Today I am talking to you about a new book that explains why effective diets do not exist in practice and how to go on a diet and lose weight without getting it back. A topic that I have already addressed and that you have already read many times, but that the author of the book (the title in English is “The fix diet”), Canadian doctor Yoni Freedhoff, addresses from the perspective of stress and of the sacrifices that diets impose on us. In short, according to the author, the problem is not that diets are not effective, but the stress that putting us to make different food choices creates us. We already know that stress hormones, primarily cortisol, tend to raise blood sugar as a defensive response, making us not only gain weight, but also age.. Dr. Yoni Freedhoff talks about a worldwide business on diets that are not effective, however, precisely because of the type of stress they cause us. This is especially true in the case of crash diets, which promise us an effective and fast diet that makes us lose weight immediately. In fact, the more we diet, the more we suffer. According to Yoni Freedhoff , the problem with diets is the suffering associated with food, when food is not only nourishment, but something we should do with pleasure, not just out of need. We are able, explains the doctor in an interview , to make the most incredible sacrifices to lose weight, accumulating stress and denying ourselves things we like., to which we associate a deep sense of guilt every time we fall back. This causes the failure of diets: we cannot be orthodox and rigorous for life, orthorexia is indeed a serious problem if we associate it with an everyday diet.
All people are under the illusion of being able to maintain a weight they have achieved by making sacrifices at the table, when it is much more likely that after some time they will return to gain weight, precisely because eating is synonymous with happiness.
Among his patients, Dr. Freedhoff noted that those who gave up the ideal weight and ate correctly and varied, thinking about being healthy, they were people who knew how to maintain a good weight on a stable basis: those who, on the other hand, took care of diets, not only often regained weight, but because of their deprivations, they gambled their health, with the risk of regaining weight after a while. To understand if the diet we do is effective, the only question we can ask ourselves is the following: is it a diet that I can do forever? Is it a diet that costs me no sacrifice?