My cheekbones, dare I say, are almost angular. And could that be a perceptible nip to my waist? Certainly, my clothes are looser all over. Not to mention the holy grail for all dieters – the fact that friends are commenting that I look thinner.

And I do – I’ve lost nine pounds in just a month. All without counting calories or sweating myself silly in the gym.

I know what you’re thinking: another middle-class woman lazily jabbing herself with Ozempic. Not quite.

For me, shedding the pounds involved no needles, didn’t cost a fortune and has caused precisely zero side-effects.

Instead, I tried a form of hypnotherapy that promises to permanently rewire your brain, creating new neural pathways and blocking out that infernal ‘food noise’ which tempts you to plunge into the biscuit tin. Hypnozempic, if you will.

Indeed, it’s this quietening of the internal chatter of food cravings that’s made Ozempic and other semaglutide or liraglutide weight-loss injections, like Mounjaro, so effective.

These popular new drugs prompt the pancreas to release insulin by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1. This slows food’s passage through the stomach, flattens blood sugar spikes and appears to bind to receptors in the brain, suppressing appetite.

As one of my friends, who injects herself weekly, said: ‘All the food noise is turned off. I’m now a normal person who simply eats healthily until I’m full.’

Susannah Jowitt lost nine pounds in a month thanks to hypnotherapist Aaron Surtees

It's the quietening of the internal chatter of food cravings that has made Ozempic so effective but injections are expensive

But weight-loss jabs stop working the moment you stop injecting. Many studies have found that a year after stopping the injections, most people regain at least two-thirds of the weight they lost. Hypnotherapy offers, in theory, a permanent fix.

Sounds good. And yet, in all honesty, when I heard about this new option, I had my doubts. How could my subconscious – so eternally, helplessly tilted towards thinking about food – possibly be rewired at the age of 56 without pharmaceuticals or brain surgery?

I am one of the many who quite definitely have a ‘mental’ problem with food. People like me might have a sweet tooth, are probably undone by bacon and need a biscuit at 4pm to give ourselves a lift.

By wrecking my metabolism with yo-yo diets in my teens and twenties, I condemned myself to a lifelong fight with flab.

Motherhood in my early thirties didn’t help and I’ve been mainly fat, or fat and fit, since then – being an unhealthy 15 stone (95kg) at my heaviest. But it was only when I wrote a book called Fat, So? in my early forties that I realised I didn’t just have a weight problem, I had a mind problem.

My mind tells me to finish the food on my plate. My mind says, over and over again, ‘Eat the chips’n’dip. Eat the chips’n’dip’, if they’re sitting in front of me at a party. The fridge sings to me if I’m in the kitchen. The bread bin whispers to me, ‘Hot-buttered-toast, hot-buttered-toast’, if I pass by it with my tea.

From the moment I get up there is a refrain in my brain telling me that I’m hungry, I’m starving, I need food. This is food noise – and, of course, it gets louder if I try to lose weight.

If I listen carefully, the theme is that if I’m going to go off the path of righteousness, then I might as well really swoop off it, plunging to the depths of Double Deckers and carrot cake.

Where the brain wiring really gets tangled is if something upsets me. If I have a bad day, where everything goes wrong, then I head to the fridge to eat my gloom away.

So you might think I’m the perfect candidate for weight-loss jabs. But the prohibitive expense – ranging from £200 to £1,000 a month – puts me off, not to mention the fact that none of us really knows the impact of this medication on our bodies as it’s all so new.

There’s also emerging anecdotal evidence that weight-loss jabs don’t just dampen the fire for food but also for alcohol, for sex, for all the fun stuff. Who wants that?

The man who promises to spare me all this is Aaron Surtees, a cheery, 40-something hypnotherapist who has resolved all manner of mental health problems – from erectile dysfunction to fear of flying – for thousands of patients over the past 20 years.

He is the founder of City Hypnosis, a leading clinic, and pioneer of the ‘Surtees Method’ which combines hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming (a disputed alternative therapeutic approach that suggests you can use language to alter your brain programming).

He says an extraordinary 20 to 25 per cent of his clients now come to him with food issues, many complaining about food noise. ‘I had one client, let’s call her Helen, who came to me in a very bad state of health – pre-diabetic, pre-cancerous tumours forming, damage to the liver, and heart disease. She was at least 25 kilos (four stone) over a “healthy” weight.

‘The doctors had warned her that she had to control her diet and stop eating so much, especially sugar and junk food. She wanted to try hypnotherapy as a last-ditch effort before gastric surgery.’ For Helen, it turned out, hypnotherapy was almost literally a lifesaver.

The sessions helped her curb her interest in sugar and see floury carbs as a poison to her body. Aaron tells me she lost almost three stone over 14 weeks. Her blood pressure, and other health markers, turned back into the healthy zone – and there, says Aaron, they have stayed.

He has also treated celebrities including Ant McPartlin and Perrie Edwards of Little Mix, among others (he won’t reveal what for).

For the rest of us, he’s just released a book and an app, both titled Subconsciously. The app is a very sensible £12.99 a month, compared to the rather eye-watering £450 he charges for an in-person session.

I’m obviously tempted by the idea of effortlessly retraining my subconscious. But I’m also struck by the fear Aaron is a charlatan or, God forbid, some sort of showboating circus act who is going to make me bark like a dog whenever I hear my name, or similar. Not even being slim is worth that.

Trepidatiously, I head to his office off Chancery Lane in central London. At his request, I’ve emailed him before I arrive, detailing my personal hang-ups around food: that I love healthy food but eat far too much of it; that when weak or upset or stressed (which is often) I battle a desire to eat both greedily and unhealthily – chips, crisps, chocolate, the aforementioned buttered toast – in the belief it will ‘comfort’ me.

