... as well as educating ourselves about nutrition, we need to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us. The change doesn’t happen through rational argument.

It is a form of reconditioning, meal by meal.

Once we accept that eating is a learned behaviour, we see that the challenge is not to grasp information but to learn new habits.

... is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.

We make frequent attempts – more or less half-hearted – to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how stron...

... and another 1% are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them.

What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others – whether overweight or underweight – are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of ...

... eating is a classic form of learned behaviour:

• There is a stimulus – an apple tart, for example, glazed with apricot jam.
• there is a response – your appetite for it.  
• finally, there is reinforcement – the sensory pleasure and feeling of ...

Food-seeking learning is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter connected with motivation.

This is a hormone that is stimulated in the brain when your body does something rewarding, such as eating. Dopamine is one of the chemical signals that passes information between neurons to tell your...

There are 3 big things we would all benefit from learning to do: 

• to follow structured mealtimes; 
• to respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness, rather than relying on external cues such as portion size; 
• to make ourselves open to ...