Do you suffer from nervous hunger and don’t know what to do? Have you tried them all? Would you like there to be a magical switch capable of extinguishing nervous hunger? Well, I don’t know if you remember Raffaele Morelli’s book, Pensa Magro . There are those who have overcome the concept of helping themselves with the mind to defeat nervous hunger and reach a healthy weight with a method that apparently works, the Skinny Talk ! Indeed, talking to yourself as if you were thin: more precisely it is defined the “Self-chatter diet”, or the diet of talking to oneself by dr. Rockett, a book by a certain John Richardson which has so far only been published in English and which you can find here .
Let’s see what it is. The author says that as long as obesity and overweight are treated as a behavioral problem (you eat because you have bad habits), it will be impossible to find an objective solution for everyone and especially for those suffering from nervous hunger. It is not the food that makes us fat, but the way we eat it. Beliefs, wrong behaviors and wrong food associations are making us fat: nervous hunger is an increasingly large-scale problem.

So what can we do? Well, according to the author, the secret is to talk to yourself and behave as if we were thin . The obese who follows a restrictive diet is a bit like those who take painkillers because their leg hurts: for those who want to reach a healthy weight, the ideal is to fight bad habits by exploiting their “inner voice”.

We make hundreds of food choices a day, often without realizing it . Every meal and every moment of the day can translate into a choice or a thought about food, not always on a conscious level or we would go crazy. Talking to yourself while you are eating, explaining why you need to halve the plate of pasta or why it is better to leave the dessert alone (for example: “I’m doing this because …”) is a great motivational aid.

It’s a bit like we split up and have a coach , or a person who is more strict than us, who controls us and convinces us not to eat chips between meals. Many “historical” diet programs worked precisely because they were organized with a group (think Weight Watchers) or with a coach , assistant or doctor who scolds the patient. Richardson argues that instead of the coach or the group of friends, to fight the nervous hunger it would be enough to speak aloud .
This thing, which at first glance may seem obvious and obvious, is very difficult to do. I suffered from nervous hunger for years and I also met many people who suffered from it: we all agreed on one thing that happens when we decide to go wrong or we have a food rush, that is, that everything happens quickly, with anger, with voracity. Often after the first bites we don’t even taste what we eat anymore, and it takes us a minute to finish it. It would be enough to talk to each other in a loud voice, while opening the fridge, asking “ok, but what are you doing and why?” to neutralize nervous hunger. The important thing is to do it aloud, not just think about it, for the technique to work.