The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

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I did them all. I’m not kidding. Starvation, cabbage soup, Atkins’, South Beach, Weight Watchers x4 (because each time I was sure that this time I’ll be able to keep within my points and not starve and agonize over how I’d eaten all my points and would be having water popsicles for dinner) Nutrisystem x3 (because each time I was sure the food was better), LA Weightloss, 21-Day Fix, several rounds of the hcg diet (the worst thing I ever did to my body but 50 lbs lost in two months was worth it then), Ideal Protein, countless diet pills, and finally, keto. And these are the more mainstream diets.

I got part way through the Physical Part section when I came across a sentence that sent shivers down my spine. The author explains that to help you break the yo-yo dieting and to become a happier, healthier you, you need to eat and this means that you need to resist putting on weight. At this point, I will admit I kind of said ‘hell no’ and closed the book. I can’t afford to put on weight, truly I can’t afford a new wardrobe of clothes. When I finally started writing TFID seven years ago, I was radically applying a non-diet, pro-calorie, pro-being-full, “ f*** all diet and weight noise” approach, pro-gaining weight, plus a Health at Every Size (R) and feminist lens too. This was definitely a fun, well-researched book. A little repetitive, but with a topic like this you often have to pound ideas into people’s brains. This book could be a little vague and too all encompassing, it could have almost been two separate books with different topics. But I guess, two for the price of one? I liked the myth busting about diet culture and the relation between health and weigh. I also liked that it was not only an anti-diet book, but a life style book. So TFID was developed as a separate way to become a normal, instinctive eater, while also examining why my first attempts at “intuitive eating” had so epically failed. And in my book, beyond talking about the way we eat, there’s a lot of focus on diet culture, on our emotions, and on our beliefs too.I’ve called it “obsessive intuitive eating” or “pseudo intuitive eating.” And sometimes refer to true intuitive eating (good) and obsessive intuitive eating (bad). A month ago I was in tears saying to my therapist, “I’m so tired. I’m tired of pretending I’m getting by. I’m tired of pretending I’m not hurting. I’m tired.” So when I saw the cover of this book on my library app, I thought it was just the book I needed. Naturally I requested it without actually reading what the book was about.

I don’t even refer to the Intuitive Eating book at all, because my subconscious intention was to not say anything bad about it, but now I don’t feel great about saying nothing about the book either. This book talks about how damaging yo-yo dieting is. It quotes studies that have been done on what not eating properly does to your body and highlights that being overweight does not mean you are not healthy and the same the other way around, there are some people who are slim and look healthy, yet they are not. My very last diet before I gave it up completely was the paleo diet – a mostly low-carb “primal” diet– and I was all in. I listened to paleo podcasts, read paleo message boards and paleo blogs. My whole life became dedicated to being paleo. One day, on one of the paleo blogs I read religiously, the blogger wrote that going low carb had messed up her hormones and made her become infertile. She stopped getting her period and wasn’t able to get pregnant with the second child she wanted… so she decided she needed to eat more carbs, sleep a lot, and gain weight to try and heal her hormones.I was going to let myself eat. I was going to let myself gain weight. And I was going to see if it could bring my healing and liberation and a better relationship with food.

Life is exhausting. And we do not live in a culture that supports and allows for healing from that exhaustion. We live in a culture that sees hyper-productivity and exhaustion as a badge of honor." Weeks after reading the book, and just a few weeks before I went off to college, my mom told me she had cancer, and we both became raw vegan to try and heal all of our earthly ills (it didn’t work) (my mom is fine, but not because of raw veganism, she ditched it soon after starting chemo) (also, I have complex feelings about pharmaceutical companies too, but raw veganism was still not the answer).(Yes I was a raw vegan in freshman year of college.) The hardest thing about this cycle is that it’s insidious. Dieters keep doubling down on their diet efforts, not realizing that dieting and restriction is fanning the flames of food obsession and cravings in the first place. However, my experience with official Intuitive Eating and the official Intuitive Eating book is actually pretty limited, which means the way that I’ve referred to it (or not referred to it) should probably be examined. In fact, the book Intuitive Eating and Geneen Roth’s books are mixed up in my mind at this very moment as I write this. Maybe that’s because there is a hunger scale in both of them? (And I DEF turned that hunger scale into a diet.) Diet culture is actually just a subset of our culture at large that’s obsessed with control, and hustling, and personal responsibility, and hyper-productivity.”We live in a diet culture, where everything is tinged with the belief that thinner is better and that less food is better — both things that can actually do a lot of damage and are squarely not true. So, in that way, I hope that my writing and my book can actually reframe food, weight, and health for anyone. But my target audience, and the people I write my “how to step out of the diet cycle” content for, are chronic dieters. 3. Who can benefit from learning to eat intuitively? Why/how? Oh, and after reading about her years of mysterious health issues related to Epstein Barr/CFS, at the very end of the book she says she saw a sort of alternative doctor and he prescribed some kind of drops that mostly cured her. That is the least helpful bit of information in a book that I've ever read. She couldn't have gone and looked at the bottle or called the office and at least found out the ingredients in case it might help readers who had similar issues????? Nope. Some sort of drops. And now she's mostly fine. How nice for her. Recommends eating 3,200 calories a day, and states that eating 1,600 a day will put yourself in starvation mode, mentioning that the study was done on people who “walk 22 miles a week”, but failing to mention that **they were in work camps**. I’ve had body image issues my whole life for reasons I won’t go into here. But I’m taking control now. I still want to be thin because that’s how I like to see myself, but not because that’s what others want or expect of me. And I’m willing now to trust my body and give it what it wants and let it do its thing. I ride my Peloton bike because I feel stronger each time. Not because I must to lose weight. Book Genre: Feminism, Food, Food and Drink, Health, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Nutrition, Personal Development, Psychology, Self Help