Health Passport – Doctor Cohen, your new diet consists of consuming 2 meals and one snack per day instead of the 3 meals usually recommended. Suppressing a meal would reduce daily calorie intake. At the same time, you do not advocate any prohibitions, from snacking to foods from fast food restaurants.

You have devised other methods before this one. Are these changes the result of adjustments based on your clinical experience?

No, they resulted mainly from the evolution of food in France and eating habits which have changed. There have also been recent studies that have shown that no meal is preferred over others. To come back to this elimination of one meal per day, it should be noted that the evolution of the number of meals during the day has changed considerably according to the periods and according to the origins of people. There are countries where we eat once a day, others where we eat 4 times a day, or even 10 times as is the case in Vietnam. It is simply a question of adapting to the eating habits of current French people, and of including the possibility of going on a diet with little “extras” such as the possibility of enhancing snacks or meals.

The biological rhythm, contrary to popular belief, and with regard to nutrition, is not daily. For proteins, for example, the rhythm is three-weekly, that is to say based on 21 days. For carbohydrates, it is 24 to 48 hours and for lipids, it is of the order of 1 month. This means that daily rhythms do not intervene in nutrition, at least not significantly, because the body has extremely important reserves that it uses according to its needs.

PasseportSanté – In your book you speak of a “no man’s land era where nothing is believed, nothing is followed, nothing is audible” in terms of diet. Don’t you think that one of the main reasons is the existence of countless “methods” like yours?

We have seen the emergence of lots of gurus all over the place, people who have an opinion and who try to transform it into knowledge. This is quite an annoying phenomenon because it contributes to confusing the minds of people who, in the end, adopt a little bit of each method and come to compose something relatively absurd, but which reassures them on a personal level. . Coming back to my methods, you should know that I have been writing nutrition books for over 20 years. I adapt them according to the periods and always according to the classic rules of nutrition: the contributions must be sufficient to avoid falling into restrictive diets but at the same time, they must allow people to lose weight. I also make sure that the ratios between the different nutrients – lipids, proteins, carbohydrates – comply with current recommendations. I haven’t changed my attitude, the only change is to accept the fact that the traditional French model as it was told does not exist – breakfast, lunch, dinner – and a recent survey by the ‘INSERM has just confirmed all of this.

PasseportSanté – In his book, To each his own true weight, the nutritionist Jean Michel Lecerf confides that obesity is a practically incurable disease due to phenomena of physiological adaptation of the organism. How do you explain that you did not arrive at the same conclusions despite similar work?

First, I find him excessively pessimistic in his approach. Yes, obesity is incurable with an equivalent parameter, but we are trying to modify these parameters. It is about profoundly modifying people’s food relationships by explaining that there are some who are lucky enough to be able to eat as they want and a lot, and others not as they want and not a lot. This is the first factor. In addition, Dr. Lecerf forgets the American study published last year which showed that people who reduced their weight during certain periods, and even in the event of a yo-yo effect, were people who better protected their health capital. than the others. I believe obesity is a chronic, relapsing disease, and overweight as well, but I think it’s interesting to have people go on regular dieting streaks.

Health Passport – In your book, you indicate that “the only effective way to lose weight is to reduce the energy intake that you absorb”. What about increasing the energy consumed, for example, through physical activity?

It comes down to the same thing. If you increase the energy consumed through physical activity, it means that you are not increasing your food intake. However, spontaneously, someone who plays sports significantly and assiduously will increase their food intake to compensate for the expenditure of energy. So yes indeed, if you move a lot more than usual without changing your diet at all, you will lose weight. But that never happens.

PasseportSanté – In relation to your recommendations, for a patient who is very overweight, you first advise him to lose weight before starting a physical activity?

Always. Always because it is not healthy to drag them into double frustration. In the beginning, when you are very fat, physical activity is not easy to do. On the other hand, it is healthy, as soon as they have started to lose weight, to involve them in moderate physical activity or even to send them to physiotherapists to avoid accidents.

Health Passport – To change eating habits, you recommend the use of food diaries. Can you explain to PasseportSanté Internet users what its virtues are?

