Weight as Messenger: Why Wanting to Lose Weight to "Feel Better" is Often a Dead End

Introduction: The Storm-Tossed Boat Metaphor

Picture this: you're in a boat crossing a violent storm. Waves crash over the sides, wind howls, the hull progressively cracks under the pressure of the elements. Water begins seeping through the breaches. Faced with this situation, you grab a bucket and start frantically bailing, convinced that emptying the water from the boat will solve all your problems.

But wait. Is that really the priority?

Of course, the water in the boat is a real problem. It weighs you down, it's rising progressively, it could eventually sink you. It's a tangible, visible, measurable danger. We understand why your first reflex would be to evacuate it as quickly as possible.

Yet, isn't the real question: how do I get out of this storm? How do I repair this broken hull? How do I find calm waters? Because as long as the storm rages, as long as the hull remains cracked, you could bail for hours – the water will keep coming in. You'll exhaust yourself, you might feel like you're making progress at times, but inexorably, the level will rise again.

This metaphor perfectly captures what I observe daily in my dietetics practice in Paris for over fifteen years. People come to see me with an apparently clear goal, often repeated by their family, their doctors, magazines, social media: lose weight to feel better. "If only I lost these 20, 30, 40 pounds, everything would be better," they tell me. "I'd regain confidence in myself." "I'd be healthier." "I could finally live my life."

Yet, in the vast majority of cases – and I weigh my words carefully because I've accompanied hundreds of people in this situation – their weight gain isn't the problem. It's the symptom. It's the water accumulating in the boat, not the storm itself. It's the visible manifestation of one or several invisible imbalances, often ignored, sometimes even denied.

Understanding this fundamental distinction can radically transform your relationship with your body, your food, and most importantly, your healing. It can save you years of painful wandering, cycles of unsuccessful diets, paralyzing guilt. It can open the door to another path, less publicized, less spectacular, but infinitely more effective long-term.

Weight as Language: When the Body Speaks

Your Body is Not Your Enemy

Our society is profoundly fatphobic and orthorexic. These two words aren't moral judgments, they're precise sociological diagnoses. Systemic fatphobia – this institutionalized discrimination against fat people – permeates every aspect of our lives. From medical offices where you're prescribed a diet before even being examined, to media bombarding our screens with retouched body images, to our daily conversations where "I gained 5 pounds" automatically calls for condolences.

Collective orthorexia has transformed every bite into a moral test. Eating is no longer a simple act of nutrition and pleasure – it's become a battlefield where "good" and "bad," "clean" and "dirty," virtuous and guilty clash. This obsession with "pure" eating creates permanent anxiety that paradoxically severely harms our health.

Together, these two phenomena have taught us to view "excess" weight as an enemy to fight, a personal failure, a character weakness. We've been taught that our body "betrays" us, that we must "control" it, "tame" it, "discipline" it. The military language isn't incidental: it reveals a fundamentally antagonistic relationship with our own organism.

This view is not only scientifically false, it's also profoundly dangerous for your physical and mental health. In reality, your body is a system of extraordinary intelligence, forged by millions of years of evolution, that's constantly doing its best to protect you and keep you alive in whatever environment you find yourself.

Your body isn't stupid. It's not lazy. It's not sabotaging you. On the contrary: every physiological mechanism, even those that seem problematic to you, responds to adaptive logic. When your body gains weight, it's not "betraying" you – it's speaking to you. It's saying: "Warning, something is wrong in my internal or external environment, and I need to adapt to survive."

The question therefore becomes: what is my body trying to tell me? Rather than: how can I silence it?

The Many Faces of Physical Suffering

Weight gain can be the visible manifestation of numerous invisible imbalances. Understanding that your weight is a symptom and not a cause is the first step toward true healing. It's also often the most difficult, given how much the opposite has been drummed into us.

Let me tell you a story that perfectly illustrates this point. Sarah (name changed) came to see me a few years ago. She had gained 40 pounds in three years. Forty pounds that obsessed her, that kept her awake at night, that colored each of her thoughts. She had tried five different diets. Each time the same pattern: rapid loss of 10-15 pounds, then plateau, then gradual regain with interest. With each failure, her guilt intensified.

During our first consultation, I didn't ask her what she was eating. I asked her how she was living. And there, the story began to unfold: a difficult divorce three years earlier (well, well), a new position with crushing responsibilities, catastrophic sleep of 4-5 hours per night, progressive social isolation because she "was ashamed of her body." Sarah wasn't suffering from a weight problem. She was suffering from an unresolved trauma, nascent professional burnout, chronic sleep debt, and anxiogenic social isolation. Her 40 pounds were her organism's logical response to this perfect storm.

Here are the main faces this suffering can take:

Emotional and Psychological Distress: The Body Under High Tension

Our autonomic nervous system wasn't designed for modern life. It was optimized for punctual, physical threats – the predator that emerges, the rival tribe that attacks – followed by long periods of relative calm. Today, we live in a state of low-intensity chronic stress: incessant notifications, accumulating deadlines, anxiogenic news, economic insecurity, contradictory injunctions about how we should live, eat, be.

Chronic stress isn't just "in your head." It's a very concrete physiological state. When you live in a state of permanent stress, your body secretes cortisol continuously. This hormone, absolutely essential in emergency situations, becomes toxic when chronically elevated. It profoundly modifies your metabolism in several ways:

First, it increases your appetite, particularly for energy-dense foods – sugars and fats. This isn't greediness, it's biology: your body anticipates needing energy to face the threat. Next, it promotes fat storage, particularly around the abdomen, creating what's called abdominal or visceral obesity. Finally, it disrupts your hunger and satiety signals, making it difficult to listen to your real needs.

I regularly observe in consultation that eating disorders often emerge in contexts of intense stress. This isn't coincidence. Chronic stress and eating dysfunctions share common neurobiological mechanisms.

