Fashion in clothing, of course. Fashion in music, of course. Fashion in vacation spots, why not?
Fashion is characterized by being something whose attention and effort is made during a short or medium-term time.
When it comes to clothing, what problem can it cause? Having to throw out half your closet? If it is a restaurant, change to another? Nothing serious. But when fashion dictates your way of eating? When is fashion your daily diet and what do you base your nutrition on? What if you do it in evolutionary times? Ah… that’s different, it brings other consequences that will leave more lasting marks and, by the way, much more complex than a simple pair of pants or so.
In recent years, diets have grown and diversified dramatically. We have witnessed, and continue to witness, the rise in the adoption of different diets and eating lifestyles. Some of them not only ridiculous, but also very dangerous.
It seems that we are all looking for the “perfect diet”, that “magical chimera” that brings us closer to that ideal body that culture expresses through the media and social networks as synonymous with fulfillment, happiness and a life in fullness.
However, there is concern that this obsession with following food fads is causing a profound deterioration in our relationship with food and, along with it, the restriction and exclusion of certain food groups necessary for a balanced diet. Most of these fad diets lack a solid scientific basis and can lead to severe nutritional deficiencies.
Diets, as is already known in scientific and academic fields, are nothing more than a deception. A fraud. No one who claims to be working seriously in this area can sustain and spread food restriction systems, even disguising them with whatever name they want: diet, light, healthy food, etc. It is something like the apology of iatrogenics. What is iatrogenesis? A medical or health action that, while seeking to do good (let’s assume they are not only after money), does harm.
All these forms of restriction contrast with a widely corroborated certainty that maintains that one of the best predictors of weight gain is restricting food (diet).
The word diet fell into disuse because we all know that it is useless. Outside of a system that has generated and continues to generate billions of dollars, it is necessary to “rebaptize it,” and it is precisely these new food gurus who have changed the name, but maintaining the same tricks: restriction, distinction between good and bad foods, calorie deficit, magic and lies, etc.
Asking ourselves about the results of a diet is a waste of time. It’s like that movie we saw a thousand times, we already know the ending, it’s just a matter of sitting down and waiting.
Diets are absolutely predictable: they fail. Science says it doesn’t work, people’s experience confirms it, and changing the name is an ingenious commercial deception, which is why these warnings need to be disseminated to stop the deception.
What are the reasons behind this puppet that, even knowing its high level of inefficiency, its complete failure, deterioration of physical and emotional health, decades pass, it reinvents itself and is still here? And the population continues to say: on Monday I start the diet.
So let’s throw out these new diets that are just the old revamped ones or new ways of doing the same thing: restrict.
New trends in food: Veganism and Vegetarianism
Veganism and vegetarianism have three aspects: the ideological, the health and the aesthetic. Pity for animals, the first; the advantages of a food without animal fat, the second; and, third, selective food restriction for the purpose of weight loss.
Working for almost 40 years with eating disorders, I have witnessed numerous cases of purely aesthetic choices. They were not pious behaviors but rather pathological ones with the aim of losing weight and confusing the family with false arguments, to pursue an obsessive goal: weight loss.
To illustrate this dubious adherence in many, allow me a small and simple thought experiment: if eating vegan would make you reach normal weights, but higher than what you have, would you follow it? If that way of sustaining your ideological struggle would cause you to increase from a body mass index of 21 to 24, would you do it? My experience tells me that there would be many whose ideology would be abdicated immediately.
There have been 40 years in Argentina working and training colleagues in the Latin American Hispanic world and my presumption is shared by many colleagues.
Parents of adolescents should be clearly aware of the risks and objectives of these dietary decisions, consult them with their doctor and try to advise against them based on the lack of nutrients that these forms of nutrition usually have at ages of growth, covering up, as if it were little, the beginning of a drama such as Eating Disorders (ED).
Lic. Fabián Melamed, Director of Family Clinic, Specialist in ED and Family and Couples Therapy.
@Psi.fabianmelamed
www.clinicadefamilia.org
[email protected]
by CEDOC
