The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

by Caroline Dooner

The reason you must allow food “now until the end of time” is that if you tell yourself something like, “Oh, well, I will let myself eat whatever I want for a month and then it’ll heal my eating and then I will ‘eat healthy’ after that,” that is actually a form of restriction. I call it mental restriction, and it’ll mess up your eating just as much as physical restriction.

Weight stigmatism and discrimination doesn’t put a fire under people to become healthier, thinner version of themselves; instead it leads to weight cycling, eating disorders, emotional pain, and lots and lots of stress, which breaks down health over time.52

So many of the people I have worked with have a lot of anger toward their families, and often their mothers: many people’s original diet partners.

In reality, the milkshake was somewhere in the middle: 380 calories. And before you get all prickly over me talking about calories, I promise it’s worth it. When the participants drank the milkshake that they thought was 640 calories, their ghrelin levels dropped. They weren’t hungry anymore. But when the participants drank the milkshake that they thought was only 140 calories . . . their ghrelin levels didn’t drop. The hormone levels stayed high, and they stayed hungry, and their metabolism stayed slow, even though they were drinking the same milkshake that the other people were.

Not only do our beliefs directly affect our body, but beliefs shape the way we see the world around us. This is a psychological phenomenon called “confirmation bias,” where we filter evidence and interpret everything as a confirmation of our existing beliefs or theories.

The belief that being skinny will make us happy sets us up for failure. External things are famously unable to make us truly happy. And still, so many people’s entire lives revolve around the belief that being skinny (or fit or lean or whatever) will make them happy.