We would do well on a little diet, just to lighten up and take good habits to spend the fall in good shape … Yes, but: “Anyway, it never works in the long term” sighs Manon, “j ‘I can’t do it, I’m always hungry “, says Annick,” I don’t have time to cook healthy “, according to Emmanuel. “It always starts well and bam, I crack and I eat anything” And so on … Emanuela Garau, psychologist and nutrition therapist sees a number of unhappy women and men pass through her consulting room, ill at ease. body but vanquished in advance. For her, however, “The problem is not the food and the weight “.

What can we do to help ourselves be better in our body, to lose weight?

It’s simple, you have to stop dieting because diets fail, over and over again. Even where women start a diet or pseudo-diet (like “no, I don’t diet, I just watch”) to lose weight, they will inevitably gain more weight than they did. first as soon as the diet stops.

In fact, this restrictive, deprived, and “mindful” way of dealing with food only creates obsessions, anxiety, overeating, and guilt.

It’s kind of a vicious cycle …

But yes ! Who also feeds on a grossophobic society governed by a cult of thinness, where weight would give indications of his personality and his value. In short, even though it’s been relaxing a bit in recent years, women wake up and go to bed thinking about losing weight. And the only way they know, because they’ve been taught, to lose weight is to “watch” what they eat.

But focusing on food and weight loss will only develop an adversarial relationship with food AND gain weight.

How to get rid of this conflictual relationship?

What I understood in my professional career and in all the accompaniments with my patients is that the paradigm must be changed. Here’s the mistake: we have always focused on food as the source of all problems because we have always been told it would be because of “what we eat” that we gain weight. The problem is not the food and the weight.

If there is overweight, it is because there is a whole series of psychological mechanisms that lead to certain eating habits, which will make you gain excess weight.

You have to identify your psycho-alimentary automatisms, work on emotional hunger, learn to take advantage of all the food by getting out of the injunctions of what to eat and what not to.

We can understand it but how to put it into practice?

If you really want to break free from your chains and regain your ideal weight, you have to start by making peace with food and building a peaceful, serene, benevolent relationship with yourself and your body. We need an approach that links psychology and nutrition. This is the only viable and effective solution. And I would add that we are talking about its “natural” weight and which does not necessarily rhyme with “thin”!

You propose a method called “I quit diets”, what does it consist of?

We learn to make peace with food and regain our ideal weight by eating everything and having fun because this notion of pleasure is crucial. We tackle five themes: the relationship with oneself and with food; the relationship to his body and his plate; emotional hunger; nutrition ; organization and planning. Because understanding is even better than learning: the head and the stomach move forward together.

More information on this 12-week training course on the Emanuela Garau website. Registration until September 20. On a blog, the psychologist-nutritherapist also discusses the relationship between diet and well-being and gives recipes