Intermittent fasting: a popular diet with serious psychological risks



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Why do we have a diet?

The social pressure exerted on the diet starts very young – and that is what worries some nutritionists and eating disorder experts about people who wish to adopt restrictive diets. In 2008, a study of nearly 200 five-year-olds showed that the mother's diet behavior influenced her thinking. Other estimates suggest that one-third of pre-adolescent children report dieting.

Get up, breathe, brush your teeth and continue your diet. "

The pressure is rising in middle and high school, while the media offers ideals of beauty that often differ from reality. Diet books, bookstore shelves, magazine articles, plaster diet tips and Instagram influencers peddle "lean tea" as a miracle weight loss strategy.

"Everyone is connected to a device that is flashing a million times a minute – not just messages about what you should look like, but also messages about feeling dissatisfied with yourself," says Kronberg, noting that these messages increase a person's vulnerability to eating disorder and diet. "It's part of: Get up, breathe, brush your teeth and keep eating."

Dawn Brighid, an integrative nutritionist at the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York, tells reverse she sees a lot of anxiety around the food. "I see people in tears because they are hungry and they do not know what to do. They were told not to eat X, Y, Z and they now feel that their diet is too restrictive, "she says. "It's like an information overload."

Many people go on a diet to lose weight, but not always for health reasons. "We have a weight bias in our culture and there is a hierarchy of lean to normal versus overweight," says Kronberg, who has been counseling patients with eating disorders for over forty years. "You know, thin people have better jobs, better friends, a better life. It is coveted.

Kronberg discovered that dieting often involves finding control and a sense of accomplishment in a chaotic world.

"People who are genetically predisposed to developing a eating disorder are much more vulnerable to the chaos of the world, to global and economic threats, not just to the chaos of their families," she says.

Between 2013 and 2016, nearly half of Americans have tried to lose weight in the past 12 months, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Diets often do not work – or at least their effects do not last. In 31 long-term feeding studies, a group of UCLA psychologists found in 2007 that dieters typically lost between 5 and 10% of their starting weight during the first few years. first six months, but that one to two thirds of people had gained more weight than they had lost afterwards. several years.

When diets do not deliver the desired results, people sink into shame: the food culture tells them that they are lazy and undisciplined. And so, they are looking for the next best diet, and the relentless cycle continues.

"Not only diets do not work, they cause damage. This is the ultimate goal, "says Tribole. "It increases the risk of eating disorders and really disconnects people from their bodies."

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