Whenever we talk about diet, we find it hard to think that it can even be enjoyable, right?

Often the diet, intense here as a slimming regimen, is indeed the furthest away from pleasure. Controlled doses, low-calorie foods that would not otherwise be our first choice, but that maybe even make us sick to eat, a rigid and obsessive weight control that over the years leads us to gain weight instead of losing weight or staying in shape.

And after the first days of euphoria in the face of a new dietary regime, convinced that it will finally work, the first symptoms that cause us to spoil the party (if a party we can talk about if we are on a diet).

Tiredness, nervousness, difficulty digesting, bloating, loss of energy during the day. Eventually the weight may even drop, sometimes it doesn’t even drop.

And we feel in disarray. And so we look for a new diet that can fix our weight problems forever.

Yet we are still here. To ask ourselves what we did wrong, what we don’t know.
If you found yourself in this description, perhaps you could give it another try, but in the opposite way to what you have tried so far.
That is to do the pleasure diet.

THE DIET OF PLEASURE: WHAT IS IT?

The pleasure diet is a type of nutrition that starts from your needs and that I will try to translate into an example plan exclusively for you.

Our cravings for particular foods can in fact be the answer to different situations.

• The first is the environment / gut axis . If we often eat a certain food, it is likely that we will have a relationship of dependence on it, caused by the fact that frequent consumption of that food has changed our bacterial flora. To be clear, a Mexican might want arepas , but not sushi . A Neapolitan will say he is addicted to pizza. But this addiction is more the result of a habit, which ultimately meant that some bacteria in our gut prevailed over others. Yes, but what do gut bacteria have to do with a food addiction that we think is psychological?
  To answer this question, you have to think that your bacteria or viruses are trying to survive within you and impose themselves on others. A dog or a rat with anger literally changes his character, becoming incredibly aggressive and trying to bite other living beings. The bite is the way in which the rabies virus, present in saliva, spreads to other host organisms. This thing, although not with the same severity, happens in the intestine. So my craving for food is not necessarily psychological, it is also intestinal.
• The second is the way our body tries to tell us something, using hunger as a symptom. Highly stressed people may feel craving for sweet, fatty or salty foods, because these foods all have an anti-stress function.

Therefore, doing a pleasure diet is not simply continuing to eat only the foods we love, but being guided by two different needs: on the one hand, pleasure, or fulfillment, through food.
On the other hand, the choice of those foods that are actually good for us, and not just on the first term. That we digest better, that make us feel nourished, after which, in short, we don’t really want to eat anything else even though we haven’t gorged ourselves. To be clear, a biscuit can make us feel good, but it is very likely that after a second we will feel the desire to eat another one, and after ten biscuits, after half an hour, we will want more food. Instead a plate of fresh salmon with roast potatoes doesn’t make us want any more fresh salmon with roast potatoes, yet we felt good when we ate it.

The key to the pleasure diet is to combine these two rules.

On the one hand, choose foods that give us pleasure, and not go on a depressing diet.
On the other hand, choosing foods that do not make us fall into the trap of wanting others of the same type to the point of being sick, but that make us feel satisfied from a nutritional point of view.
At the same time, the pleasure diet should also be extended to an environmental issue.
For example.
We all know that physical activity is good for you: but its benefits stop when we force ourselves to do physical activity out of duty, because we know it is good for us. There is a difference between doing something that we are passionate about and forcing ourselves to set the alarm at five because only by going to run on an empty stomach do we feel okay, even if we don’t want to do it.

Examples of pleasure diets are nutritionist Daphne Coon’s La Pleasure Diet , the one of the same name by Dr. Robert Willner, Marc David’s Slow Down diet. Let’s see how to do it on page two.