Can a hypnotherapist find the off switch ...

... for Hannah’s corned beef and crisp sandwich cravings?

I was desperate, desperate, yes desperate, to be upbeat here this week. I even thought of practising “nice” in the mirror.

But that would involve looking at myself and I simply couldn’t face it. Oops, there I go again. See, can’t help the slump or my nature.

But can you? I read something the other day which gave me hope.

I considered it while sucking on a Mini Milk.

“I’ve always been curious about what it is that allows some people to change the course of their lives, despite long odds,” writes Tom Shroder in the Washington Post.

“As far as weight loss goes, I was one of the lucky ones. Thirty to 40 pounds overweight in my early teens, I was regularly taunted by schoolyard bullies.

“Something humiliating must have occurred on the day I came home too depressed to do anything but lie on the couch and brood. I sank down deep into the cushions and felt sorry for myself. Then I began to get angry.

“I hated being the fat boy in school. I hated the way I looked in the mirror. And, more than anything else, I hated the feel of the swollen belly I carried everywhere I went.

“And then I decided: I didn’t want to be fat anymore. I refused to be fat anymore.

“From that moment, I simply did what it took to lose the belly. I changed the way I ate, changed the way I thought about food. It wasn’t particularly difficult. There was never any doubt in my mind that the pain of changing was insignificant compared with the pain of remaining the way I was.

“Losing weight is one thing. All I had to do was talk myself out of eating too many French fries.”

So, it’s that simple, is it? Deciding one day to stop eating chips? Thinking – no, believing – that you can be more than you are by weighing less than you do today? Refusing – his word, not mine – to be dissatisfied?

But how do you change the way you feel about yourself?

The other day I decided to get hypnotised to see if I could think myself thinner.

I met this wonderful man, Simon Richards DCHyp, MBCSHA, GQHP (and quite sexy really) at his Corpus Clinical Hypnotherapy offices in Bridgend.

I went after feeling that I’d exhausted every diet known to mankind, save the skimmed milk and Bovril one (yup, I’ve been reading up on gastric bands).

I also knew of a few people who’ve gone to see him who are still reaping the rewards.

I went with an open mind, and huge hope that he’d find something in my subconscious noodle that would flip a switch, make my self-esteem fatter and my need to self-medicate with carbs slimmer.

He told me that a small number of people don’t succumb to hypnotherapy, but they are usually those who don’t really want it and who fail to relax or let their mind become open to positive suggestions.

My mother had suspicions that I wouldn’t “go under” as she put it.

“The constitution of an ox, you’ve got my love,” she said to me. I stopped short of asking her if she was confusing constitution with bottom size.

I thought about this while nibbling on six chicken nuggets and a strawberry milkshake as I waited to go in, convincing myself that it would be my last meal of rubbish (idiot, idiot, bloody idiot!). I tried to relax, honest I did, but all I could think about while he was trying to suggest wonderful new ways of thinking to me was whether or not he was looking at my fat belly.

There I was, sat in this fancy rocking chair, and all I could concentrate on was my belly, my boobs, my short-sleeved top, my chin, why I had those nuggets, my flat hair, that obnoxious, charmless man, stage hypnotist Kenny Craig from Little Britain saying to me: “Look at your thighs, at your thighs, the thighs, the thighs, not around the thighs, the thighs, don’t look around the thighs… click… you’re under.”

Under. Rhymes with thunder. Yeah, you’ve got it, thunder thighs.

Hypnotherapy, and diets, work on other people. I’ve seen the evidence in my own office.

So why am I so resistant to thinking I can change, even though it’s the one things I want most in the world (apart from McDonald’s extending their breakfast menu past 10.30am)?

Stop doing things I like in order to do things I’d don’t, maybe.

One, two, three… and I’m back in the room. I’m just thankful it’s not in the all-you-can-eat buffet of my mind today.

WE’D only got so far into our mini break ...

... as the Merthyr to Brecon roundabout when I started crying. I don’t know what it is about me and tears lately, but we seem to be best pals.

Significant (thin) Other was giving me a row – well, when I say “row” what I mean was a shake of the head, followed by some finger twitching and mild foot tapping.

