Weight-loss diets

Over the last twenty years, the prevalence of obesity has tripled, regardless of age, sex, ethnicity and social level.

Even though millions of people try to lose weight, the population's weight keeps steadily rising. In the European Community, half of all adults and one in five children are overweight. Of these, a third are frankly obese and their number is growing rapidly.

Gaining fat doesn't just mean gaining weight, it means creating a disharmony. The process of growing body volume is a physical and psychological symptom at the same time; it implies a general discomfort that becomes visible on the outside through a change of shape.

The food we choose and the amount we decide to eat are tied to our eating patterns, to cultural and environmental habits, and to the value we give food from an emotional, affective and cognitive point of view. We pour all our existential discomfort onto food, projecting onto it our need for love, our desire to acquire, and the compensation for our frustrations.

To counter the serious problem of obesity, diets proposed by more or less qualified people have multiplied, spread through the press, books and mass media in an indiscriminate and often risky way for those who venture down this path without the preparation and critical skills needed to glimpse the individual risks, almost always tied to the constitution of the person who wants to go on a diet. Before starting a diet it is essential, in fact, to know how our metabolism works and what the physiological mechanisms behind gaining and losing weight are. There is a fundamental difference between slimming down and losing weight. In fact, when you follow an unbalanced diet, you lose weight rather than slim down: such are the diets that allow rapid weight loss, which eliminate completely or almost completely most starchy foods. This causes dehydration of the body.

A person on a restrictive diet is as if going into hibernation, with all the consequences that come with it. After every restrictive diet, the body tends to become less and less efficient. Many people, after numerous attempts to lose weight, find themselves forced to eat very little, because as soon as they eat just a little more than the minimum they tend to regain pounds.

Because of these mechanisms, weight loss must therefore be slow in order to act on fat mass and, at the beginning, there will be a decrease in volume more than in weight.

A dietary intervention is worthwhile because it manages to activate the individual's metabolism in order to achieve a stable reduction in weight, and not because of the number of pounds it makes you lose.

This involves a permanent overhaul of your eating behavior: not so much eating less as eating better, focusing on regular, sufficiently substantial meals to avoid feeling hungry between meals, which implies optimal blood sugar regulation. Fasting, skipping meals or eating erratically triggers the body's weight-defense mechanisms more quickly, which tend to keep our set point fixed, undoing the results of the diet in the long term.