Supatra Tovar, Getty
- Supatra Tovar is a psychologist and dietitian who used to follow fad diets.
- She now helps clients change their mindset around food to help them lose weight in a healthy way.
- Her tips include changing what you’re exposed to on social media.
A psychologist, registered dietitian, and pilates teacher who broke out of a cycle of yo-yo dieting shared with Business Insider her four tips for losing weight healthily and sustainably.
Supatra Tovar, author of “Deprogram Diet Culture: Rethink Your Relationship With Food, Heal Your Mind, and Live a Diet-Free Life,” struggled with fad diets in her 30s. But now, at 52, she feels better than ever about her body.
She said changing her mindset was key to improving her diet.
1) Understand why diets don’t work
“The first step to building a healthy mindset around dieting is really understanding how dieting actually works against our bodies,” she said.
“We’re really not designed to cut our calories in half, so the body goes into ‘starvation mode.’ You may lose weight in the short term, but it’s deceptive,” Tovar said. Extreme calorie restriction is typically unsustainable, so when we inevitably stop dieting, the body works to put the weight back on.
Tovar pointed to what is known as the set point theory, which supposes that the body tries to maintain a person’s weight. It is thought to do this by slowing down the metabolism and allowing more energy to be stored as fat, research suggests. But experts don’t agree on whether this set point can be reset to a high or lower level of body fat.
Supatra Tovar
2) Set boundaries with unsupportive people
“There’s always somebody in our lives who is telling us to diet or that we don’t look good, pinching our fat, telling us to go exercise, or asking ‘Do you really want to eat that?'” Tovar said.
Tovar recommended limiting the time you spend with them and surrounding yourself with people who are more positive and supportive. If that’s not possible, try to create healthy boundaries around comments on food and appearance.
3) Delve inward
Tovar asks her clients to “delve inwards” to address their thoughts about food, first examining their childhoods to understand where their ideas may have come from.
“We pick up everything when we’re kids, and model the behavior of adults. The messages that we get from our family — whether you had to clean your plate to ‘earn’ dessert, or your parents engaged in a lot of dieting — it all plays a part,” Tovar said.
Next, she tells clients to “tune into” their hunger, to identify when they are eating mindlessly or emotionally, and when they’re full. This helps people to practice “mindful” or “intuitive” eating, by acknowledging their cravings and eating according to their body’s needs.
A big part of mindful eating, Tovar said, is not moralizing food by labeling them as “good” or “bad.”
“We’re just saying food is food, and allowing our bodies to eat what they want without judgment,” she said. People will tend to gravitate towards healthier foods, she said.
However, experts say intuitive eating isn’t suitable for everyone, particularly those who struggle with eating disorders. And Mark Schatzker, a nutrition writer, previously advised against including ultra-processed foods in an intuitive diet because the artificial flavors can trick the brain into wanting more.
Supatra Tovar
4) Change what you’re exposed to on social media
“You have to depopulate your social media feed from all of the content that is designed to make you feel terrible about yourself,” Tovar said.
Disordered eating is often indirectly promoted on social media, through trends such as “what I eat in a day” videos and platforms pushing weight-loss ads, BI’s Rachel Hosie previously reported.
Tovar recommended unfollowing any influencers, companies, and magazines that promote diet culture, and replacing them with “stuff that makes you feel good.”
For her, this meant getting rid of diet-focused content and replacing it with “puppies and kittens and Kevin Bacon singing to his goats on his farm.”