Unresolved trauma creates another form of particularly misunderstood weight gain. Research in psychotraumatology, notably Bessel van der Kolk's groundbreaking work, shows that trauma – whether singular and massive or repeated and insidious – inscribes itself in the body. The body remembers, even when the conscious mind prefers to forget.

Weight gain can then become an unconscious protective armor. I've accompanied many people who, exploring their history, realized their weight gain began precisely after a traumatic event: sexual assault, domestic violence, sudden bereavement, serious accident. The body, in its defensive wisdom, created a physical barrier – a way to take up space, to become "less desirable" in potential aggressors' eyes, to create distance from a world perceived as dangerous.

Particularly among people who've experienced violence, this dynamic can be very strong. The body can unconsciously choose to "take up space" as a defense mechanism. Forcing weight loss without treating the underlying trauma is asking the body to give up its protection. It will resist, and it's right to resist.

Depression and anxiety profoundly alter your neurochemistry. These mood disorders aren't simple "blues" that can just be "overcome with willpower." They're illnesses that affect your hunger and satiety hormones (leptin, ghrelin, neuropeptide Y), your motivation to move (via dopamine and serotonin), and even your ability to correctly perceive your body's signals.

The negativity bias characteristic of depression amplifies every eating "failure" and minimizes every progress. You perfectly remember that moment when you "cracked" on a package of cookies, but you forget the twenty balanced meals of the week. This cognitive asymmetry reinforces the spiral of guilt and compensatory behaviors.

Hidden Physiological Distress: When the Body Malfunctions

Sometimes, the storm isn't emotional but physiological. Hormonal imbalances, chronic inflammation, metabolic disorders can create weight gain that stubbornly resists any diet attempt – because the problem isn't dietary.

Hormonal imbalances are frequent and underdiagnosed causes of weight gain. Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), for example, affects 10% of women of childbearing age but often remains undiagnosed for years. This condition creates insulin resistance, elevated androgen levels, and often intense food cravings, particularly toward carbohydrates. Women with PCOS often tell me: "Doctors tell me to lose weight to improve my PCOS, but it's precisely my PCOS that makes weight loss impossible!" They're right. It's a vicious circle that must be broken by first treating the hormonal cause.

Hypothyroidism significantly slows metabolism. Even with moderate eating, a person with an underactive thyroid will gain weight. Cushing's syndrome, characterized by elevated cortisol levels, creates very specific weight gain, often at the trunk level. Hormonal troubles linked to menopause – this massive transition affecting all women – profoundly modify body composition and metabolism.

Similarly, premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) can create intense cyclical food compulsions, often misunderstood and incorrectly labeled as "lack of willpower." It's actually a hormonal fluctuation that temporarily but drastically modifies appetite and food preferences.

Chronic inflammation is another major but largely overlooked factor. Conditions like endometriosis – affecting one in ten women but taking an average of seven years to diagnose –, autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto's disease or rheumatoid arthritis, lipedema (a pathological accumulation of painful fat, often confused with "simple" obesity), or chronic digestive troubles like irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel diseases create a systemic inflammatory state.

This inflammation profoundly disrupts metabolism in multiple ways: it induces insulin resistance, it modifies hunger and satiety signals, it promotes fat storage, it reduces energy expenditure. A person in chronic inflammation can eat exactly the same thing as a person without inflammation and gain weight where the other won't. It's not a question of willpower, it's a question of physiology.

Sleep disorders deserve particular attention as their impact is underestimated. Lack of sleep or poor sleep quality disrupts appetite-regulating hormones – leptin (which signals satiety) decreases, ghrelin (which stimulates hunger) increases. Concretely, after a night of poor sleep, you'll be hungrier, you'll be drawn to more caloric foods, and you'll feel satisfied less easily.

Sleep also plays a crucial role in blood sugar regulation. Chronic sleep deprivation increases insulin resistance, creating fertile ground for type 2 diabetes and weight gain. One study showed that four nights of sleep restriction (4.5 hours per night) were enough to induce insulin resistance comparable to that observed in type 2 diabetes.

Medications constitute an often ignored but major factor. Many medications have significant weight gain as a side effect: antidepressants (particularly tricyclics and certain SSRIs), antipsychotics (olanzapine, risperidone), mood stabilizers (lithium, valproate), corticosteroids prescribed for asthma or autoimmune diseases, certain contraceptives, beta-blockers for hypertension, certain diabetes medications (insulin, sulfonylureas).

This reality is rarely discussed honestly with patients. They're prescribed a medication for their mental or physical health, and six months later, when they've gained 20 pounds, they're told they need to "watch their diet." This is extraordinarily cruel. These people find themselves feeling guilty for something that largely escapes their control, and worse, they must choose between their mental health (by taking the medication) and their bodily well-being (by avoiding weight gain).

Social and Systemic Distress: The Weight of Precarity

The social dimension of weight gain is systematically minimized in our discourse on "obesity," which prefers to point fingers at individual choices rather than oppressive structures.

Precarity and food insecurity create specific metabolic conditions. When access to quality food is limited by financial constraints – and in France in 2025, millions of people are in this situation –, the body adapts. It becomes more efficient in storing available resources, anticipating periods of scarcity. This adaptation, called "thrifty phenotype" in research, is an evolutionary response to nutritional insecurity.

The correlation between economic precarity and elevated weight isn't coincidence or a question of "bad choices." It's a metabolic adaptation to insecurity. The least expensive foods are generally the most calorie-dense and least nutritious. When your food budget is $5 per day, you optimize for calories, not nutritional quality. Judging these choices from a position of economic privilege is outrageously violent.

