Until the beginning of this year, it had never even crossed my mind to ask myself whether I was hungry before I ate. I wanted to eat, so I ate. If I wanted to eat, I was hungry, right?

It seems not. This year I have learnt that there are two kinds of hunger.

The first kind, the never, is physical hunger. Before starting Beyond Chocolate, I can’t remember feeling hungry at all apart from one occasion as a child when I was so hungry my stomach ached. Physical hunger was not a part of my daily life. Diet programmes told me when, how much and what to eat. And when I wasn’t dieting, I was guiltily eating all the things I either wasn’t allowed on my diet programme, or the things that cost too many points or syns.

The second kind is an emotional hunger. I feel it’s important to say that for me, this emotional hunger was my physical hunger. If I didn’t feel quite right in some way, I reached for food to sooth me. It wasn’t a concious thing. I thought it was what everybody did. It felt natural to me. It worked.

 It was only when my father in law told me he wasn’t hungry at lunchtime because he’d had a large meal the night before. This fascinated me. I wondered why I was always hungry no matter what I had eaten earlier in the day, or the previous day. Why could I eat a three course meal and then want another dinner when I got home? How was it possible for me to put away an entire carton of Ben & Jerry’s after a takeaway but still want more chocolate?

I was going through a very painful time in terms of my eating habits and my body size. I was failing at every diet I tried and no matter how desperate I was, my willpower wasn’t enough. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any willpower, I spent 12 weeks on a liquid formula diet over the summer of 2005 with no trouble, but there was some part of me determined to eat no matter how much I wanted to fit into my old size 10s jeans.

I found Beyond Chocolate in Psychologies magazine and eventually bought the book after a recommendation from a friend. Initially I thought it was going to be about accepting your fat and giving up the diets. It isn’t though. It’s about recognising that diets have a mere 5% success rate and finding a different, far less stressful, completely realistic way to lose weight and building your life into one you want to live.

I’ve since found many other books on intuitive eating and my life has changed immeasurably. The daily hopelessness in terms of being slim doesn’t exist in my life now. I eat what I need and I eat what I want. I don’t eat for emotional reasons as a matter of course. I feel positive that the more coverage intuitive eating gets, the slimmer the Western world will become and we will be much happier in our own skin.