Over 25,000 books on diets and even more on food in general have been published internationally in recent years. Most of these texts convey completely conflicting information as do the thousands of scientific studies published in accredited journals.
How not to be confused?
The only certain fact that emerges from this amount of information is that all diets lead to weight loss, but that none solves the problem in a definitive way.
The battle to identify the best diet among blood groups, biotypes, Dukan, Mediterranean, Atkins, Paleolithic, just to name a few, is therefore completely absurd and useless.
As long as we continue to tackle the problem of nutrition with sterile caloric calculations, or with weird theoretical constructs, we will not come out of it.
TO DEEPEN: What really hinders the implementation of a healthy diet?
Diet is a habit, not an emergency
The flaw of every diet lies in the very meaning we have given to this term: a momentary intervention to solve a chronic problem.
No wonder it doesn’t work. Moreover, every restrictive and punitive mechanism, in a society where food is pleasure before being nourishment, is destined to last for a short time and fail in the long term.
The real problem lies elsewhere, in the relationship to be rebuilt between us and food. During the evolutionary history of our species, food was first of all nourishment and survival and there was little space for any other function linked to pleasure other than to appease the suffering of hunger.
In the modern world where food has become a product, eating means first of all satisfying certain emotional conditions . We eat out of nervousness, stress, loneliness, sadness, the joy of being together, rather than hunger.
We eat more and eat worse
This, coupled with a proliferation of industrial foods designed to be irresistible, has made us lose control. Hence the epidemic of metabolic diseases and overweight. Not from the metabolic problem of an individual who must be “put on a diet”, but from a behavioral and social problem that must be corrected at the root.
None of us can live long in a condition where food is only sacrifice and renunciation.
We need to find a balance between the need à to nourish ourselves correctly for the body and to satisfy the pleasure mechanism in a to avoid violently taking control of our behavior.
The speech is very complex and long, but we can at least mention some basic strategies to be adopted to rebuild a more balanced relationship with food:
- Recognize when you are hungry and when you are looking for food for other reasons
- Don’t skip meals and try to feed yourself when you eat
- Correct your ingredients list
- Give yourself a few exceptions and enjoy them
- Restore a balance between food intake and consumption through movement
If you have weight problems, remember that the first thing that needs to be corrected is your relationship with food.
If you succeed on this path and simply learn which ingredients to use in daily life and how to insert some satisfying exceptions, you will have won the battle forever and you will never need to go on a diet again.