Destructive work rhythms are another form of social violence. Irregular schedules, night shifts, lack of breaks for proper meals, excessive commute times, mental load that has you eating in front of your computer while continuing to work – all this profoundly disrupts circadian rhythms and metabolism.

Your metabolic hormones are regulated by biological clocks. When you eat at irregular times, when you sleep out of sync with your natural clock, when you're exposed to artificial light late in the evening, these clocks desynchronize. The consequences on metabolism are massive. Even athletes following intensive training without adapted nutritional support can develop similar metabolic dysfunctions, as I observe in my practice of sports dietetics.

Social isolation is a major stress factor deeply linked to our neurobiology. We are social animals. Our nervous system is wired for connection. Isolation triggers the same neural circuits as physical pain. This suffering directly affects our relationship with food and our metabolism.

Chronic loneliness increases cortisol levels, reduces sleep quality, promotes compensatory eating behaviors. Eating becomes one of the few accessible pleasures, one of the few moments of comfort in an emotionally arid existence. The impact on family and loved ones often creates vicious circles of mutual misunderstanding and shared suffering, where everyone feels powerless.

The Dead End of the Reversed Solution

Bailing Doesn't Repair the Hull

Let's return to our boat metaphor, because it illuminates a crucial point. As long as you're still in the storm, as long as the hull remains broken, bailing will only accomplish one thing: exhausting you. You could empty water for hours with the energy of desperation, convinced you're making progress with each bucket emptied. But it will keep coming in at the same rate, or faster if you exhaust yourself to the point where you can no longer maintain your other defenses.

Worse: the very act of frantically bailing prevents you from doing what could really save you. Your hands are occupied, your gaze riveted on the rising water, your mind entirely absorbed by this Sisyphean task. You can't look at the horizon to find refuge. You can't repair the hull. You can't even properly assess your situation, so much does the apparent urgency of the water blind you.

This is exactly what happens when you try to lose weight without addressing the underlying causes of its gain. The diet industry – which generates over $360 billion annually worldwide – has every economic interest in keeping you in this cycle of failure and guilt. Each failure sends you back toward a new diet, a new program, a new promise. It's an extraordinarily lucrative business model founded on a 95% failure rate.

The Vicious Cycle of Restrictive Diets

Let me describe precisely what happens in your body when you start a restrictive diet. Because understanding the physiology helps free you from guilt.

Phase 1: Restriction You drastically reduce your food intake, often influenced by myths like sugar addiction or other simplistic narratives. You go from, say, 2200 calories per day to 1200 calories. You eliminate entire food groups. You count, weigh, measure. You're motivated, determined. The first days are difficult but you hold strong.

Phase 2: Physiological Stress Your body, which has no idea you're doing a voluntary "diet," interprets this restriction as famine. For it, it's a survival situation. It activates extremely powerful ancestral mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to survive during periods of scarcity. Your hypothalamus, this brain region that regulates homeostasis, triggers a cascade of adaptive responses.

Phase 3: Metabolic Slowdown Your basal metabolism – the energy you expend at rest – decreases. Studies have shown this decrease goes well beyond what we'd expect simply from weight loss. This is what's called "metabolic adaptation." Your body becomes more efficient, burning fewer calories for the same functions. Your body temperature may drop slightly. You feel more tired, have less desire to move spontaneously (this is called NEAT – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis – which decreases).

Phase 4: Appetite Explosion Your hunger hormones go into overdrive. Ghrelin, the hormone that stimulates appetite, increases dramatically. Leptin, which signals satiety, decreases. Dr. Sumithran's research in New Zealand showed that these hormonal changes persist for at least a year after weight loss. Concretely, you're much hungrier than before, and you feel satisfied less easily.

Your brain also increases the reward associated with food. Neuroimaging studies show that in people in restriction, brain areas associated with reward activate much more intensely in response to food images, particularly energy-dense foods. Food becomes obsessive. You think about it constantly.

Phase 5: Crises and Compensations Inevitably – and I emphasize this word, inevitably – you end up "cracking." This isn't lack of willpower. It's biology. Your body, facing what it perceives as a vital threat, triggers irrepressible food urges. This can take the form of binge eating episodes where you rapidly eat large quantities of food, or bulimia with compensatory mechanisms like vomiting or excessive exercise.

Often, these crises aren't even experienced as pleasure. It's mechanical, dissociated, compulsive. You eat beyond all physical discomfort. You hear yourself say "stop" but you can't. It's not because you're weak. It's because ancient survival neural circuits have taken over from your prefrontal cortex.

Phase 6: Toxic Guilt After the crisis comes the tsunami of guilt and shame. You blame yourself terribly. You tell yourself you're pathetic, without willpower, that you don't deserve to succeed. The negativity bias makes you forget all the days you "held on" and only retain this "failure."

This shame reinforces the initial emotional stress – the one that may have contributed to the weight gain in the first place. You isolate yourself socially because you're "ashamed of not having willpower." Isolation increases stress, which increases cortisol, which promotes fat storage and food compulsions. The circle is complete.

Phase 7: Amplified Weight Regain Your body, which experienced this restriction as trauma, does what traumatized organisms do: it overcompensates. It becomes even more efficient in storage. It rebuilds its reserves with zeal. Studies show that 66% of people who diet regain not only the lost weight, but more.

This isn't your fault. It's that your body, now "burned," prepares for the next famine. It learned that resources can disappear brutally. It stores preventively. It's adaptive intelligence, not stupidity.

Phase 8: The New Attempt, More Desperate The cycle begins again, often with a higher starting weight and an even slower metabolism. Each attempt becomes more difficult. You tell yourself you just need to "be stricter this time," "have more willpower." You try an even more restrictive diet, even more radical. The cycle intensifies.

This phenomenon is called cognitive restriction or restrained eating in the scientific literature. It's been documented since the 1970s. Modern transdiagnostic approaches recognize that this restriction-compensation pattern is at the heart of most eating disorders, from anorexia to binge eating disorder to bulimia.