Someone fancy was on the radio, a name which I hoped he wouldn’t recognise. But the man who knows what I’m thinking before my thoughts have begun, jumped on the name and started dancing around on the connection between us, saying that he was thrilled, thrilled, thrilled that I would soon be on the same celebrity panel as posh paws on Radio Wales, mixing it up with the great and the good.

Then I broke the news that I wouldn’t be going, that I’d made up an excuse (it was valid and genuine but I could have wriggled) not to go.

He was, to put it mildly, disappointed, rumbling on about the way he gets frustrated because I throw opportunities away with the dexterity of an Olympian.

“Why’ve you done it this time?” he asked me. “The Same Old S*** is it? I’m clueless as to why you have such a low opinion of yourself. You’re fabulous! I wish you’d snap out of it, you’re stopping yourself from doing so much.”

The SOS in question is my subterranean self-esteem. It’s an odd beast, fed on an abundance of carbohydrates and crusty rolls, Yorkshire puddings, Boots Shapers meals and cheese and onion pasties to shut it up.

Frankly, it all comes down to feeling unsightly. I’m not embarrassed to say this is what I think or feel. Nobody’s going to point at me, are they? Nope. And I’m not lying or saying I’ve had a gastric band. Now THAT would be something worth shouting about.

To be honest, I’m so familiar with thinking this way it’s become the norm for me.

And I think it’s all to do with the fact that I feel fat. And ugly. Fugly! Well would you look at that. Copyright Jones.

It’s not the kind of Fugly that comes from having a spot on the end of your nose, the wrong kind of shoes on or a flat hair day.

It’s an incapacitating feeling that leaves me kind of helpless. My beast of burden doesn’t stop me being who I am, or going to work or chopsing or arguing or thinking big thoughts.

Instead it’s a silent thwarter that has turned me into the most self-conscious and unsociable bugger.

And the worst thing of all? I’m entirely responsible. Me. Fugly Jones. I know it, but I can’t shake loose of it.

Most of the time, it isn’t a problem for me as I just live with it. It just IS.

But it becomes an issue when I’m asked to do stuff by friends, when I’m invited places, when I’m asked to go on a panel and just be me. And I just want to say no as it’s the easier option. Because then, I don’t have to worry about what to wear, or anticipate the fall-out by well-intentioned others who simply don’t get this side of me and tussle with me when I say I’d rather not do something.

I was thinking about this while sitting in a café in New Quay, just past Plwmp. Talk about being haunted by your body image.

Convincing myself that I think better while either smoking a cigarette and drinking a latte or stuffing my face, I took the opportunity while S(t)O was off taking pictures to order a bacon roll on the sly (it was less than an hour after breakfast after all) to help with my mental ruminating.

I was about to dig into my notion of Fugly (and a crispy bacon roll), thinking that if nobody saw me doing it I wasn’t really eating, when he came round the corner just as the waitress was delivering my sneaky treat.

As ever, S(t)O didn’t chastise me, or venture any kind of opinion in fact – I got in there first anyway.

But it all went horribly wrong because not only was I caught out, when I opened the roll to check on the fat content it had butter on it. Butter! Who the hell puts butter on a bacon roll? It should be a mortal sin.

So he ate it, enjoying every mouthful as it didn’t taste of guilt – while my interpretation of it backfired, leaving me empty in more ways than one again.

I avoided Plwmp on the way back home. And butter on bacon rolls as soon as I got in. But the jury’s still out on whether I can shake off Fugly.

I’VE just looked up the word ‘holistic’.

Apparently it has something to do with ‘emphasising the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts’.

And there I was thinking it was all to do with vitamins and yoga. Shows how much I know.

The reason I’m showing so much interest in the word, now firmly in my head illuminated under a spotlight of hope, is because Fern Britton has put her remarkable weight loss down to taking an ‘holistic approach’ to it.

To be honest, I’m still not sure what it means. It’s a word that means something in the abstract to me, like low-fat cheese.

Yet it seems somewhat out of reach. Whatever, it’s worked for Fern who’s looking like Little Britton now, despite looking fabulous before.

Fern, who was reportedly concerned that at her biggest she was an unhealthy role model for other women, has quietly introduced a new fitness regime and eating plan, avoiding faddy diets in favour of – yes, you guessed it, an holistic approach.

