Fat Nutritionist Proves You Don’t Need to Lose Weight to Be a Good Professional

Being overweight is not always a choice. No sign of sloppiness or self-indulgence either. So much so that many people struggle with their bodies all their lives. From teasing at school to insults in the family context, at work and even at the doctor. A hostile environment can lead to the search for crazy solutions: restrictive diets, fainting, surgeries… and more weight gain. Unable to find help, Erick Cuzziol decided to try to solve his problem by himself and today he is the Fat Nutritionist. Yes, he calls himself that way and we’ll explain why.

we, from awesome.club, we believe that knowledge is the best way to learn more and break paradigms. That’s why we talked to Erick and asked him, in his own words, to share his life story with us. Check out!

I was a very thin child because of a throat problem. When I was 7 years old, this was resolved and I started to gain weight, that is, I was thin because I couldn’t eat. My weight increased a lot from one hour to the next, leaving my mother worried, not knowing how to control the situation.

At school, they picked on me a lot, especially in Physical Education classes. Where I studied, there was weigh-in day. Everyone was around the scale waiting for me to get on. At that time, I was a teenager and already weighed 120 kilos. There was an adult there, who should have seen that the environment was not healthy, but they believed that this kind of humiliation would motivate me to change.

I started dieting early, when I was about 14 years old. I lost eight kilos in the first one, then there was one where I lost 20, but I recovered quickly and that was disheartening. Over time, I realized that the more I insisted on diets, sought medication and other gimmicks, the more weight I gained.

I was always on the soup diet, which basically consists of consuming liquid, low-calorie foods. I also took a type of fiber that the manufacturer recommended mixing with diet or light soda to improve the taste. Look at the absurdity! I drank this every day before going to school.

But the worst diet of all was the so-called “USP diet”, which, in fact, is not recommended by the University of São Paulo. There were meals where I only ate cream crackers, sometimes dinner was ham… foods that are now known to be bad for your health, but they were on the diet. Sometimes I ate a tomato. Breakfast was usually a cup of unsweetened coffee.

On this diet, I passed out three times, one of them at school. When I started to feel bad, I ran to a corner where I couldn’t be seen, because falling fat is a joke or a teacher’s scolding. And I just wanted to lose weight.

I chose Nutrition because I thought I could find answers to my questions. Would be wonderful! But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Obesity is a very complex condition and there is no magic formula to end it.

When I attended the college clinic, a teacher told me that I was a disgrace to the institution, because my body showed that the course was inefficient. This episode destabilized me a lot, but I had support from the direction and the teacher even apologized later.

Do you realize that there is no coherence in this thought? If the fat person has to eat better, how is this environment not a place for them? A fat student could be seen as someone who brings new perspectives to college, new challenges. But it wasn’t like that.

I went to many interviews where a lot of time was spent talking about my body: “Why did you major in nutrition and not lose weight?”; “How are you going to explain this to patients?”; “How are you going to make patients believe in your work?”

People thought that the fact that I was a fat nutritionist made me an incompetent professional. I suffered enormous resistance and had to constantly prove myself. When I worked in a company cafeteria, if they needed a snack for an event, they asked me, because they thought I would make a hearty and tasty menu because I was fat. But when it came to workers’ health, maybe I wasn’t the best person to take care of it.

When I started seeing patients, I could see from the way they looked at me that they didn’t believe in my work. Many simply did not return for the second appointment. On the other hand, I found people who wanted to rebuild and understood that my daily struggle was a great learning experience that I could contribute, not a failure. These patients stayed with me until they were discharged.

Nowadays, people look for me because I am a professional with a different look, precisely because of my experience. I don’t think this is essential, I don’t think I’m better than other nutritionists, nor that other health professionals need to go through this, but I feel that some who don’t have a hard time understanding what it’s like to be a fat person and the injustices that they suffer.

In my opinion, the most serious fatphobia happens in the family and the second most serious happens in a medical environment. People will ask for help and are treated as if they do not deserve it. As if being fat is a choice, so we have to suffer the consequences. Obesity is classified by the WHO as a disease, but it is treated as a sentence.

Most people who look for a nutritionist just want to lose weight. They don’t think about health and quality of life, they don’t want to reflect on the factors that prevent them from maintaining a healthy diet. A lot that happens in our life impacts our food and we need to analyze this.

Diets do not work for 95% of people, and among the 5% who manage to lose weight, there is a high chance of developing an eating disorder. The models of traditional weight loss diets approach eating disorders and this is very dangerous.

Everyone who is healthy loves to eat! If you don’t like it, you have a problem. Liking to eat is not wrong, it is not a fault, it is healthy.

My working method is called Intuitive Eating. If people need a guide that is sustainable, they need to be their own guide. While in diet you have rigidity and deprivation, which are unsustainable, in Intuitive Eating you work on flexibility. But that flexibility also requires discipline. Instead of encouraging deprivation and focusing on guilt, we prioritize conscience and focus on satisfaction. This takes the fear out of dieting and replaces it with confidence.

It is also necessary to take into account that we live in a perverse food environment, in which the quality of food is quite bad. It’s no use for the person to change alone when the whole outside is impacting on their weight. It takes compassion.

Today, for health ratings, I am not a healthy person. Within my diagnosis, I move, consume a good base of fruits, vegetables and vegetables, and take care of my mind. In my opinion, being healthy is being aware of how much you like yourself and taking care of yourself so that you feel good.

Yes, it is possible to be fat and healthy! In fact, I choose the word “fat” because it once meant courage, strength, determination. To address medical issues, they use “obesity”, but at no time did this term bring respect or dignity to the fat person. If everyone knew the challenges fat people face, they would feel admiration, not disapproval.

the team of awesome.club saw in the story of the Fat Nutritionist a call to reflect on food, health and fatphobia. We also want to know his experience. Do you fight with the scales? Have you ever been on a crazy diet? Share with us in the comments.