Self-Inflicted Violence: Using the Violence Scale

There's a tool I sometimes use in consultation to help people become aware of the progressive escalation of violence they exercise on themselves. It's an adaptation of the violence scale – this tool usually used to identify violence in couple relationships – applied to our relationship with ourselves and our food.

Imagine a color scale, from green to purple, representing the increasing intensity of violence you inflict on yourself:

Vigilance level (green): Occasional thoughts about your eating or appearance. "I maybe ate a bit too much today." It's banal, normal, not worrying in itself.

Attention level (yellow): Regular guilt after certain meals. You start avoiding certain social situations involving food. You weigh yourself daily, your mood depends on the number. It's an early warning signal.

Alert level (orange): Food obsessions occupying a significant part of your daily thoughts. Marked social avoidance. Rigid dietary rules interfering with your life. Eating disorder symptoms become visible. Professional intervention is recommended at this stage.

Danger level (red): Restriction/compulsion cycles affecting your physical and mental health. Compensation after eating (vomiting, excessive exercise, laxatives). Significant social isolation. Major psychological distress. Urgent professional help needed.

Emergency level (purple): Life-threatening risk. Severe malnutrition, medical complications, suicidal thoughts. Hospitalization often necessary.

By choosing to focus solely on weight loss without treating systemic causes, you progressively climb this scale. You amplify stress instead of reducing it. You neglect healing in favor of the symptom. You reinforce the shame that fuels problematic behaviors. You perpetuate a cycle that, by definition, cannot work as long as the causes remain active.

This is particularly visible among men suffering from eating disorders, an often invisible population whose suffering is minimized. Or among men developing bigorexia, this obsession with muscularity that's actually an eating and body disorder disguised under the guise of "health."

As I often share with my patients in consultation: "Trying to lose weight to feel better when you're in the storm is like wanting to repaint your house while it's burning." You can choose the most beautiful paint color, apply yourself with the greatest care – as long as flames consume the walls, your effort is not only vain but also dangerous because it prevents you from dealing with the real problem.

The Reversed Approach: Taking Care of Yourself to Find Balance

Get Out of the Storm First

The good news – and it's immense, I can't say it enough – is that there's another way. A less publicized path, less spectacular, less lucrative for the diet industry, but infinitely more respectful of your humanity and more effective long-term.

This path that respects your body, honors your history, and has real chances of leading you toward lasting balance. It's the path of compassionate nutritional rehabilitation, of reconciliation with self, of systemic healing.

This approach consists of completely reversing the usual process:

Instead of: "I will lose weight to feel better, and then all my problems will resolve"

Try: "I will take care of myself to feel better, treat the causes of my suffering, and my body will naturally find its optimal balance in this context of restored well-being"

This inversion may seem subtle, but it's revolutionary. It changes everything: your relationship with your body (from combative to collaborative), your approach to food (from control to listening), your success criteria (from the number on the scale to overall quality of life), and especially, your chances of long-term success (from nearly zero to excellent).

This approach isn't giving up on getting better. It's on the contrary the most intelligent and effective strategy, supported by decades of clinical research. This is what studies on eating disorder recovery demonstrate, even after years of illness. Moreover, can you heal after 10 years of an eating disorder? The answer is a resounding yes, when you treat the root causes and not just the visible symptoms.

The Pillars of Self-Care: A Healing Architecture

1. Identify and Treat the Storms: Systemic Diagnosis

Before anything else, it's essential to precisely identify the "storms" shaking your boat. This investigative work may require help from health professionals trained in non-diet approaches and eating disorders. Unfortunately, not all professionals are equally trained, and you may need to search to find those who practice truly compassionate medicine and psychology.

Identifying Emotional Storms

Consult a psychologist, psychiatrist, or specialized psychotherapist to treat trauma, depression, anxiety, or any other psychological disorder. These professionals can help you understand and heal the emotional wounds keeping your body in a permanent state of alert.

If you're neurodiverse – autistic (ASD), with ADHD, or high IQ (gifted) –, specialized support considering your specific neurological functioning is particularly important. Standard approaches can be inappropriate or even counterproductive. Neurodiversity interacts with eating disorders in complex ways requiring particular expertise.

Therapies can take different forms: cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), EMDR for trauma, systemic therapy, psychoanalysis – different approaches work for different people. What's important is finding a therapist with whom you feel safe and understood.

Identifying Physiological Storms

Get a complete medical check-up with professionals who don't reduce all your symptoms to your weight. Check:

• Your thyroid hormones (TSH, T3, T4, anti-TPO antibodies)

• Your blood sugar and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c)

• Your vitamin D status (very frequent deficiencies)

• Your adrenal function

• Your complete hormonal profile if you're a woman

Treat underlying conditions like:

• PCOS with an endocrinologist who understands this complex condition

• Endometriosis which often requires multidisciplinary care

• Lipedema, too often confused with "obesity" when it's a pathological painful accumulation of adipose tissue that doesn't respond to diets

• Diabetes, whether type 1, 2, or gestational

If you're pregnant or postpartum, specialized follow-up is absolutely crucial. Pregnancy and postpartum are periods of particular vulnerability for eating disorders, and your mental health is as important as your physical health for you and your baby.

Identifying Social Storms

If your work environment is toxic, if your relationships are abusive, if your living conditions are precarious, these factors must be addressed even if they seem "non-medical." Your social environment is an integral part of your health.

The impact on family and loved ones is considerable and must be taken into account. Sometimes family therapy can be extremely beneficial. Eating disorders don't exist in a vacuum – they develop and maintain themselves in a relational context.

