Eat in the moment and listen to your intuitive inner voice. Those are two weight-losing tips from South African clinical psychologist Gillian Smale when she addressed the SA Gastroenterology Congress on Obesity in Port Elizabeth earlier this week.

"If you eat intuitively because you are physically hungry ? instead of simply because you feel like it, you should not put on weight," she advised specialists, physicians and doctors to tell their patients. "Learn to eat with your head and not your heart. Also eat in the moment ? do not eat absentmindedly and load on those extra calories.

Half of South Africa's women and a third of its men are estimated to be overweight.

The conference learned that while lifestyle obviously plays a part in obesity, research has shown that 30 to 60 percent of obese patients have a genetic susceptibility to the disease.

"Everyone is born with an intuitive sense of when and what to eat," Dr Smale believes. "But this sense is lost very early on especially if mothers feed babies on schedule. That is the first step to ruining their offsprings' intuitive hunger sense and this gives them the susceptibility to becoming obese."

Other 'programming' through life helps children lose touch with intuitive eating like allowing them to earn tasty treats. "Eat your vegetables and then you can have dessert,"; "Don't waste food. There are people starving" or "I've made your favourite meal so eat it all" were a few such messages.

Dr Smale, who has a special interest in eating disorders, said that intuitive sense of how much to eat was easily lost and in addition and also switched off through dieting.

"There are 22 000 registered diets and only five percent of them have long term success," she said. "Diets dictate the content and context of what is eaten and this leads to a vicious cycle. The exclusion of food leads to a sense of deprivation which then leads to bingeing. Depression and remorse follow ? and a stricter diet the next day.

"Diets only teach us an external temporary way to lose weight. We should be developing an intuitive way ? an internal way ? modifying our lifestyles and developing better eating habits. Our inner voice should tell us what and how much should be eaten and when! This means only eating when we are hungry and only enough to satisfy us.

She says that everyone should try to develop instinctive behaviour around food. They should eat often. They should eat smaller portions and they must understand that skipping meals gives them a greater appetite. They should eat intuitively and stop when satisfied ? and not feel guilty about leaving food on a plate. And think of exercise as fun instead of being a duty.

"If you have a few kgs to lose, break away from the famine mentality of eating as much as you can or the tourist mentality which is eat everything because you never know when you will have the opportunity again. And don't make each celebration ? like a birthday ? an excuse to overeat. Anyone eating a starter, main course and dessert is eating enough for two days at one sitting if they clean their plates."

She said overweight people might get confused about emotional hunger and stomach hunger as well as feeling satisfied or feeling full when eating.

"When we eat when we are not hungry, we ingest more food than the body can burn ? and then the weight piles on.

"To lose weight, there are no quick fixes. If people can develop a sense of eating intuitively ? that is eating with your stomach and not with your head ? is a good way of slimming down. But if you don't walk the talk, being thin will remain wishful thinking."

Dr Smale is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Port Elizabeth.