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So, Paul, is Posh really too thin ...?

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Tuesday Feb 5 2008

From within the eerily perfect confines of his mews flat in Kensington, Paul McKenna announces calmly: "I believe I can cure most psychological problems, and quite a number of medical ones." The hypnotist and self-help author has something of the religious zealot about him - as well as a strong whiff of money.

He has just he earned himself a £15m TV deal in the US. The man with the most powerful eyes in television was born in Enfield, Middlesex, to a builder and a home economics teacher.

He first discovered his 'powers' in his twenties, when he hypnotised the boy next door into achieving an 'A' in his biology A-level.

Some 20 years later, he has a multimillion-pound self-help empire and a number of well-known clients, including Sarah Ferguson, Sophie Dahl, David Bowie, David Walliams, George Michael and Robbie Williams.

McKenna (44) smiles involuntarily when I mention them, unashamedly impressed by the whole celebrity "thing".

And then there are the freaks - my word, not his - such as the woman who came to him with a phobia of jelly or those suffering from trichotillomania (where you pull out your hair and eat it).

Formerly a radio disc jockey, McKenna's main focus now is helping people to lose weight He is a food evangelist with a pathological hatred of the diet industry. Instead, McKenna's tirades about the misconceptions surrounding weight loss are peppered with nerdy, schoolboy expletives. "It's got sh*g all to do with food and everything to do with psychology," he says. "There is a better case for banning diets than banning smoking.

"Diets simply make people fatter, leading to obesity, which is a massive drain on our health services. Any regime that restricts what you eat just means that your body gets good at storing fat, and so the second you come off the diet - slam!," he shouts, and I wonder if the sudden shift in volume works as some form of mind control, "the weight goes back on."

McKenna's weight-loss seminars preach a simple sermon: to eat what you want, consciously, and only when hungry.

He has, he says, been working with a group of doctors to make his self-improvement strategies available on the health service, and hopes to meet up with the UK health minister this year.

"The only worry is that the diet industry is so big and so powerful that there may be too much at stake there. Politicians, I'm sure, have been bought - I can't think that they haven't."

I disagree, disappointed that, after making so much sense, this last point just sounds barmy.

When I ask about celebrities and their promotion of fad diets, McKenna becomes agitated.

"There's a new kind of anorexic now: there's your professional anorexic, and there are quite a number of famous people like that. They are right on the edge, walking around thinking, 'I am so in control. You want to look like me, don't you?' These people are getting their serotonin highs from perceiving themselves as being better than other people."

Is he alluding to people such as Victoria Beckham, whose excessive slimness seems to be their primary accomplishment?

"I don't know whether she has an eating disorder," he gives a wry smile, "but I can say that some people just white-knuckle it. Every day it's just a question of getting through the day, and sometimes they binge, and sometimes they starve, or they become bulimic or anorexic."

McKenna assures me that he refuses to work with the food fanatics, unless, of course, they allow him to concentrate on their underlying problems.

"An actress I won't name came to see me recently, telling me she needed to lose 10lbs. Now, she was anorexically thin, and I thought, 'Not on my watch'. So instead, we worked on her body dysmorphia, which most people have. They look at themselves in the mirror and go through a checklist of abuse - funny eyes, fat face, look at the state of my bottom ... But it is as if they are looking at themselves in one of those seaside mirrors. In her mind, the actress will never be thin enough, so I worked away on her for 45 minutes until eventually it just popped. Before she left, she said, 'You know, I did used to get more roles when I was a little bit bigger. Actually, I look ok'."

McKenna may not come in the traditional Lothario packaging ("I'd like to come back in my next life and be liked for something other than my mind" ), but he does have a long back-catalogue of Amazonian blondes.

After a relationship with GMTV's Penny Smith, presenter Liz Fuller famously dumped him live on air. Now his beautiful former fiancee, Clare Staples, is said to be stepping out with his close friend Robbie Williams.

" I like a pretty girl," he admits. After splitting up with his girlfriend of 18 months at Christmas, McKenna is currently single.

He doesn't go for skinny girls, "because I just want them to go and eat a pie" , and laughingly concedes a liking for unbalanced women: "I love a mental case, because then I can fix them."

The next question is so obvious, McKenna poses it himself.

"Have I ever used my powers to seduce women?" he asks with a smile that screams, 'Yes, yes, yes!', but he replies: "Well, that would be rather sad, don't you think? "

I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna, Bantam, £12.50

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