2. Repair the Hull: Restore Your Biological Foundations

Once the storms are identified, you need to repair the damage according to an approach I call ethical dietetics – a practice that puts well-being and respect for the person at the center, not the number on the scale.

Sleep: Your Body's Shipyard

Sleep isn't a luxury, it's an absolute biological necessity. It's during sleep that your body repairs itself at the cellular level, that your hormones rebalance, that your brain consolidates its learning and processes the day's emotions.

Prioritize 7-9 hours of quality sleep. This may seem impossible at first, especially if you've gotten used to nibbling on your sleep to "have time for yourself." But it's an investment that pays exponentially. Good sleep improves your mood, your energy, your decision-making capacity, and regulates your hunger hormones.

Some concrete strategies:

• Go to bed and wake up at regular times, even on weekends

• Reduce screen exposure 1-2 hours before bedtime

• Create a conducive environment: cool, dark, quiet bedroom

• Avoid caffeine and alcohol in the evening

• Develop a relaxing bedtime routine

Joyful Movement: Reconciling Body and Pleasure

Not "exercising to burn calories" or "punishing yourself for eating." Not military bootcamp nor "no pain no gain." But moving in a way that genuinely feels good, that makes you feel alive, present in your body.

If you're a high-level or serious amateur athlete, consult a sports dietitian for adapted support that optimizes your performance without falling into restriction. Athletes are paradoxically at risk for eating disorders precisely because they're asked for extreme body control.

For most people, beneficial movement looks more like:

• Walking in nature listening to birds

• Dancing in your living room to your favorite music

• Swimming for the pleasure of water on your skin

• Biking to explore your neighborhood

• Gardening, DIYing, playing with your children or animals

Any movement that brings you pleasure, vitality, a feeling of connection to your body is beneficial. Movement that leaves you exhausted, in pain, or filled with guilt is not.

Compassionate Nourishment: From Enemy to Ally

Adopt a nutritional rehabilitation approach based on listening to your real needs rather than external control. This means:

• Regularity: Eating at regular intervals (generally 3-4 meals plus 1-2 snacks) to maintain stable blood sugar and avoid extreme hunger crises

• Variety: Including all food groups, without demonization

• Sufficiency: Eating enough to truly nourish your body, not the minimum you can "tolerate"

• Pleasure: Choosing foods that make you feel good physically AND emotionally

• Flexibility: Adapting to social situations, cravings, variable needs

If you have real food intolerances or allergies, don't let these necessary constraints transform into orthorexia – this pathological obsession with "pure" eating that ends up cutting you off from social life and pleasure.

If you're vegetarian or vegan, ensure nutritional support that respects your ethical values while guaranteeing your physiological needs are met. Plant-based eating can be perfectly healthy, but it requires particular attention to certain nutrients (B12, iron, zinc, omega-3, etc.).

Sometimes nutritional rehabilitation goes through playful approaches, like playing with food in a therapeutic setting. This may sound infantilizing put that way, but it's actually a powerful way to reconnect sensorially with food, to exit the mental and return to the body.

Social Connection: The Antidote to Isolation

Cultivate authentic and supportive relationships. Isolation is a major factor in metabolic dysregulation and psychological suffering. Humans are social animals – our nervous system regulates itself in connection with others.

Share meals with kind people. Laugh. Create bonds. The impact on family and loved ones can be transformative when communication improves and dysfunctional dynamics are addressed.

If your current relationships are toxic, it may be necessary to create distance and build a new support network. This can happen through support groups, group therapies, associations, compassionate online communities.

3. Develop Deep Immunity: Strengthen Your Resilience

As I develop in my book "Deep Immunity," it's not enough to get out of the current storm – you must also strengthen your boat to better resist life's inevitable future storms. This holistic approach is inspired by Claude Fischler's anthropological vision which recognizes the complexity of our cultural relationship with food.

Biological Immunity

• Diversify your diet to nourish your gut microbiota

• Respect your circadian rhythms (regular sleep and meal times)

• Manage inflammation through anti-inflammatory eating

• Support your natural detoxification systems

Psychological Immunity

• Develop your critical thinking regarding toxic messages about bodies and food saturating our screens

• Practice self-compassion rather than self-criticism

• Learn to identify and name your emotions

• Build emotion regulation strategies that don't go through food

Social Immunity

• Build a compassionate support network

• Set clear boundaries with people or content that harm you

• Consciously choose the influences you let into your life (social media, media, etc.)

• Engage in communities that share your values

Spiritual Immunity (in the broad sense, not necessarily religious)

• Clarify your deep values: what really matters to you in life?

• Create meaningful rituals that anchor you

• Find meaning in your journey, even in suffering

• Connect with something bigger than yourself (nature, art, social engagement, etc.)

Natural Regulation: Trusting Your Body's Wisdom

You Are Not a Machine to Control

One of the most pernicious lies of our hypermodern era is that our body would be a machine that we must control, tame, force, reprogram. That we would ourselves be our own engineer, with the responsibility to "manage" our body like we manage faulty software. This mechanistic metaphor permeates all our discourse on health: we talk about "calories in vs calories out" as if it were a simple accounting equation, about "metabolism" that we must "boost," about bodies "that don't work well" that we must "fix."

Nothing is more false, and nothing is more dangerous.

Your body isn't a machine. It's a living ecosystem of extraordinary sophistication, possessing natural regulation mechanisms developed and refined over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Your organism knows how to regulate your temperature, your blood pH, your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your water balance, your bone density, and yes, your weight, with a precision that the world's best engineers can only envy.

These mechanisms are incredibly effective and reliable... when we let them function. When we provide them with the conditions they need. When we stop sabotaging them through external control and distrust.

Natural Regulation Mechanisms: An Ancestral Intelligence

Weight Homeostasis: Your Body Knows Its Weight

Your body possesses what scientists call a "set point" or "settling point" – a natural weight zone around which it tends to stabilize when conditions are optimal. This concept is sometimes controversial, but data have been accumulating in its favor for decades.

