural way, without the unnatural struggles of dieting. Clinical hypnosis lets you change your life by changing your mind!