Something Is Wrong With Me - The Quality Of Life

How many women in the world can call themselves beautiful? According to a 2006 study, there are only 2% of such women in the world. The worst situation is in Japan - 0% of Japanese women consider themselves beautiful. Best of all in Brazil - there are satisfied 6%. Globally, 86% of women are unhappy with the way they look.

DOSSIER

Svetlana Bronnikova is a PhD in Psychology, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in overeating, being overweight, obesity and eating disorders. Lives and works in the Netherlands. Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov. She taught clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the University of the Russian Academy of Education. In 2002 she coordinated a project of medical, social and psychological assistance for drug addicted migrants in Europe (Antwerp, Belgium). In 2011, she became the head of one of the branches of a large Dutch clinic for the treatment of obesity and eating disorders.

In the same study, women were asked whether they would agree to live less if they were guaranteed in return that they would lose weight to the desired weight. They were willing to give up three to five years of their lives for ideal weight.

ADVERTISING STROKE

Cynthia Bulik, an American eating disorders specialist, renowned researcher and author of wonderful popular books, once noticed that until the 1970s in America, the main idea of advertising any product was that the neighbor had something better than you. … The neighbor wears a more fashionable coat or the neighbor drives a cooler car. The sales technique was built on this competition. And then the American world was flooded with people with high purchasing power and advertising stopped working. Then a brilliant marketing strategy of all times and peoples was created, which is still used today. It's about the fact that something is wrong with your body. You're not good enough to meet certain standards. And it helps to sell any product: medicine, food, cosmetics and cars … The idea that something is wrong with your body,generates tremendous bodily anxiety and the need to achieve the ideal, to be accepted. As a result, we are dealing with ever-growing statistics on eating disorders and body image disorders - they are highly related to each other. Today a girl of 8-10 years old who is on a diet is not new, although some 10-15 years ago it was unthinkable.

DIETARY SECT

Dietary behavior is a disturbed eating behavior, a spasmodic anxiety reaction to the message "something is wrong with me." An obsessive need to improve and fix yourself. There is, in fact, a lot of religious fervor in it. Anthropologists describe the modern female dieting community as a religious community. There is the concept of sin (“you broke loose, ate something wrong”), there is repentance (you can admit: “I ate something wrong”), there is punishment (“you ate something wrong, but the next day have to work it out in the gym or starve "). This structure is accepted in any denomination. And just as religion unites people with a single set of values, diets unite women and allow them to speak the same language. If you have a group of women who don't know each other and need to quickly introduce them to each other, throw them a weight loss topic. They will immediately become best friends.

The body of a modern person ceases to be a receptacle for the soul, an instrument that allows you to functionally act in the world, reach your goals with your feet, and do something with your hands for these purposes. The body becomes an attribute of the personality. A presentation of what kind of person I am. And in Russian culture, the stereotype “they meet by dress” is especially widespread. Your clothes, your watch, shoes, branded bag tell about success, solvency, about how successful you are. But today we have moved from the situation "we meet by clothes" to a deeper layer: we judge a person by what body he has. At the same time, it is considered a great dignity to demonstrate that this is not the body that was given to me by birth, but that I work hard to get such a body. I'm working on it, then I'm great.

RITUALS OF IMMORTALITY

English psychoanalyst Susie Orbach (psychoanalyst Lady Diana, who treated her when she suffered from bulimia), one of the creators of the DOVE company, who shoots wonderful videos about the image of the body and about how women accept themselves as they are, said in one interview: We are being told that when I go to the gym five times a week and go on a diet, I take care of my body, and taking care of my body is natural and right. If I'm fat, unsportsmanlike, but I just hate to move, they say, I don't take care of myself. In fact, this message contains the idea of absolute control. As long as I eat healthy food and exercise five times a week, nothing bad will happen to me."

This is a kind of modern magic. The world is so unstable and threatening that the body becomes a temple. If I do all of the above, then I won't get sick and I won't die at all. Not only is it impossible to be fat and unsportsmanlike, it is also impossible to grow old! Susie Orbach recalls that a similar hysteria around the cult of a healthy athletic body and proper nutrition was in Germany in the pre-war period: a component of the concept of "a good German, a true Aryan."

PEOPLE ON SWING

When a well-known person in Russia publicly says that fat people are monuments to their own laziness and intemperance, and, being the editor-in-chief of a fashionable European magazine, can say out loud: “I hate fat people,” this indicates that there is a huge bias and we are more do not look at the body as a body.

And this is sad, because there is no reality in which we can all be thin, or white-skinned, or straight-nosed. There is a genetic precondition and genetic diversity, due to which people are short, tall and medium height. There are genetically thin, normally built and plump or broad-boned.

This concept is now being ridiculed, bringing us back to the idea of omnipotence: “You're just trying hard! But if you try …”But almost half of our notorious weight and addition is genetics, which is almost impossible to defeat, you can get into the so-called“yo-yo”situation - a diet swing. When I periodically lose weight, having raped myself to the utmost, and then the weight will return, and even with a profit.

According to statistics, no more than 5% of people who have resorted to a diet (by diet I mean any dietary restriction, rules imposed from the outside) are lucky ones who can lose weight once and no longer get better. Everyone else is getting better. And unfortunately, the popular notions of nutrition that travel from one glamorous magazine to the next do not match the research results. The dietary business is too powerful an industry to allow itself to be considered ineffective, even if research proves it. It costs about $ 70 billion a year in the USA alone. Think about this figure. We do not include the treatment of obesity, which is increasingly becoming surgical. And this is also colossal money. A very expensive operation.

