Three doughnuts and a chocolate cupcake

Hello people of the internet,

I've had a special request from reader @alexbloor to talk more about the hypnosis. Given that my last two blogs were about the hypnosis, I promise never to talk about it again until I've reached my goal weight, but here goes...

I decided to try hypnosis because Charlie Brooker told me it helped him quit smoking. (You can read all about this in my book about therapy, Talk Yourself Better, out on 25th October.) Now, I was sceptical about hypnosis, but I have a lot of faith in Charlie - and if it helped him, I thought, it might just help me too, even though our problems are different.

So I googled 'does hypnosis help weight loss?' and came across a newspaper article about a woman who had lost five stone by listening to a £20 hypnosis app called Easy Loss. (I promise I'm not being paid to promote this app!). I started listening to this app on Wednesday morning, three days ago. This day was going to be a write-off diet day, because I was going out with the team at work. My plan was to eat fish and chips and a chocolate dessert.

Because it was a write-off diet day, I started it by eating three doughnuts and a chocolate cornflake cupcake for breakfast. I am not proud of this fact. It's appalling. But this alone should explain why I need to diet - I'm completely out of control around food.

I'm lucky enough to work in a relaxed environment where I can listen to my own music through headphones, so I listened to the Easy Loss app all morning at work. The American man on the recording has the most incredible voice - soft and rich and soothing - but I wasn't entirely convinced it would work. He was telling me that, instead of craving carbohydrates, I would just want to eat fruit and vegetables. I thought 'yeah yeah, whatever'.

But we went out for lunch at Dean Street Townhouse, and weirdly, I realised that I no longer wanted to eat the fish and chips or chocolate cake. I ordered the pea and mint soup, and the tomato salad. Everyone around me was eating the bread on the table, with soft salted butter, and ordinarily I would have been shovelling it into my face, but I didn't. I just sat there serenely, drinking my water.

When I was asked if I wanted some bread, I said something like 'No thanks, I don't eat bread anymore'. The same thing happened with dessert. It was very confusing, but somehow, I no longer craved these things.

I ate fruit for dinner. When I woke up, I weighed myself, and predictably, I weighed more than I had the day before (three doughnuts and a chocolate cornflake cupcake will do that to you).

Feeling miserable, I went to work. It was a busy day, and I listened to the recordings again at my desk. I realised I wasn't thinking about food much - it was like an afterthought, something I knew existed, but I didn't crave it like I did usually. I ate four diet sachets during the day, roughly 900 calories.

Now the weird thing is, I weighed myself again the next morning (aka today) - and I'd lost a whopping 3.8lbs and an inch off my waist in one day!

Sceptics might say 'oh, your scales are broken' or 'it's water weight' or 'you'll weigh more again tomorrow'. Fine.

I don't really care what the loss is down to - I'm just incredibly motivated by the fact that I lost almost 4lbs and one inch in a day! It spurs me on to keep listening to the recordings.

Like I say, I won't talk about this again until I've lost all the weight, but I'm super-happy with this preliminary loss - and I didn't have to pay an old man to swing a pocket watch in my face, either. Result.