Aaron is quick to start, turning the lights down and settling me into a comfy recliner chair with a large pair of headphones over my ears to drown out distractions.

Through a microphone connected to the headphones, his voice sounds rather unusual: deep yet soft, almost tentative, with occasional unexpected emphases – the very opposite of the honeyed ‘look into my eyes’ hypnotic tones I was expecting.

‘You’re walking down a white marble staircase,’ he starts, and settles into a rhythmically soothing patter. He tells me I’m going deeper and deeper, my legs getting heavier and heavier, then asks me to visualise a pleasant place in my mind.

I panic slightly: I’m so busy trying to decide between a Cornish beach and a sunny terrace in Greece that I lag behind and suddenly realise Aaron is now talking about picking up objects of treasure. Are the objects in the pleasant place or are we now somewhere else? You’re hopeless at this, I silently berate myself.

The session is, all in all, unexpected. If I’m honest, I’d expected a load of soothing, self-help guff along the lines of ‘believe in yourself, you’re better than this.’

But Aaron is almost brisk: concentrating in the first half – which feels like ten minutes but I realise later was 20 – on relaxing me enough so he can ‘enter’ my subconscious and then, in the second half, reprogramming my brain.

‘You’re now entering the control room of your mind,’ he tells me. ‘You’re surrounded by coloured lights and switches and dials. One of these is labelled “Food Noise” and you can see the dial is set much higher than it needs to be, so step forward and carefully ease the dial backwards.

‘This is the food noise dial and you just turned it down, so you no longer need to listen to it. You don’t need or want to eat as much as you used to. You can get the same sense of satisfaction from turning that dial down and eating less. It’s good to eat less, you will enjoy that lighter feeling from turning down the dial, that higher sense of confidence in yourself . . .’

So it goes, for the rest of the 40-minute session, at the end of which Aaron brings me back, 5-4-3-2-1, and then I’m awake, bubbling with questions – and very much convinced that I was never ‘under’. Aaron addresses my questions with cheery goodwill – he must have been asked them a million times – and the answers are, again, unexpected.

I tell him I don’t think I was hypnotised and confess that my mind wandered quite a lot. He assures me it doesn’t matter a jot. I narrow my eyes and share my surprise at the lack of feelgood mantras. He laughs at that.

‘I realised fairly early on that when it comes to reprogramming the mind, streamlined and direct is best: it’s like using tomato puree instead of a whole tub of tomatoes to make a good pasta sauce,’ he says. ‘My effectiveness is a combination of experience, tone, energy and knowing what the subconscious mind listens to best.’

What does the mind listen to? It’s fairly well established that hypnotherapy works by first taking you into a deep state of calm, stilling the critical, conscious part of your mind. Hypnotists say there is a deeply relaxed state, between being asleep and awake, in which your brain is open to change. In this state, repeatedly listening to a carefully crafted message can slowly create new neural pathways in the brain.

So how do I know if it’s worked? He becomes very matter-of-fact. ‘Listen, I can tell that you were open to the process, and that’s the only requirement. I know that what I said will have gone in. Now you must go home and, each night for a week, or every other night for a fortnight, listen to the recording of our session, or another weight-loss recording on the app. It will work.’

I walk home with those words, ‘It will work’, ringing in my ears.

That night, I listen obediently to those light hesitant tones, walk down that white marble staircase and stroll into the control room. As I listen to more sessions on the Subconsciously app, I begin to recognise a familiar structure: the gentle drumbeat of key words, the common motifs of descending and climbing, heaviness and lightness.

After just one session and listening to the recording twice, I notice, almost to my disbelief, that my ‘food noise’ has, indeed, gone down. It starts with a day when I simply don’t feel the usual distractions of the fridge while working from home. My son comes in and eats hot honeyed toast in front of me and I don’t ask for my usual mega bite.

At the same time, however, I am going through a particularly stressful time: not just the piling up of work deadlines, plus the stress of a sick mother over 200 miles away, but also busy, busy commitments of parties, book clubs, choir rehearsals and concerts – with endless dinners out. Food is offered to me wherever I go – vast platefuls of lamb and roast potatoes, delicious canapes, creamy cheesecakes. It would be rude to say no – and I don’t.

While I never have second helpings, the first servings are often huge. This doesn’t bode well.

What I do notice is that I somehow feel revoltingly full even when I haven’t eaten as much as I would have done, pre-Aaron. It’s almost as if my body is cross with me for denying it the lightness it was promised. Slowly, slowly, gently, gently.

Almost exactly two weeks after the first session, I start to eat less. Shockingly for a Yorkshire girl, I even – occasionally – manage to leave food on my plate.

It’s not dramatic. It’s only because I’m paying forensic attention that I notice the diminution of my usual greed. That said, after a month, when I weigh myself, I am cautiously hopeful.

Still, nothing can describe my shock when I stare at the dial and see I’m nine pounds down.

I’ve eaten out more often than not that month; I’ve slept badly and eaten chocolate to keep going; I’ve been so busy I kept forgetting to listen to Aaron’s recordings as often as he advised. And yet I’ve lost nine pounds.

I ring Aaron the next day and squeak with excitement. ‘It’s magic!’ I crow. He’s more conservative, telling me I should listen to the sessions more – but agrees his method works. ‘It’s the subconscious mind that’s the seat of your magic, Susannah,’ he concludes.

You can keep your expensive injections. I’ll take Aaron instead – and luckily, at £12.99 a month, I can afford to.

• Subconsciously is available from Amazon or good bookshops.
• Download the Subconsciously app from all app stores.