It’s a feedback. A Canadian experience has shown that the simple fact of keeping an up-to-date food diary in people who wanted to diet and to whom one did not give a precise dietary instruction, made them lose the equivalent of 2 kg in a month. It is linked to the fact that writing what we eat makes it possible to avoid undervaluing our food intake: we all tend to underestimate our food intake, and writing allows us to visualize it and exert feedback. on his diet. The second thing is that the support in terms of diet is something fundamental is the reason for the existence of the website that I run. It is also possible to do it by using a notebook, just like an intimate notebook which allows to evaluate their feelings, their emotions, their food intake and the evolution of the weight.

We always hear about diets, deficiencies. My experience shows that people do not follow the diet for more than 3 to 4 months, and it is not in such a short time that we have deficiencies. None of us has ever observed the slightest deficiency in consultation, except perhaps for exceptional iron deficiencies in some people, at least in the context of the prescription of a properly balanced diet. This is my experience with it, and I claim to have followed over 2 million people on the web, so the statistic is reliable.

PasseportSanté – How do you explain that people give up so quickly? 3 to 4 months it seems quite weak …

There is a certain weariness: diets are nothing to cheer about! I keep saying that dieting is a job, an exercise that comes with a lot of frustrations and restrictions, and so it’s no fun at all. It breaks the conviviality and if it is not nurtured by the dream and the benefit of losing weight, there is no reason to continue on a diet. This is the reason why the best nutritionists are the people who are able to say no when they don’t see any particular interest in the person losing weight.

Health Passport – What about the situation of people who, on a very occasional basis, diet to lose two or three pounds, for example before an event such as a wedding? Can high protein diets that ensure faster weight loss be acceptable in this case?

There has been a lot of spitting on high protein diets because they have been used indiscriminately, meaning that the people who were doing that, were doing it for too long periods of time. But we know very well that it is the fastest method to lose weight, but we also know that it should not exceed two weeks, because beyond that, we are exposed to problems. Go on a high protein diet for a week to lose 4 kilos which will be composed of 1 kilo and a half of water, 1 kilo and a half of muscle and 1 kilo of fat, why not… It’s not traumatic in the light of all this that I just said. But there is a ripple effect in these diets which means that when people have done it for 15 days and have lost, even factually, 4 kilos, they are tempted to continue it for several months …

Health Passport – In your last diet, you did not recommend any dietary restrictions. Can you explain why?

If you prescribe a food ban, you make people frustrated. Being able to give someone 3 or 4 squares of chocolate on a diet is to change the way they see the diet. But anyway, there are no foods to ban. Even fatty foods, it’s stupid to ban them, it is better to control or limit them: butter is a good product if you only take 15 to 20 g per day, the oil is the same thing. Personally, I hate candy bars which are very poorly composed, but when they are taken occasionally I don’t mind.

HealthPassport – According to a study, only 20% of overweight people lose weight in the long term thanks to slimming diets. You do not advocate food prohibitions and your method is not highly restrictive. Nevertheless, could the disruption of eating habits not also lead to cognitive restriction?

It’s not the same thing at all. Our ancestors never ate 3 meals a day. The invention of 3 meals a day dates from the beginning of the XNUMXth century, it has never existed before. In the Middle Ages, we ate one or two meals a day, a little later, we ate four, then two… The three meals a day were mainly sanctified by the breakfast cereal vendors. However, it has been demonstrated: breakfast has no sacred character. It is part of the history of these slogans which have become truths. Like the story of eating like a king in the morning, like a prince at noon and like a beggar in the evening. These are slogans. You can very well eat one meal a day, you will feel like a charm. It’s all part of the received ideas and which are maintained by people who have an advantage over a traditional food model. The French today barely eat for breakfast, eat on the go for lunch, snack at four o’clock and eat well in the evening. This is what new eating habits are!

Return to the first page of the Great Inquiry

They don’t believe in diets

Jean-Michel Lecerf

Head of the nutrition department at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, author of the book “To each his own true weight”.

“Not every weight problem is a food problem”

Read the interview

Helene Baribeau

Dietitian-nutritionist, author of the book “Eat better to be on top” published in 2014.

“You have to be in tune with your real needs”

Read the interview

They have faith in their method

Jean-Michel Cohen

Nutritionist, author of the book “I decided to lose weight” published in 2015.

“Doing regular diet sequences can be interesting”

Read the interview

Alain Delabos

Doctor, father of the concept of chrononutrition and author of numerous books.

“A diet that allows the body to manage its caloric potential on its own”

Read the interview