If you want to beat the diet trap, you'll have to learn to take your instructions from a very important source....yourself! Sue Thomason explains how.

I’ve just started trying out intuitive eating after many years on and off diets with no lasting results. I’ve been on a few internet sites and I can’t figure out whether I’m allowed to weigh myself or if eating intuitively means I can eat things like chips just because I feel like it. My friend swears by it but I’m worried that I’ll gain weight.

Briony, 24, Nottingham

Hi Briony,

Intuitive eating is a very good way to live if you’re a compulsive overeater because it puts you back in the driving seat where food is concerned. The hard thing is actually getting into the driving seat as you can see from your question – you are asking if you are ‘allowed’ to weigh yourself and querying what you can and cannot eat.

This is entirely natural for a long-term yo-yo dieter like yourself because the kind of diet thinking you’ve been brainwashed into over the years deliberately removes all self responsibility where food is concerned and you have effectively become an automaton, in passive receive mode, unable to eat anything or think about your own body without externally referencing it all to check that it is ‘allowable’ or ‘correct’.

You’re not alone, though. Every single overeater in the world looks outside themselves for instructions when it comes to food and weight (and sometimes other parts of their lives too - sometimes, but not always, they do this with EVERY area).

Even overeaters who are great successes in other areas of their lives and who wouldn't dream of looking to others for instructions about what they should think do it in the area of food and weight. They don't even realise they're doing it. Not one compulsive overeater and chronic dieter knows their own mind in this respect - every overeater is in passive recieve mode.

This is something that really does have to be turned around if you want to get out of the overeating trap. Intuitive eating can never be intuitive unless all of your decisions are made internally and based on your own wants and needs.

You have to work out for yourself the answer to the questions about whether to weigh yourself and what you can eat. It’s not something I can answer for you.

The Food Philosophy is now more affordable as there is a non-coaching version of the six-week online weight-loss course available for just £30. Not everyone can afford the course at the moment and it is important that as many overeaters are reached as possible and given the tools to get themselves out of the overeating trap, lose weight, increase confidence and raise their self esteem.

For £30, you get all of the online course material as well as membership to The FP forum where you can chat to other people who are doing the course, support each other, go through the steps and exercises together and also talk to those who have already been through the course and who are already out of the overeating trap.