Never as much as in recent years has looking after oneself become quite so important and never has there been such a widespread diffusion of health centres, wellness centres, beauty farms and fitness centres.
Everything that in one way or another can conjure up the idea of feeling good about oneself and one’s body is extremely fashionable.
Modern society has created legends and benchmarks that are totally incorrect. Suffice to think of the models of beauty offered by magazines - ethereal almost artificial bodies, sheathed in size 6 clothes with long, slender legs. And what can we say about the infinite number of showgirls on TV?
What’s worse is that this fashion even affects «mature» women. This desire for thinness means that almost every week magazines publish diets that promise to guarantee us a bikini body in just a few weeks or to give us a wasp waist in time for our holidays.

Those who have to lose just a kilo or two could benefit from these diets; when you have little weight to lose there’s little harm in eating only proteins or pineapple or salad for a week. However, the same results could be achieved by limiting the consumption of fat and salt in the daily diet and doing a little exercise.

It’s a completely different matter for those who have serious weight problems. To succeed in losing a lot of kilos, patients need to be totally committed and have great will power. Furthermore, it takes a long time to achieve lasting results.

Reading all the diets recommended by weekly magazines, the first thing I wondered was what leads people to blindly believe that losing excess weight is simple.
You just need to look around to see how many people are overweight or have serious problems with anorexia or bulimia - especially young people - or read reports published in more serious weekly magazines where figures clearly show that obesity is increasing at an alarming rate.
If these diets really worked, we would all be slim and have no problems. Dieticians would have nothing to do and psychologists would have shut up shop because nobody would need any support for eating disorders.

The diets lasting 10-15 days recommended by magazines do not allow for any lapses. The weight of dishes is strictly controlled, making the diet almost impossible to follow for those who work and forcing the most diligent to turn up at the office with a lunch box, not to mention the difficulty in having dinner with friends without asking them to cook you a grilled steak after they have spent hours preparing delicious dishes.
It has been shown that 80% of diets end the Monday after they began, with the only result being that the body’s metabolism has been subjected to seven day’s stress.
We all know people who live to eat and just as many who eat to live, others who eat nothing or eat compulsively. If we compare all these cases, the common denominator is food and what it represents inside and outside of us.
However, a diet is not an end in itself; it invests a series of inalienable factors that should not be forgotten such as taste, culture, habits and religion.

I don’t understand why we have to force people to go against their tastes by imposing sometimes absurd diets such as those based on exotic fruit, especially when we have plenty of oranges, pears, apples, mandarins, water melons and melons!

A similar thing could be said for the concept of «ideal weight». There are some appliances, called impedance meters, which we use at the centre in Melezzole to calculate the correct balance between thin body mass and fat body mass - in other words the ideal weight.  
However modern and sophisticated the appliance may be, this test cannot take into account the sensitivity and exigencies of the individual, who sometimes feels better with a couple of kilos extra or less compared to the weight considered ideal.
This is because ideal weight is what the individual really feels to be his or her weight, what makes them feel good about themselves and with others.
It is totally subjective, with the exception of excesses that are without doubt the litmus paper test for an incorrect diet and a fragile psychology (from this point of view, the French idiom «creuser sa tombe avec ses dents», in other words «digging one’s own grave with one’s teeth», is particularly fitting because the image of teeth directly links the problems the individual causes him or herself to the mouth).