This set point isn't the weight dictated by fashion magazines, Instagram influencers, or simplistic BMI charts displayed in medical offices. It's the weight that your unique genetics, your life history (including your in utero life), your body composition, your environment, and your overall health status determine for you.

This weight may be different from what you'd like to weigh. It may be in a higher range than what our fatphobic society considers "acceptable." But it's the weight where your body functions optimally, where your hormones are balanced, where your fertility is preserved, where your immune system is strong, where your mental health is stable.

When you try to force your body below this natural set point through chronic restriction, it defends itself fiercely. And it's normal: for it, it's a survival issue. It doesn't know you live in the food abundance of the 21st century. Its ancestral neural circuits are shouting at you that you're in danger.

On the other hand, when you provide optimal conditions – emotional security, sufficient and varied food, regular and pleasant movement, restorative sleep, stress management, rich social connections –, it naturally tends toward its balance. This balance may involve weight loss if you were above your set point because of stress, inflammation, or other pathological factors. Or it may involve stabilization at your current weight. Or even a slight gain if you were in chronic restriction.

The goal isn't an arbitrary number. It's functional balance.

Hormonal Regulation: When Everything Falls Back into Place

When you take care of yourself holistically rather than obsessively focusing on your weight, something remarkable happens: your hormones begin to naturally rebalance.

Cortisol (the stress hormone) progressively decreases. Your nervous system exits permanent "fight or flight" mode and regains the ability to relax. This takes time – sometimes several months – but it's biologically measurable.

Leptin and ghrelin (satiety and hunger hormones) regain their balance. You begin to feel your real hunger rather than panicked hunger crises. You can eat to satisfaction without tipping into compulsive excess. Food becomes simply food again rather than an obsession.

Insulin regulates better. Your insulin sensitivity improves, which reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes and promotes balanced energy use rather than excessive storage.

Sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone) rebalance. In women, menstrual cycles may regularize. Libido, often extinguished during periods of restriction and intense stress, may return. Fertility improves.

Thyroid hormones function optimally. Your basal metabolism normalizes. You have more energy, your skin improves, your hair is stronger, your body temperature is stable.

This restored hormonal regulation allows your metabolism to function normally – not artificially "boosted," but functioning according to its own wisdom. This naturally favors a return to your equilibrium weight, whatever it is.

Metabolic Flexibility: Regained Adaptability

When your body is no longer in "famine" mode (caused by chronic restrictive diets) nor in "maximum alert" mode (caused by permanent stress), it regains what physiologists call metabolic flexibility.

A flexible metabolism can:

• Efficiently use different energy sources (carbohydrates, fats, proteins) according to momentary needs

• Adapt its energy expenditure to varied situations (rest, activity, digestion)

• Build and use its reserves in a balanced manner according to natural cycles

• Maintain stable weight without conscious effort of permanent control

This flexibility is the sign of metabolic health. It's very different from the metabolic rigidity we observe in people who've done many yo-yo diets.

Time, Essential Ingredient of Healing

Let's be honest and direct: this approach won't give spectacular results in two weeks. It won't make you "lose 20 pounds before summer." It won't transform you into someone else for your family reunion next month.

And that's precisely its strength, its credibility, its superiority.

Lasting changes take time precisely because they involve a deep, systemic, multi-level transformation:

Healing of physiological systems: 3-12 months for your hormones to truly rebalance, for your microbiota to reconstitute, for your inflammation to decrease, for your metabolism to regain its flexibility.

Transformation of psychological patterns: 6-24 months to develop new ways of thinking, new emotional responses, new mental automatisms. The brain can change – that's neuroplasticity – but it requires repetition, patience, often therapeutic support.

Rebuilding body confidence: It's a continuous process that significantly improves in 12-18 months but remains lifelong work. Learning or relearning to trust your body after years or decades of war against it doesn't happen in a snap.

Adapting your social environment: Variable depending on your situation, but generally 6-12 months to modify relational dynamics, set new boundaries, create new support networks, sometimes change jobs or life situations.

This timeline may seem discouraging, especially when diets promise you quick results. Yet, think about it really: how many years – sometimes decades – have you spent trying to lose weight through restriction? How many cycles of diet-regain-guilt-new diet-failure-shame have you gone through?

If you total all that time, all that energy, all that suffering invested in approaches that never worked sustainably, isn't it worth trying something different, even if it takes 12-24 months?

This approach asks for your time, yes. But it's time invested in real healing, not in another cycle doomed to fail. It's time where you learn, where you rebuild yourself, where you discover who you are outside weight obsession. It's time that gives you back your life.

False Objections and Real Answers

After fifteen years of clinical practice, I've heard just about every possible objection to this approach. Some are legitimate and deserve nuanced answers. Others are internalizations of fatphobic discourse that must be deconstructed with compassion. Here are the most frequent.

"But my weight endangers my health!"

This is probably the objection I hear most often, and it's a legitimate concern that deserves a thorough and nuanced answer, not a simplistic slogan.

Yes, certain medical complications (type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, joint problems, certain cancers) are statistically correlated with elevated weight. These correlations are real and documented. I don't deny them.

But – and it's a capital "but" – correlation is not causation. This distinction isn't academic quibbling, it changes everything in the therapeutic approach.

The relationship is generally not causal but multifactorial. Elevated weight and health complications are very often both symptoms of one or several common causes: chronic inflammation, hormonal imbalances, chronic stress, forced sedentarity, poor quality food due to precarity, exposure to environmental pollutants, etc.

Treating only the weight without treating these underlying causes is not only doomed to fail, but can even worsen the situation. This is exactly what the data on weight cycling shows.

