The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

by Caroline Dooner

Don’t you worry. This book will be nothing like that. Because The Fuck It Diet is not really a diet.

The irony is that restriction and dieting cause a very real food addiction that cannot be cured with more dieting and more restriction. We are physiologically and psychologically wired to be food addicts when our bodies sense there isn’t ample food. It’s chemical and hormonal and completely inescapable.

If you are yo-yoing between dieting and bingeing, you are putting your body through a constant crisis.

Eating less than you are hungry for triggers your body’s survival mode, changing your hormones and brain chemistry, which then lowers your metabolism and makes you biologically obsessed with food. The mental fixation is actually caused by the physical restriction.

If you are obsessed with food, you have triggered a famine state. If you are bingeing, you are in a famine state. This is true no matter how much you weigh, or how much you are sure you are already overeating.

Your fixation on food is not happening because you are lazy or irresponsible—it’s an inescapable protective measure meant to keep you alive.

A diet is a cure that doesn’t work, for a disease that doesn’t exist. —SARA FISHMAN AND JUDY FREESPIRIT

We believe diets must work because we initially lose weight, and initially improve health. So when things go south and blow up in our faces, we assume it’s our own fault. We don’t understand the long-term effects of the diet: the weight regain, how bad it is for our health and metabolism, and the fact that we get into a miserable cycle of self-blame.

One of the biggest indicators of weight is genetics.6 We all have “set points,” weight ranges that the body will try to maintain. No matter how you are eating or moving, there is a weight range your body wants to be in—some people’s are higher, and some are lower. Your body will adjust your metabolism in order to keep you in your set point range.7 We do know that dieting has been seen to raise weight set points.8 Meaning that your body will have a new normal at a higher weight than it was before you started dieting. Survival.

Social status and feelings of personal power have more impact on your health than even your health habits.12 Autonomy and control over your day, your job, your activities, your money, and your life leads to more contentment, which is great for your overall health. And the acute stress that comes from being marginalized or powerless, or feeling shame and prejudice, are all terrible for your health,13 regardless of weight or even the way you eat. The way you are treated, and treat yourself, affects your health.

Not feeling you have any power in your life can make you sicker than any of your health habits14 . . . that’s huge. Experiencing discrimination, or even just perceived discrimination,15 is terrible for your health. And traumatic experiences that are completely out of our control can have major impacts on our health long-term as well. For instance, survivors of the Holocaust concentration camps had significantly higher rates of fibromyalgia,16 even decades later. And survivors of childhood abuse are at higher risk for having autoimmune disorders.17

what this also means is that social change, kindness, and empowering ourselves and others will end up being more helpful and important to our collective health than any “war on obesity.”

Our collective dieting became more and more widespread first, and collective weights have only risen after, likely because of, and in response to, our dieting and fucked-up eating.

companies who sell weight loss have always been seen as the good guys. They want to help us become thin and healthy and happy! Weight Watchers is trying to rebrand because they just want us to live our best lives! Fuck no. They don’t care about you. Don’t blindly accept that they exist to save us from ourselves. They have always had a vested interest in perpetuating our deep cultural bias against weight, and creating products and programs that only work temporarily so you keep coming back again and again.

BMI takes no actual health factors into account. It can’t tell you anything about your blood pressure, your glucose levels, your hormones, your metabolism, your strength, your stamina, your bone density, your cholesterol, your immunity, your cellular respiration . . . nothing. It’s literally just a math equation: weight in relation to height, and it was first published by a life insurance company in 1959 as a way of explaining their rates. This was criticized by scientists because the equation it was based on was never meant to be used for individual diagnosis.

many studies have found that higher BMIs actually have lower mortality rates.20 And many studies have shown that weight loss or too much exercise has been associated with poorer health, higher stress hormones, and increased mortality.21 And

In her book Dispensing with the Truth, Alicia Mundy calls it “Obesity, Inc.” and talks about the million-dollar funding that Weight Watchers and other groups contributed to Shape Up America!, an organization that was part of a strategy to turn obesity into a disease (!!!) so it could be “treated” by the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries. That’s one reason why I keep putting “obesity” in quotes. It was created by lobbyists.

These days, one of the reasons that people think being fat has remained an “acceptable” open prejudice is because we think that people’s weight is fully their own fault—that their weight means something about who they are as a person, and that therefore we get to pass judgment and target them, so we feel better about our own miserable little lives.

Hopefully it goes without saying that whether people’s weight is in their control or not, treating a human being poorly because of how they look, or how we perceive their health to be, is cruel. It’s never been okay and it never will be, misinformation or not. Fat people are subjected to constant judgment and scrutiny, they get dismissed by doctors, they are passed over for jobs and used as the punch line of jokes.

