The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner
book is for chronic dieters. This book is for people who are ready to learn why their diets haven’t worked, and why what we’ve been taught about food and health hasn’t worked. It’s for the people who have been on every diet, who have spent hours worrying about and micromanaging the minutiae of the calories or toxins in the food they are eating—and don’t want to do it anymore.
It’s for people who have spent years seeing their worth through the lens of what they ate that day and what they weighed that morning, who have gone from diet to diet hoping that the next one would be the answer. It’s for people who didn’t even realize how miserable they were, because they were too busy praying that just maybe this time they’d lose enough weight to like themselves, and then all this misery would be worth it.
If you feel perfectly fine with the way you eat, exercise, and relate to your body and weight, you probably don’t need this book. But for those of you who are sick of being stuck in an abusive relationship with diets, who want a different relationship with food and with your body, this book is here to tell you that there is a way out.
I am now completely easy-breezy with food, which I genuinely didn’t think was possible before. Since going on The Fuck It Diet, I barely even think about food anymore if I’m not hungry, which was also something I thought was a myth. For so long, I believed that the cure for binge eating and food obsession was better willpower. I thought that if I could just diet successfully, like I did those first few times, and then keep doing it forever, I would finally be healed, happy, and—most importantly—thin and beautiful.
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.
No matter what you weigh, dieting is ruining your metabolism and your ability to listen to your body. We are going to talk a lot more about weight science, and the reasons your health and weight aren’t as connected as you’ve been taught, and how diet culture has basically put you at war with yourself.
This book can benefit any person, of any gender, at any weight, who struggles with food and body image. But because I am a woman who had to figure out why I was so scared of being too big in this world I live in, this book is inherently a feminist response to diet culture. The insidious societal causes of our dysfunction with food and weight can’t be ignored. So, to the women who believe they must be tiny and toned in order to matter and be respected, I say “Fuck that.” You are allowed to eat the whole sandwich, and you are allowed to take up as much space as your body needs.
I have worked with well over a thousand women (and some men) through The Fuck It Diet in my group programs, as well as one-on-one. And over and over again—to everyone’s surprise—I’ve seen that allowing all foods is the only thing that heals food obsession and bingeing. The most common fear is that once they start eating, they will never stop. And every single time, people are in awe of how their appetites completely change once they are actually fed—once you give yourself permission to eat, bingeing disappears. No superhuman willpower required.
The reason The Fuck It Diet works when no diet, self-help guru, or mindful eating does is because it tackles two things at once: the biological reasons that keep people obsessed and bingeing, and at the exact same time, the mental, emotional, and cultural reasons that we become obsessed with food and weight in the first place.
In this book I’m going to share my experience, their experiences, and the science that backs up our experiences and explains why not-dieting actually works. These lessons were hard to learn, but once I learned them, they became so obvious and logical. Now I wonder how I ever believed that restriction was the answer.
WHY ARE WE SO ADDICTED TO FOOD?
Do me a favor and imagine that you are in a real-life famine and you have access to very little food. Just imagine what would happen.
Immediately, everything in your life would become about food. Everything in your body would be telling you both to ration what you have and to eat a lot the first chance you find enough food. You would be constantly looking for more food. You’d maybe start searching for crops that weren’t destroyed. You’d hunt rabbits. You’d forage. And you would quickly become very resourceful with the food you did find.
There would be a surge of adrenaline when this restriction and food search begins—it’s slightly euphoric—giving you enough energy and hope to scavenge for food. But at the same time, your metabolism would slow down so it can resourcefully use and store the nutrients you are eating. As you are forced to eat less, you would probably lose weight, but at the same time your metabolism would slow down so you don’t lose too much too fast—because if you used too much fuel too fast, you’d die.
After you’ve been hungry and rationing for a while, always eating what you can when you can, you may finally come across more substantial food. Maybe you spear a boar. Maybe you steal some loaves of Wonder Bread from a rich family in the village. Whatever. The point is: you find more than a handful of food, and everything inside you overrides whatever rationing willpower you’ve had so far. You eat it all. You eat as much as you can get. You feast. And if you tried to stop yourself halfway through, you probably wouldn’t be able to.
That’s what your body is wired to do for survival. It’s a good thing. Your body’s only job in a crisis is to help you store nutrients and fuel in your body for the days and weeks to come. It gives you some energy, though you’ll still be operating at a lower metabolic rate than normal if the feasting isn’t able to continue. You’re still in a famine, even if you just ate two loaves of Wonder Bread. Your body knows you’re still searching for food, constantly.
To stay alive, you will have to keep eating as much as you can when you find it, and your metabolism will remain low while you do, ensuring that you stay alive.
There are two possible endings to this famine:
FATE #1: THE FAMINE NEVER ENDS. As you use up all your food stores, you stop being hungry at all, because your body believes there really is no food, so it is not going to keep using precious energy to send hunger signals. You live for a little while like this, in deteriorating health, then you die. And you can and will die of starvation even if you still are not emaciated, because starvation weakens your muscles and heart regardless of your weight.1
FATE #2: YOU FIND ENOUGH FOOD TO KEEP YOU ALIVE BEFORE THE FAMINE ENDS. But before it fully ends, every time you find food, you feast. As you should. Your body stores those calories as fat to help you rebuild and repair your body, and to protect you in case you find yourself in a famine again. In between these necessary and helpful feasts, you are hungry and still fixated on finding and eating as much food as you can, when you can. Of course.
Before the famine is over, other things happen as you go through feast-and-famine eating: your hormones stop working properly and your sex drive drops (no use having children in the middle of a famine!), you’re irritable, and that adrenaline high is wearing off. Your body is trying to conserve energy, so your metabolism is low and your energy may come mostly from spikes of adrenaline and stress hormones.
Maybe thanks to some sort of manna, or because you found a more bountiful terrain with fish and mangoes and brownies, you live and the famine eventually ends.
Once there is food, you are going to eat as much as you can, for a long time. You will gain weight, and it will be awesome. Your body will take some time regaining strength and vitality. You will be tired for a good chunk of time, while your body slowly repairs the parts of you that were sacrificed