What are your goals in life? It's a good question and one which is worthy of serious thought.

If you don't write these goals down or have a plan about how to achieve them, then they become just wishes or nice to do one day and they will probably not ever become a reality.

With Don't Say Diet I encourage clients to think about all of their goals in life, not just weight loss, it has a real impact, so why not give it a go now.

Make a list of things that you would like to do or achieve in your life. Write them in bold letters, so that you can really start to pay proper attention to them, large or small things it doesn't matter. This way it makes them become visible and more possible.

Now write down next to each of them the reasons why you haven't achieved them yet and note how many are reasons and how many are excuses and can you tell the difference? Have a think about this and see what comes up in your mind, you only have to account to yourself, not to me or to anyone else so don't delude yourself.

Now make a new list, take your favourite three things and write down under each one, what it would take to achieve this i.e.: money, time whatever it is do a timeline as to how long you think it will take and then plan your journey towards it, even if you do something small once a day or week towards you goal, you will be making progress where you hadn't before.

Making things happen in your life not only makes you feel good about yourself, but it gives you control. Soon losing weight won't be an issue because you will be a new person going after what you want and getting it, including losing weight.

There are many reasons we over eat or eat food that doesn't aid our weight loss, but one key reason is that we haven't got a plan. We often stumble along from meal to meal, snack to snack eating what is available without any proper thought to what we are doing.

You can start to change those habits by planning what you are going to eat for the next day or if you can the next week.

Breakfast is an important part of weight loss, but you don't need a full English! A banana or yoghurt, toast, cereal, anything to kick start your metabolism will help. Have these things in and ready to go.

By taking your own lunch to work you can not only save money, but be in control of what you eat. Just plan it the night before and have the right ingredients in. If you are at home then even better.

In the evening, plan a few options so again your have choices but make sure you have what you need stocked.

Try and not go to the supermarket when you are hungry, you will buy things you fancy but don't necessarily need and you will definitely over buy.

It's a simple question and I bet you think there are loads of answers to that questions, but in fact there are only two.

Reason one: Hunger

Reason two: Emotion

When you break it down like this, you can work out which one is driving you to eat.

Hunger is a gradual feeling, it will build up until you satisfy it with food. If you regularly eat when you are not hungry, chances are you are overweight because you are feeding your emotion not your hunger so food is not necessary.

Have a think what emotion makes you eat when you are not hungry

Boredom

Sadness

Deprivation

Tiredness

Consolation

Habit

Many more ...............

Firstly, identify the emotion, you don't even have to do anything about it, but being aware is a good place to start shifting these old patterns. Once you are satisfied that you know when this eating habit takes place you can start to think about what you can do about it. This is you starting your journey on gaining control over food and it feels really good.

When you've been battling with your weight for years and been on constant diets, only to put the weight back on, it's easy to get disillusioned. We do seem to be dieting ourselves into obesity but unable to stop. Each time we diet and lose weight, we expect to gain it again because that's what has been happening, it's become our truth, so in effect we begin to expect weight loss to be a temporary thing. A few months of happiness or contentment as we start to revert back to old habits and increase our eating, introducing back all of the things we omitted and deprived ourselves in order to lose the weight, until we are back where we started, often even bigger.

I've been in this situation many times and it's a sad cycle. This is why I developed Don't Say Diet, I like to think of it as resetting your expectations about weight loss, seeing it as a whole different experience, an experience where you are empowered to lose weight easily, without dieting and for the last time.

Once you get into the swing of taking responsibility for how you eat, and when you eat and what you eat, you will become more focused on areas where you can start to save yourself calories.

I'm not an advocate of calorie counting as I think it drives us to focus on lack, but when you become mindful and in control of your eating habits, you can assess if you really need that particular thing to eat, and because there is no deprivation, you soon feel like you don't mind leaving things.

For instance, I leave all of my crusts on sandwiches. I don't really like them and I feel that eating them is a waste of calorie intake, I eat what I enjoy most and thats the middle. I do the same with pizza. When I look at my plate at the end of the meal I see all of those dry, tasteless calories left on my plate and know that I have enjoyed the parts I liked. Also I often omit to put butter on jacket potatoes and on toast under beans. I don't notice the difference and its another saving of calories I won't miss.

There are many ways to cut calories, we may eat two rounds of toast in the mornings or two muffins or a large helping of cereal. Try cutting down to one and see if you really needed that second round or use a smaller bowl. You are still eating the same just not as much and over the weeks and months, you will have saved yourself many calories that will show when you step on the scales.

It really is worth thinking where you can cut corners on what you eat during the day, every little helps!!! :)