Is food a “substitute” for love?
Fiorenza Sarzanini is one of the most successful names in Italian journalism. The editor of Corriere della Sera Luciano Fontana appointed her deputy director, also entrusting her with the role of head of the Rome office.
Joined the newspaper’s editorial office in 2000, she worked for the Messenger for over 10 years dealing with judicial news and security. “Mirror” is the title of the podcast in 6 episodes dedicated to eating disorders and written with Francesca Milano. Fiorenza Sarzanini has entered the stories of young people affected by these problems who have chosen to be treated. He collected their testimonies, spoke with them and the doctors who follow their path, crystallizing the journey into the tunnel of these diseases in a series of episodes to shed an important light on the topic.
The author has listened to the confessions of many young people and tells their thoughts and stories, the demons and the hunger for love, the dizzying falls and the effort to be reborn. He spoke to the doctors who face this epidemic every day for which there is no vaccine. He picked up the outburst of parents, their sense of guilt, the desperation of those who see their children destroyed without being able to help them.
The result is an investigation, narrated with sensitivity and passion in this book published by Solferino, shedding light on a disease of our time and igniting hope. Because the journey is tiring, but if you accept the support of those who know this evil and those close to you you can save yourself. If you get help, you can heal.
This is a bittersweet novel by Fiorenza Sarzanini that tells us what society today considers a fundamental goal: the achievement of a healthy weight, which all thin women want, if not even at the limits of anorexia.
Overweight, which may seem like only a small problem to those who do not experience it every day, however, represents a real limitation in a world that makes physical appearance the most important thing, judging people only by appearances and without ever going beyond the surface. Yet, those who live with it every day know how much it can affect life: in relationships with the family that would like you to be perfect, according to aesthetic standards that may not be shared by those concerned; in relationships with the opposite sex, in which the physical aspect is often the only thing that strikes you at the first meeting and on which a possible follow-up depends.
All these things the author tells them with simplicity, but with words that touch inside because, despite the casual tone that exudes from Hungry for love, time luckily passes, one grows and in the end the right awareness also arrives: accepting and wanting oneself. well, including the extra pounds, it is the only solution that works because, as the plot rightly tells us, it is not necessary to change the weight, but to change the look.
Remembering that not all women are “showgirls”, that real life does not take place on television but is what every normal woman lives daily, with the small and large battles of every day, also serves to restore the right priorities to problems and to values. Of course, enjoying a maxi-slice of chocolate cake with lots of joy and a few extra pounds, is definitely better than always staying on a diet, feeling dissatisfied and frustrated, because true beauty is the inner one and, to quote D. Hume, “The beauty of things exists in the mind that contemplates them”.