Azahara Nieto (Madrid, 43 years old) titled a book in an explosive and suggestive way: Guilt makes you fat (Ediciones B), and promotes it with a revolutionary message for these times: “Learn to eat without guilt, diets and fears through a radical approach to healing a society obsessed with thinness. What if the problem isn’t you, but what they made you believe about your body?” Receive a rainy October morning in the center of Madrid, in front of a water.
Ask. There’s no need to weigh yourself
Answer. Certainly not every day. Because you change your relationship with food. If you weigh less you get more licenses; If you weigh more, you punish yourself by limiting yourself. You cannot have a good relationship with food, nor stable habits, if everything depends on what the scale says. In the case of men, weight is less variable, but in the case of women it is much more variable.
Q. You, a nutritionist, do not have a scale in your office.
R. I removed it from the consultation. I used to hide it, because there are people who just weigh themselves have a huge impact on them. Not weighing yourself allows you to really change habits. You can’t decide your weight. You can change your eating, sleeping and exercise habits. But you don’t decide the weight. This is why body diversity also exists.
Q. He gives examples in his book, such as pasta carbonara, Eat it as a reward.
R. If we use food as a reward or punishment we are condemning the relationship with it as a toxic relationship. You can’t afford certain foods only if you’ve had a good or bad day. Incorporate them naturally into your life and enjoy them because you feel like it. Eat without fear and without guilt.
Q. It is a revolutionary thesis and very grateful, because it is listened to with pleasure. But is it compatible with maintaining a healthy body?
R. Yes (laughs). What is not proposed is a tailor-made diet. To my patients, even if I tell them I don’t work with weight loss, I know it’s there. But if you work with habits, you end up having good analysis. What I don’t tell you is that they stay thin, as they would like. They may lose weight. But it’s about aiming for health, not thinness. Thinness is what brought us here: to all the problems that exist with eating disorders and also the campaigns that exist around obesity, which are very stigmatizing.
Q. Has social media, the display of extraordinary bodies, worsened the way we eat?
R. Self-esteem has worsened. I don’t know if it’s the way you eat, but self-esteem. We continually receive information to compare not so much with what they eat but with the exercise they do, how many times they train, the number of repetitions they do. In the end you end up comparing yourself to many people whose lives you see even a little, without knowing what their daily life is like. You used to be able to compare yourself to a colleague, but now you can compare yourself to millions of people in totally different situations.
Q. In the book he talks about the importance of cooking with love.
R. And the importance of being cared for, of letting yourself be cared for and taking care of yourself. When we talk about someone taking care of themselves, what we automatically understand is that they are dieting, not sleeping better or exercising, for example. It’s the same with food: it’s good or bad to the extent that it brings you closer to thinness. Look: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how much weight you lose, as long as you’re thin everything seems to be fine.
Q. Tell me about intermittent fasting.
R. One more tool. The weight loss that occurs with intermittent fasting occurs the same way as with a well-planned diet. Intermittent fasting is a very severe time restriction: you go many hours without eating. If you have a bad relationship with food, that fast generates a lot of anxiety as you count the hours until the end. And it can end in a binge.
Q. He often mentions our terrible relationship with food. When does it start to go bad?
R. In women, since childhood. We get reports of body parts that aren’t so nice, or if you’re a chubbier girl and I don’t know what. Ever since you were a child, constant adjustments have been made to your body and food. Don’t eat too much of it, you’ll gain weight, lose your ass, look at your mother.
Q. There is still work.
R. As a society, obviously. You start by stopping talking about people’s bodies. Stop talking about diets, what you eat and what you gain or stop gaining weight. I call it the evil gossip. When you sit down to eat the same thing: “Wow, how are we going to move forward? But I’m going on a diet tomorrow.” We are not interested. We need to stop talking about all this. Children must be taught not only to eat well, but also to avoid saying that certain foods are dirty, or that they are disgusting, or punishing or rewarding them with food. Teach them that body diversity exists, don’t tell them: “Look at that fat kid”. This is a feature and that’s it, nothing more. We must change as a society: individually it is impossible.
