On Instagram, Dr. Jean-Michel Cohen summarizes the state of mind that can help you maintain a weight loss process: moving forward with patience, indulgence and perseverance. The idea is useful, provided you don’t turn it into a magic formula.
Patience: accept gradual weight loss
The central message of the nutritionist doctor is simple: a diet should not just be a parenthesis of a few weeks, but a gradual change in the dietary pattern. He thus insists on three conditions: not feeling hungry, continuing to enjoy eating, and accepting that weight loss may be slow.
This approach agrees with the French recommendations on an essential point: to lose weight sustainably, it is better to focus on lifestyle habits that can be modified over time rather than a brutal restriction. The High Authority for Health reminds that the objectives must remain realistic and adapted to each situation, particularly in the case of overweight or obesity.
In other words, losing slowly is not necessarily failing. On the contrary, it can make the approach more compatible with daily life: family meals, outings, personal tastes, work constraints, fatigue. Conversely, very restrictive diets are more likely to cause frustration, nutritional imbalances and sometimes weight gain.
The phrase “I must not be hungry”, however, deserves to be qualified. The goal is not to eliminate all feelings of hunger, which is a normal signal from the body. It is rather
to avoid methods that starve or greatly frustrateand learn to better recognize hunger, satiation and satiety. Health Insurance recommends taking into account food preferences and bodily sensations to modify eating behaviors.
Forbearance and perseverance: don’t stop everything at the first deviation
The formula highlighted in the video is in three words:
“patience, forbearance, perseverance”.
These words can serve as psychological benchmarks so as not to transform each deviation into a failure. This is important, because many weight loss efforts become fragile when an outing, a dessert or a less organized week is experienced as a total break.
Indulgence does not mean “forgetting everything” or abandoning your goal. Rather, it consists of pick up the thread without feeling guilty. This idea is similar to approaches focused on eating behavior, where we seek to build a more flexible relationship with food, to rediscover the pleasure of eating without feeling guilty and to avoid all-or-nothing.
Concretely, these three words can be translated as follows:
- Patience : do not judge your efforts solely by the rapid variation in weight.
- Indulgence : accept that a one-off deviation is part of a normal eating life.
- Perseverance : return to your basic habits after a less regular period.
This flexibility can also help you allow yourself to make deviations without abandoning your goal, especially when your diet remains generally balanced and compatible with your tastes. This point is important: an approach that is too rigid can give the illusion of being more effective initially, but become difficult to maintain.
However, weight loss does not only depend on motivation. It can be influenced by age, state of health, sleep, physical activity, emotions, certain treatments or even weight history. In the event of obesity, eating disorders, chronic illness or weight-related suffering, medical, dietary or psychological support may be necessary. The challenge is not to “succeed perfectly”, but to build an approach that is sufficiently realistic to be able to last.