Oh, and Ryvita. And cycling.

As such, she’s slimmed down from a size 20 – some papers have taken bets and put her at a size 24 – to what looks like a trim 14.

And how does she feel about it, about achieving what I’ve been struggling to do since the day dot?

Surprisingly unsmug and unfazed.

“I don’t feel any different. Genuinely, no different at all. People expect me to be saying something else, but no,” she says.

However Fern, 50, saw the years approaching the Big Five O as the turning point in her life and the motivation behind trying to lose weight.

“For me it took a long time to feel happy about myself and to know who I was,” she admits.

“I’m a late starter so it’s only in the last two or three years that I’ve felt happy with who I am. I think it’s to do with happiness in my personal life, feeling loved and loving someone in return. To feel the love between you is fantastic.”

I feel loved, and adored, it has to be said.

So I couldn’t help but wonder whether if my Significant (thin) Other started to tell me my ‘at home’ look of scabby tracksuit trousers, equally scabby top with bleach marks, no make-up and no bra possibly wasn’t my best, I may be spurred on more.

There’s a lot to be said for contentment and somebody thinking you’re fabulous, flat hair and inflated bits ’n’ all.

Back to Fern: “I think when you get older, more mature, you can see the chapters that have happened to you.

“In my 20s I was working and, unbeknown to me, creating some form of career ladder. I didn’t know that at the time, I was just thinking, ‘Oh, this is OK.’

“Then in my 30s I was married to my first husband and had my children.”

Fern has twins from her first marriage, and two daughters from her second to celebrity chef Phil Vickery. After the birth of twins Jack and Harry (now 14) she suffered crippling post-natal depression.

She says: “I had the most terrible post-natal depression that manifested itself in deep unhappiness. Then I think because I felt I had to be strong and protective for the children, I got larger to feel stronger.”

She later had a daughter, Grace, now 11, and then six-year-old Winnie with Vickery, whom she married in 2007.

But in her late 40s she began to consider her weight, which means that I have less than four years to go before my big epiphany. Yet I wish it were tomorrow.

Fern says: “I thought: ‘I’m not going to have any more children, they’re safe and secure, they don’t need me to be the lioness looking after them, so let’s not perpetuate this.

“I thought, I can be like this for the rest of my life or think, 50, that’s interesting, let’s change.

“I wanted to do something for ‘me’ because being a wife and mum and working, you have no time in the day for yourself.”

And, about two years ago, she started cycling.

On reading this, I went to Halfords on Saturday. I didn’t get further than the burger van parked outside. But my mind was willing at the very least, even if my belly was craving fried onions.

Fern saw an advert in the paper for fertility expert and television scientist Lord Robert Winston’s charity Women For Women, which raises money to help improve health services for mothers and mothers-to-be.

She says: “It was a 400km cycle ride in Egypt, spread across five days. Last year I did India and this year I’m doing Cuba.”

She trains on a 14-gear hybrid bike three days a week, for an hour each session. As the event gets closer, she then does two consecutive days of about 40 miles each day and towards the end 10 or 12 miles a day.

She does that AND presents This Morning AND looks after her kids. I couldn’t find the time with a map.

Perhaps living with a chef makes it easier, having low- calorie meals cooked for you.

But Fern says: “Being married to a chef is like being married to a builder. Your house is the one that doesn’t get any attention! And so although Phil cooks beautifully, and the six of us sit down to a family supper together, it’s very often just a normal family meal.”

She confesses to not having lost her sweet tooth though.

“I adore sugar, that’s my weakness. I could eat chocolate all day long. Well not all day... These days instead of buying a bar I’ll buy a small bag of chocolate buttons.”

Losing the weight has taken years off her and she’s much more confident – light years away from her depressed time.

She says: “Even Jonathan Ross joked: ‘You’re getting too skinny’, which was very sweet of him, and my daughter’s told me my bosoms are sinking slowly, but those were the only comments!”

So as Mam Jones says – someone who’s lost five stone too despite being physically challenged – if Fern can do it, I can too.

Maybe another trip to Halfords, with nose pinchers on, is on the cards tomorrow.