Restriction often worsens health markers. Studies show that repeated cycles of weight loss/regain (weight cycling or yo-yo dieting) are more dangerous for cardiovascular health than stable weight even if elevated. These cycles increase inflammation, disrupt metabolism, promote insulin resistance, and are associated with increased mortality.

Relapses in eating disorders are moreover often triggered by diet attempts prescribed by well-intentioned but poorly informed doctors. The remedy then becomes worse than the disease.

Metabolic health takes precedence over weight. You can be metabolically healthy at an elevated weight if you take care of yourself: regular and pleasant physical activity, varied and sufficient eating, stress management, quality sleep, rich social connections, no tobacco. This is what's called the "Metabolically Healthy Obese" phenotype in the literature.

Conversely, you can be metabolically unhealthy at a "normal" or low weight if you're sedentary, chronically stressed, poorly nourished, socially isolated. Weight is just one marker among others, and not the most reliable.

The compassionate approach actually improves health. Studies on "Health at Every Size" (HAES) approaches show significant and lasting improvements in health markers – blood sugar, blood pressure, blood lipids, physical condition, mental health – without necessarily weight loss, and with an adherence rate far superior to restrictive diets.

This is particularly the case for obesity support in a non-stigmatizing approach that focuses on health behaviors rather than the scale number.

If your doctor talks to you about health risks linked to your weight, ask them very precisely: "What behaviors can I adopt to improve my metabolic health, regardless of what the scale does?" The answer – physical activity, varied eating, stress management, quality sleep – will probably be very close to the approach I describe in this article.

"My doctor says I MUST lose weight"

Unfortunately, medical fatphobia is a massive, documented, and devastating reality. Many doctors – not all, fortunately, but far too many – were trained with outdated paradigms that consider weight solely as a problem of "willpower" or "calories in vs calories out."

This deficient initial training, combined with massive cultural biases against fat people, creates often abusive medicine. Understanding the origins and mechanisms of fatphobia helps protect yourself intellectually and emotionally from these harmful discourses.

Recent scientific data – ignored by many practitioners – nevertheless shows that:

• Weight is determined 40-70% by genetics. You didn't choose your set point weight any more than you chose your height or eye color.

• Environmental and social factors play a major role. Precarity, chronic stress, exposure to endocrine disruptors, lack of access to safe spaces to move, sleep quality, etc. – all these factors largely escape individual control.

• Metabolism adapts to restrictions by slowing down. This is basic physiology, not laziness.

• Mental health is as important as physical health. A diet that "succeeds" in making you lose weight but makes you anxious, depressed, obsessive, and socially isolated hasn't improved your health – it's deteriorated it.

You have the absolute right to seek a health professional who practices a compassionate, non-diet approach based on current scientific data rather than prejudices. These professionals exist. Dietitians specialized in eating disorders, trained in HAES approaches and ethical dietetics, can support you in a truly respectful way.

If a doctor treats you differently because of your weight – if they refuse to really examine you, if they attribute all your symptoms to your weight without investigation, if they prescribe a diet before even making a diagnosis – you have the right to change doctors. You deserve to be treated with respect and competence.

"I've already tried everything, it doesn't work for me"

If you've "tried everything" diet and restriction-wise and it's never worked sustainably – if you've done ten, fifteen, twenty different diets and you weigh more today than at the start of your first diet – that's precisely the clearest possible sign that this approach isn't suitable.

You didn't fail. The methods failed. With a 95% long-term failure rate, it's not individuals who are deficient, it's the paradigm that's deficient.

Even after 10 years of an eating disorder, recovery remains possible with the right approach. I've accompanied people who'd been suffering for 15, 20, 30 years. Recovery took time – sometimes 2-3 years of intensive work – but it came. Because we treated the causes, not just the visible symptom.

The compassionate "take care of yourself first" approach isn't just another method to check off on your list of attempts. It's a fundamental paradigm shift. You move from:

• Fighting your body → Listening and collaborating with your body

• Controlling your eating with external rules → Nourishing your needs according to internal signals

• Punishing your "deviations" → Understanding your behaviors with compassion

• Seeking perfection in weight → Accepting your imperfect humanity

This approach works precisely because it exits the paradigm that made you suffer for years. It's moreover particularly effective for men suffering from eating disorders, an often invisible population in ED discourse who rarely receive appropriate help.

Conclusion: The Invitation to Peace

Getting Out of the Storm is Possible

You're not condemned to spend the rest of your life frantically bailing while the storm continues to rage around you. You're not destined to eternally repeat the same painful cycles of restriction-compensation-guilt-new attempt.

You can make a different choice. Today. Now. You can choose to:

1. Identify your storms with honesty and compassion: What's really raging in your life? Is it work stress? Unresolved trauma? Chronic inflammation? Hormonal imbalances? Difficult living conditions? A toxic social environment?

2. Get out of these storms by actively seeking appropriate help, treating causes at their root, transforming what can be transformed in your environment, developing new internal resources.

3. Repair your hull with patience and determination: Restore your sleep, rebuild your relationship with food according to an ethical approach, rediscover the pleasure of movement, reinvest your social connections.

4. Trust – perhaps the most difficult part – in your body's capacity to naturally find its balance in optimal conditions. Accept letting go of obsessive control to allow natural regulation to operate.

This path isn't easy. It would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. It requires courage to go against all social messages. It requires patience in a culture of immediate gratification. It often requires qualified and compassionate professional support.

But unlike diets that promise rapid and spectacular transformations before leaving you worse off, heavier, more desperate than before, this approach leads you toward real healing. Healing that lasts. Healing that gives you back your life.

You Are Not Alone: A Community of Resistance

If what you've just read deeply resonates with you, if you recognize yourself in this description of the boat in the storm, if you're tired of fighting against your own body, know that you are not alone. Absolutely not.