SELL A DREAM

The diet industry is selling the dream of being thin. He sells even to those who cannot be organically thin, and places responsibility on the client. This is the most ingenious business ever created. If I buy a computer program, and it, such an infection, does not work, I go to the manufacturer and say: "Why did you program me here!" And he corrects. And if I buy a dietary meal plan, and after a while I break down and get better, the person who sold it to me says: “Well, why are you so! This is a malfunction in you, it is your fault, it is your responsibility. " A win-win situation for the dietary industry.

But thanks to the fact that research is accumulating, information is breaking through, we begin to understand what reality is behind this. For example, understand that every diet includes a breakdown and weight gain phase. And if you went on a diet and effectively lost weight, and then broke loose and effectively gained weight, then it is not you - a weak-willed pig, this was programmed in the approach itself.

LITTLE RAT'S JOY

Rats love to eat very much, they adore sweet and fatty foods. One of the rats' favorite foods in nutritional experiments is the acclaimed American Orio cookie. When a rat is fed these cookies, dopamine levels skyrocket. The rat gets high. But the effect lasts for several feedings. If you continue to feed the rat with cookies, it decreases markedly. What does this mean? About the fact that as soon as we allow ourselves to eat our favorite product, the level of pleasure returns to normal.

LEGAL DINNER

Two Canadian nutritional psychologists asked the participants to rate the taste of a milkshake and ice cream while they secretly took into account how much people ate. In these experiments, there were two groups: losing weight and people who have never been on a diet. So, the second, the more cocktails they drank, the less ice cream they ate, because they no longer fit. And the first dieters, the more cocktails they drank, the more ice cream they ate. This effect has been described under the name “the last supper effect”: “If I broke my diet anyway and drank two cocktails, then go for a flaw - I’m eating ice cream too! And tomorrow with renewed vigor …"

But it turns out that this is not the only change that dietary restrictions are bringing us. Changes take place at the level of the brain. If I limit myself to certain foods, no matter what, my brain reaction to these foods changes. The dopamine system - the brain's reward system - is adopted to react to them differently. The product just showed up in the window or was carried past to the cafe, where I chew my cabbage leaf, and my brain immediately tells me that this product is much more attractive than it actually is or seemed to me when I could.

We are doing it all wrong when it comes to promoting healthy eating. It should be strictly forbidden to eat broccoli! It should be reported that raw carrots are a terribly harmful product. Then people will think that broccoli and carrots are ambrosia.

THICK AND THIN

The researchers analyzed diet and physical activity in a large sample of 36,400 Americans from 1971 to 2008 and 14,419 from 1988 to 2006. Then they compared people of the same age in different years in terms of food intake, level of physical activity and body mass index. It turned out that a character from, say, 2006, eating the same amount of food in terms of calorie content and composition (macronutrients, proteins, vitamins), exercising the same amount of time, was still inferior to a person of his age from 1988 in terms of body mass index (by 2, 3 more). In other words, today we are all 10% heavier than the generation of the eighties, despite the same diets and training plans.

What is the reason for this? Jennifer Cook, professor of kinesiology and medicine at York University in Toronto, and head of the research team, names three reasons for this. It has become more difficult for adults to remain thin, firstly, due to exposure to chemicals. Pesticides, fire retardants, and even substances in food packaging can affect hormonal processes. Secondly, due to the greater availability of drugs, including antidepressants, which make many people look fat. The third reason for the total weight gain is a change in the intestinal microflora. It is already known that some types of gut bacteria lead to weight gain and even obesity.

When I teach people intuitive eating, we go through the "legalization" phase. We name the products that seem the most forbidden to you, and ask you to buy a large supply so that they do not suddenly run out. And for some time there are as many as you want. When a person starts this experiment, he is afraid. And after a while they discover that it is not so tasty.

NATURAL WEIGHT

The optimal weight, or set point (from the English weight set point), is not a single figure (60 kg, 85 kg, etc.), but a certain range (say, 60-65 kg). In a healthy adult, weight can fluctuate within these limits - for example, due to high water intake, in women - at different stages of the cycle, etc. This weight is called optimal because the maximum level of health can only be maintained with this weight range. That is why the body "resists" attempts to change this weight.

RACE WITHOUT PRIZE

There is no prize in the race for the perfect body. The race is endless, and the price people pay is colossal.

The good news is that there is a physiological weight set point. This is a genetically programmed range within which we find ourselves most of our lives if we are not on a diet. The set point rises slightly at the birth of children. It is normal to add two kilograms with each child. But any restriction or weight loss below the physiological norm immediately shifts the set point higher.

You need to look back and understand if there is such a body composition in which you are comfortable, in which you are not sick, you can pick up leaves in the country, play with children, do something ordinary joyfully. And how much effort it takes to be in this weight. If all the effort goes into maintaining a certain body shape, this is a disorder, something is wrong with that.

All that remains is to come to terms with the fact that your body does not meet the set beauty standards. But in nature there are practically no bodies that correspond to them. This is good news.

EXPERT OPINION

IDEAL AS DIAGNOSIS

The perfect body race is a universal move for playing out psychological scenarios. And the prizes, in my opinion, are still there. For example, masochistic individuals, by imposing suffering on themselves, cope with anxiety. People inclined to idealization put up with themselves only by constantly improving themselves. Obsessive-compulsive individuals live in scenarios, calculations, algorithms. And how masterly they can be realized in the "recipes" of nutrition! The mechanism of critical assessment of personality is formed in childhood, when we are very dependent on adults, who are sometimes unable to provide an atmosphere of security and harmony. The child turns negative feelings towards the parent against himself. “If I hadn't been so bad, everything would have been different” - this attitude is fixed and manifests itself in endless variants. So if caring for food is your way of earning love, then the question is definitely not just for the nutritionist. There is a lot to change.

Inna Kostyuchenko,

psychologist