The dietitian psychologist shares 4 tips for losing weight in a lasting way.

• Supatra Tovar is a psychologist and dietitian who followed fashionable diets.
• It now helps customers change their state of mind around food to help them lose weight in a healthy way.
• His advice includes the change in what you are exposed on social networks.

A psychologist, a recorded dietitian and a Pilates teacher who broke out a Yo-Yo diet shared with Business Insider his four tips to lose weight healthy and permanently.

Supatra Tovar, author of “Deprogram Diet Culture: rethink your relationship with food, cure your mind and live a life without diet”, struggling with fashionable diets in their thirties. But now, at 52, she feels better than ever in her body.

She said that changing her state of mind was the key to improving her diet.

1) Understand why diets do not work

“The first step to create a healthy state of mind around the diet is really to understand how the diet really works against our body,” she said.

“We are really not designed to cut our calories in two, so the body goes into” famine mode “. You can lose weight in the short term, but it’s misleading,” said Tovar. The restriction of extreme calories is generally not durable, so when we inevitably stop a diet, the body works to put the weight.

Tovar highlighted what is called the theory of the point of adjustment, which supposes that the body tries to maintain the weight of a person. It is believed that by slowing down metabolism and allowing more energy to be stored in fat, suggests research. But experts do not agree that this point of instructions can be reset to a high or lower level of body fat.

2) Set limits with people without support

“There is always someone in our lives who tells us to do a diet or that we do not look good, pinched our fat, telling us to exercise or ask” do you really want to eat this? “” Said Tovar.

Tovar has recommended that you limit the time you spend with them and surround yourself with more positive and united people. If it is not possible, try to create healthy limits around comments on food and appearance.

3) Give inward

Tovar asks its customers to “dive inward” to respond to their thoughts on food, first examining their childhood to understand where their ideas can come from.

“We take everything when we are children and moderate the behavior of adults. The messages we receive from our family – whether you have to clean your plate to “win” the dessert, or your parents engaged in many diets – everything plays a role, “said Tovar.

Then she tells customers to “syntonize” their hunger, to identify when they eat without thinking or emotionally, and when they are full. This helps people practice a “attentive” or “intuitive” diet, recognizing their desires and eating according to the needs of their bodies.

A large part of conscious consumption, tovar said, is not to moralize food by labeling them as “good” or “bad”.

“We just say that food is food and allow our bodies to eat what they want without judgment,” she said. People will tend to gravitate to healthier foods, she said.

However, experts say that intuitive food is not suitable for everyone, especially those who have trouble with food disorders. And Mark Schatzker, a nutrition writer, previously advised to include ultra-transformed food in an intuitive diet because artificial flavors can encourage the brain to want more.

4) Change what you are exposed to social networks

“You must depopulate your social media flow from all the content designed to make you feel terrible,” said Tovar.

Disordered food is often indirectly promoted on social networks, through trends such as videos and platforms “which I eat in one day” pushing weight loss advertisements, previously reported Rachel Hosie de Bi.

Tovar has recommended that you do not follow all the influencers, companies and magazines that promote the culture of the diet and replace them with “things that make you feel good”.

For her, it meant getting rid of the content focused on diet and replacing it with “puppies and kittens and Kevin Bacon singing in her goats on her farm.”