Thousands of people undertake this journey toward a more peaceful, more respectful, more collaborative relationship with their body and food every day. You too can escape this fatphobic world and reclaim your power, your autonomy, your joy of living.

In consultation in Paris (office in the 6th, 20th arrondissements, and Le Raincy in Seine-Saint-Denis), I accompany people daily exactly in this process. I don't promise you a weight miracle. I don't promise you'll weigh X pounds in Y months. That would be lying to you, and I refuse to perpetuate these comfortable but destructive lies.

What I offer you is support to:

• Understand the real systemic causes of your difficulties, beyond the visible symptom

• Build a truly compassionate and collaborative relationship with your body

• Develop eating that truly nourishes you – physically, emotionally, socially – according to principles of respectful nutritional rehabilitation

• Restore your natural regulation mechanisms that years of diets may have damaged

• Reconnect with your body wisdom, this ancestral intelligence we all have but our culture teaches us to ignore

The path to healing doesn't go through war against your body. It doesn't go through obsessive control, permanent distrust, punishment of "deviations." It goes through peace, understanding, compassion, and progressive trust.

Whether you suffer from anorexia nervosa with all its implacable rigor, bulimia and its devastating cycle, binge eating disorder and its paralyzing shame, ARFID and its sensory particularities, or simply a complicated and painful relationship with your body in a structurally fatphobic world, know that another way exists.

This way doesn't erase past suffering. It doesn't make the journey easy. But it offers something infinitely precious: the possibility of real healing. Of a life where food becomes simply food again. Where your body becomes an ally, not an enemy. Where you can invest your remarkable energy and intelligence in projects that truly matter to you, rather than wasting them in an endless war against yourself.

Living and eating are two sides of the same coin. Lighten your relationship with food and free yourself from what doesn't serve you!

Official Sources and Specialized Associations

1. World Health Organization (WHO)

   • International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) - Eating Disorders

   • https://www.who.int/

2. Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH)

   • Health at Every Size® principles and evidence-based research

   • https://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/

3. National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA)

   • Clinical guidelines and treatment resources

   • https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/

4. Academy for Eating Disorders (AED)

   • International professional organization for eating disorders

   • https://www.aedweb.org/

Landmark Scientific Studies

5. Mann, T., Tomiyama, A. J., Westling, E., Lew, A. M., Samuels, B., & Chatman, J. (2007) "Medicare's search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer." American Psychologist, 62(3), 220-233. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.3.220

6. Bacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2011) "Weight science: Evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift." Nutrition Journal, 10(9). DOI: 10.1186/1475-2891-10-9

7. Tomiyama, A. J., Carr, D., Granberg, E. M., Major, B., Robinson, E., Sutin, A. R., & Brewis, A. (2018) "How and why weight stigma drives the obesity 'epidemic' and harms health." BMC Medicine, 16(1), 123. DOI: 10.1186/s12916-018-1116-5

8. Montani, J. P., Schutz, Y., & Dulloo, A. G. (2015) "Dieting and weight cycling as risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases: who is really at risk?" Obesity Reviews, 16(S2), 7-18. DOI: 10.1111/obr.12251

Trauma and Body Research

9. van der Kolk, B. A. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking Press. ISBN: 978-0670785933

10. Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., et al. (1998) "Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study." American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258. DOI: 10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8

Mindfulness and Non-Diet Approaches

11. Daubenmier, J., Moran, P. J., Kristeller, J., Acree, M., Bacchetti, P., Kemeny, M. E., ... & Epel, E. (2016) "Effects of a mindfulness-based weight loss intervention in adults with obesity: A randomized clinical trial." Obesity, 24(4), 794-804. DOI: 10.1002/oby.21396

12. Schvey, N. A., Puhl, R. M., & Brownell, K. D. (2014) "The impact of weight stigma on caloric consumption." Obesity, 22(9), 1959-1961. DOI: 10.1002/oby.20826

Physiological Regulation Studies

13. McEwen, B. S., & Karatsoreos, I. N. (2015) "Sleep Deprivation and Circadian Disruption: Stress, Allostasis, and Allostatic Load." Sleep Medicine Clinics, 10(1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1016/j.jsmc.2014.11.007

14. Sinha, R., & Jastreboff, A. M. (2013) "Stress as a common risk factor for obesity and addiction." Biological Psychiatry, 73(9), 827-835. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.01.032

15. Sumithran, P., Prendergast, L. A., Delbridge, E., Purcell, K., Shulkes, A., Kriketos, A., & Proietto, J. (2011) "Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss." New England Journal of Medicine, 365(17), 1597-1604. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1105816

Weight-Inclusive Approaches

16. Tylka, T. L., Annunziato, R. A., Burgard, D., Daníelsdóttir, S., Shuman, E., Davis, C., & Calogero, R. M. (2014) "The weight-inclusive versus weight-normative approach to health: Evaluating the evidence for prioritizing well-being over weight loss." Journal of Obesity, 2014, 983495. DOI: 10.1155/2014/983495

17. Tribole, E., & Resch, E. (2020) Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. 4th Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN: 978-1250255198

18. Puhl, R. M., & Heuer, C. A. (2010) "Obesity stigma: Important considerations for public health." American Journal of Public Health, 100(6), 1019-1028. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2009.159491

19. Schwartz, M. W., Seeley, R. J., Zeltser, L. M., et al. (2017) "Obesity Pathogenesis: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement." Endocrine Reviews, 38(4), 267-296. DOI: 10.1210/er.2017-00111

20. Müller, M. J., Enderle, J., & Bosy-Westphal, A. (2016) "Changes in Energy Expenditure with Weight Gain and Weight Loss in Humans." Current Obesity Reports, 5(4), 413-423. DOI: 10.1007/s13679-016-0237-4