When I blurted out that I weighed myself every morning — naked, fasting and exhaling — to a friend who did her nutrition course, she threatened to leave with my scales. I know, it’s unhealthy to give so much importance to a number. I started when I was going through chemo, ten years ago. I was melting. Except for certain uncontrollable metabolic events, a month of chemo (-5 kilos), divorce (-5 kilos), menopause (+5 kilos), not to mention pregnancy (+15 kilos) and breastfeeding coupled with a heartbreak (-15 kilos), I was stability itself. But in recent years, I have either weighed myself for fear of disappearing, or for fear of taking up too much space. Never correct, basically; body shamingas they say.
It comes from very far away, this subjugation whose influence I am only just beginning to measure. I remember asking for a “diet” from the hospital where my father worked when I was six. Already, I had integrated the social codes and the obsession with girls.
But in the 1970s, the body landscape was not the same as it is today. There were 14% of adults obese in 1978. Today, it is one in four Quebecers. The rate of pediatric obesity has tripled in 30 years, reaching one in ten children. And we’re not even talking about being overweight. 40% of adults aged 18 to 74 in Quebec have a waist size considered to be at risk by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Global progression can only be attributed to genetics, shrinking jeans or an aging population. The other day I read an interview given by cardiologist Martin Juneau to Hélène David in The Press. Nearly 40 years of public speaking and efforts to prevent public health, his observation is scathing: “It hasn’t achieved much. » The doctor, who is interested in diet as a factor in overall health, had already told me in an interview: “I don’t see my vegan patients again. » And no, they are not dead.
A body for life
According to the Dr Juneau — author of the work A heart for life —, the obesity epidemic among young Westerners will cause serious health problems in a system that is already failing everywhere. He is not the only doctor to worry about this. I am a fan of Dr Michael Greger, who published How not to diet (How not to Diet2019), 650 pages on a complex issue and a billionaire diet industry that fuels the effects of dissatisfaction and comparison, that of corresponding to uniform and thin standards.
The Dr Greger has been promoting a vegan diet for years; With this book he dismantles and dissects all the diets and miracle proposals, but he also explains chronobiology (the best time to eat one thing or another). He notes that it is normal that obesity has become epidemic given our metabolism which has not evolved much since the great apes. “The fight against kilos is a fight against biology, obesity is therefore not a moral failure. I cannot stress this point enough: it is normal to be overweight, it is a normal reaction to the omnipresence of abnormal, denatured, calorie dense, sugary and fatty foods. »
Healthy eating is bad for business. This isn’t some huge conspiracy — it’s not even anyone’s fault. This is the only way the system works.
We are bathed in easily accessible calories like never before and, paradoxically, the food industry reaps money on the one hand with processed products while the (growing) diet industry pockets on the other and the industry pharmaceutical industry was just waiting for its turn, as my colleague Jean-François Nadeau pointed out recently. It’s win-win-win all the way.
In addition, we like to think that we have control when most decisions would come from the unconscious part of the brain, recalls the Dr Greger. “And it is in this arena that marketing manipulations do most of their dirty work. »
The meager public health funds are no match for the marketing of junk food multinationals, the miracle pill industry and the promises of diets, disguised or not.
Instinct, where are you?
I can no longer count the kilos of books that I have read for this column and several of them address a fashionable concept, born in the 1990s: intuitive eating. Rachelle Longpré is a young nutritionist specializing in eating disorders and intuitive eating. She receives women and young people who collapse in tears in her office, struggling with a mental health disorder generated by a constant internal struggle, an obsessive love-hate relationship. The body positivity and shape diversity movement is only just beginning. Fatphobia creates internalized violence, she told me.
And the more we only think about that, the bigger we get. “It’s counterproductive,” says Rachelle. We are not winners shame the individuals. When we free ourselves from that, there are health problems that improve. In the long term, I even have clients who want something raw and fresh; they crave vegetables. »
Intuitive eating appeals to instinct and pleasure too, but the goal is not weight loss or deprivation. “We aim to reestablish the relationship with food,” adds the nutritionist, “to connect with hunger signals. Eating disorders start earlier and earlier. 45% of 9 year old girls want to lose weight. »
Human beings must fight against the body’s natural tendency, which for millions of years has sought to prevent weight loss.
She reminds us that food is intertwined with the social dimension. Listening to your intuition means getting away from the cerebral approach, disconnected from the body.
Rachelle also highlights an element that is little talked about: anti-diet culture is a feminist, anti-patriarchal approach, which focuses on the reappropriation of one’s image and power.
We are slaves to normative external conditionings which are as powerful and atavistic as our Judeo-Christian unconscious. Atone is part of our collective DNA.
Today, we’re going lean, and Sunday, intuitively, it will be chocolate…