The roundnesses are like the knots of a tree, they conceal our intimate world, its hidden fragilities, its repressed fears, its badly healed wounds. To lose weight is to rub it.

It is not surprising, then, that our valiant slimming project results in a refusal of obstacles.

Sigmund Freud said: " We are the toy of our unconscious ."

Obstacle n ° 1: the family circle

Lose weight, when all the family silhouettes are wrapped, is to stand out, worse, to value a body resolutely in opposition to the transmitted genetics. This can be felt as a symbolic rejection or a disavowal of its origins with the risk of hurting one's loved ones.

A responsibility difficult to endorse, but necessary for the psychiatrist Gérard Apfeldorfer, author of Lose Weight, it is in the head (Ed Odile Jacob) and co-founder of the linecoaching.com online therapy program:

To thin is also to break with those who love us as we are and who we say, by losing weight, that they are wrong to love us so, since we ourselves do not love each other

When guilt borders on emotional torture, the unconscious slices: the kilos remain immutably hooked and we, in agreement with the lineage.

Some grew up with a mother who valued bodily intransigence. Many ex-teens under influence continue to inflict restrictive diets in an attempt to compete with the image of their idealized mother.

An unconscious way also to perpetuate the maternal requirement. Except that failure is in ambush: it is impossible to lose weight permanently for others.

Compulsive letting go with restrictions, sacrificing self-esteem , while the brain locks lipolysis (fat storage) to protect the body.

But against all odds, not losing weight can sign an act of rebellion . For the psychiatrist and nutritionist Bernard Waysfeld, author of The Weight and the Self (Ed Armand Colin),

It is an unconscious way of staying in opposition to the internalized maternal image

Food has a strong emotional dimension in many families. To love oneself and, even more, to testify to it, is to commune with good food.

Result: even satiated, we do not balk on the size of the portions, any more than we sulk the dishes presented. Foods are a symbolic mark of love. To banish or to refuse is to repel it.

Thus one always finishes one's dish in defiance of one's satiety , in order to show one's attachment to the loved one who has put oneself in the kitchen, not to tarnish the common happiness nor to betray the education received.

A message so anchored that, even far from his own, leaving the surplus of a dish is the culpable fault. To lose weight is then to fight between a conflict of loyalty to those we love and the guilt of wanting to free oneself from tradition.

Obstacle # 2: the need for comfort

Stress , disappointment, boredom ... We make a raid in the fridge to neutralize the emotional overflow that overwhelms us. And, a time, it works. Eating activates the secretion of endorphins with anxiolytic properties . Except that we engulfed in XXL mode and therefore we store.

Above all, "the problems that have troubled us have not disappeared, and while we lament over its weight that never ceases to climb, we forget why we started to eat and we do not confronts "The more we are afraid of suffering, the more we become dependent on what prevents us from suffering," decodes the nutritionist and psychotherapist Jean-Philippe Zermati, author of Dietless Diabetes (Ed Odile Jacob) and co-founder of the program linecoaching.com.

By avoiding our emotions, we increase our food addiction and reinforce our emotional intolerance

We have a tyrannical boss, an invading mother, a lover a bit selfish ... And yet, we do not muffle, we endure in silence the bullying and other disappointments, and we "eat" our anger . But our body is daring for two, because what we do not say ends up externalizing ourselves on our curves.

At the mercy of the renunciations of all that we could not say, our silhouette ends up getting heavier.

"Lose weight is an act of self-affirmation, it is necessary to put into words what one thinks or feels, in a civilized way, instead of eating to stifle one's painful emotions," says Dr. Apfeldorfer.

"By daring to say, we take the risk of being finally heard", summarizes the psychologist Michèle Freud, author of Mincir and reconcile with oneself (Ed Albin Michel). In short, we must open the valves of our affects to successfully open those of weight loss.

Obstacle n ° 3: the relation to the body

Overweight is a protective shield that keeps others away from you , especially the male gaze and desire, but also its fantasies and desires, often unconscious.

By giving the illusion of gagging the sex appeal and retract the part of desirable in itself, the pounds reassure. Better, they temporarily evacuate fears related to sexuality.

To lose weight is to reinvest one's capacity for seduction, to accept seduction and seduction, to desire and to be desirable, to combine Eros with the present and to enjoy it. Physical and psychological exposure too dizzying for some. A theory translated by Dr. Waysfeld:

Mechanisms of defense oblige, stuck between the desire to lose weight and suffering to face their fears, some unconsciously choose to protect themselves by keeping their weight

It's paradoxical, but to lose weight is to become another and to switch to an unknown land , where one has to substitute the identity built on one's ex-body with one's new identity as thin, as much as a mutation of oneself. And the more the desire to refine is ardent, the more anxiety to lose pincers.

It is legitimate when it is necessary to tame a new perception of oneself: one does not move any more in the same way, one remakes his dressing, the look of others is also different.

Not (yet) ready to face this change, unconsciously, we may want to stay a little longer in familiar territory, that of the kilos.

Obstacle # 4: Severity with oneself

A life that is not (yet) up to its aspirations? Logic, refute some, to have a perfect body to slip into a perfect life. Losing weight becomes a personal added value.

Mastering one's thinness , a narcissistic power takeover that testifies to the ability to hold the reins of one's life and thus to succeed at all levels: a couple, a career, a social life ...

The end justifying the means, it is thus that one eats under surveillance, in dictator of his plate. But, inexorably, hyper-control sooner or later leads to a loss of control: irrepressible compulsions, copious weight regain .

Psychologically, in the midst of a distortion between the fantasy projection of his life and reality, an ingenious fight is fought.