“Diet is a hijab for a European woman”

Issues related to body and food cause modern women a strong concern. The clinical psychologist tells how the bans are dangerous, why we overeat and how food has become a problem for women.

Many women know about disorders of food behavior in vain. Someone cannot fall asleep without a night snack, someone is familiar with the attacks of compulsive overeating-when you approach the refrigerator for an apple, and then you find yourself in an embrace with a plate of dumplings. What is the reason for such violations in healthy, in principle, people?

Julia Lapina: One of the first reasons for such overeating is dietary

behavior. 60-70% of people who come to some dietary programs and trainings suffer from compulsive overeating. The fact is that any prohibitions and restrictions in food signal our body about the danger.

Neocortex-a part of the brain that is responsible for the mind and rational thinking-can easily be disconnected if the body believes that something threatens his life. It doesn’t know that you want to get into a new dress or follow some idea. The body says: “You do not know how to use the neocortex – I will turn it off, and you go, eat”. And this signal is felt as a loss of control.

There will be no barrels of overeating if there are no stages of starvation. This was clearly demonstrated by the famous Minnesotsky “hungry” experiment of 1944, which was conducted by Dr. Ansel Kis in the city of Minneapolis (Minnesota). It was attended by 36 young volunteer men with normal weight, who were put on a diet of 1,500 kcal.

Very soon, these healthy men became apathetic and irritable, they only talked about food. Some began to read culinary books, some shared dreams of how they would open their restaurant. After the end of the experiment, when the food became available to them without restrictions, the participants began to eat without stopping – they consumed from 5,000 to 10,000 calories per day!