For many of us, dieting has become our new religion, and food and weight have become our morality. Looking at the positive side of religion, it offers community, structure, ritual, and an attempt at spreading kindness, love, spirituality, healing, acceptance, and charity. On the dark side, religions have historically taken advantage of shame and dogma, and ignited our “fear of the other” and people who are different from us. People start feeling like they know the one true way. They have figured it out. OUR way is right, THEIR way is wrong. We need to convert the heathens who have yet to see the light and teach them the error of their ways. It is the kind of moral superiority that we use to try and make ourselves feel temporarily safe.

diets feed into the exact same human fear that causes holy wars: I know the way. WE know the way, and you don’t. We are doing this right, and you are doing this wrong. We are following the moral and right way to live. This way of living will keep me safe and on the path of righteousness. I need you to hear the good word of coconut oil and follow my coconut oil path. I don’t eat grains because I am smart and informed and responsible. I know ALL about phytic acid, and you should too, because YOU are fat and eating all the wrong THINGS. We evangelize, we spread the good news, and in a strange way, through diets, we are also seeking salvation and eternal life. It is our way of convincing ourselves that we are safe. It lets us feel better for a moment because at least we’re doing better than them. It’s the dark side of humanity wrapped up in a new cult.

I know what it feels like to believe. I know what it feels like to think that your cult is, well, first of all, not a cult. But I know what it feels like to believe that your diet is the right way. I know how safe it feels to follow a plan and really, really hope and believe that it will actually deliver on all of its promises.

And it all stems from fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of mortality. Fear of imperfection. Fear of losing control. Fear of aging. Fear of not being safe. Fear of the sins of the flesh. It’s sad, it’s lonely, it’s isolating, and it is so, so human.

Part of the big problem with the diet and beauty industries (and many other industries that capitalize on your insecurities) is ...

Your best self is probably the one who trusts yourself the most,

beware of dogma. You can tell it’s all going south when you are experiencing lots of fear, judgment, and feel all-holier-than-thou.

If you’ve tried to heal your eating by not dieting before, and it didn’t work, that is most likely because you were ignoring your relationship to your weight and still trying to make intuitive eating into some kind of diet. Most of us think that if we can just “eat intuitively,” we will eat like a bird and become the naturally thin and happy version of ourselves. So many of us try to heal our eating without changing our relationship to weight as well. Ignoring how closely our feelings about eating and weight relate to each other is our big mistake.

Now I realize that the entire time I thought I was eating intuitively, I was still focused on weight, and still scared of most foods, whether I was letting myself eat them or not. My intuitive eating was still used to try to eat less, which is inherently going to backfire.

How to go on The Fuck It Diet: Stop restricting. Trust your body, appetite, and cravings. Eat deliciously and normally for the rest of your life. Embrace life in a (probably) not-stick-figure body. Do cool, fun things, and enjoy your life.

Any time you eat a lot, remember that it isn’t your body losing control—your body is doing all of this on purpose.

dieting is the thing that will continually force your weight set point up and up and up. It is the act of trying to control your weight that encourages your body to put on more and more and more weight.

Our tendency is to assume our weight is a sign that something is terribly wrong, and that it is going to go up and up, and so we immediately try to diet to get the weight off—but the body knows what it’s doing.

Basically, ultimate long-term control over your weight is an illusion. The times when you felt you had control were actually the times you were setting yourself up for the backlash (the binge and regain). This is the way we are wired, this is the way we have been for many, many thousands of years, and your attempts to override this biology will be continually futile.

Not only is weight gain an important part of fixing the metabolism, but it is also an emotional rite of passage. We all need to face our fears of being a higher weight. We need to learn to be happy and fulfilled at that weight. We need to learn to accept ourselves there. We need to let go of the fear of what “gaining weight” means. We need to be willing to dress ourselves at a higher weight. We need to learn to value ourselves at any weight. It is essential.

you would continue to live in fear of what would happen to you if and when you did gain weight (which you inevitably will with illness, pregnancy, menopause, broken ankles, etc. You are not a robot). You would continue to live in fear of gaining weight. You’d keep living in fear of what people would think of you, how people would treat you, and what you would think of yourself if you gained weight. And all of that subconscious energy would affect your eating and the way you experience your entire life and body.

Hunger begins to feel like the enemy in so many ways.

Let’s take a moment to remember that people who are not hungry are usually very sick. Lack of hunger is not a good sign. It means that something is wrong, and maybe you are dying. Still, I cannot tell you how many diets I have read and followed where the promise was always some version of becoming cravingless and not hungry. The message was always that your hunger was sabotaging your attempts at health and beauty. This creates a major disconnect between you and your body.