The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner
of their eyes became brilliantly white because all their blood vessels shrank! So if you want to have beautiful porcelain doll eyes, starve yourself. You’ll just have to deal with lots of other horrible problems.
Next, they started sneaking food from off-site. Remember, these men had been chosen specifically because they were the most willing and likely to comply with the experiment. But they still started cheating with extra food off the compound. In fact, the cheating became such a huge issue that the men were required to have chaperones every time they left. Three men completely pulled out of the experiment.
These men were also profoundly psychologically changed by their restrictive diets. A few weeks into the experiment, one man started having disturbing dreams of cannibalism. Then he cheated on the experiment by going into town and devouring milkshakes and sundaes. When the head of the experiment confronted him, he broke down crying and threatened his life. He was discharged and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where after a few weeks of being fed normally, his psychological health went completely back to normal (!!!). LET THIS SINK IN! All this man needed to regain his sanity was more food.
Yes, this man was an extreme case, but all of the men became anxious and depressed. One man recalls snapping at his good friend in the experiment nearly every day, and having to apologize often for his irrational outbursts.
And the weirdest part of all: even though these men had become extremely emaciated, they did not perceive themselves as being excessively skinny. Instead, they thought other people were too fat. They were experiencing body dysmorphia, which is a phenomenon experienced by people with eating disorders where people see their bodies as a different size or shape than they actually are. It’s assumed that eating disorders could be a result of body dysmorphia, but these men didn’t even want to lose weight in the first place. They were experiencing psychological body dysmorphia just from the physiological effects of starvation. I can’t explain that one to you. But it’s eye-opening.
So what do you think this means for a culture obsessed with controlling the food we eat and the way our bodies look? It does not bode well. Dieting and restriction messes with our brain chemistry big-time. It fucks with our mental health and takes over our minds until food and weight are all we can think about. We deserve better because this isn’t working.
REHABILITATION
The purpose of this experiment was to see how to rehabilitate people who were starving, and the goal was to figure out how best to help them recover. These dramatic physical and psychological effects weren’t even what the study was meant to focus on. The semi-starvation phase of the study was actually just to get the participants to the place that they needed to rehabilitate from.
When Keys started re-feeding the participants, he only increased their food a little bit, assuming at first that slowly re-feeding would be the healthiest method—some by 400 calories, some 800, some 1,600. The group whose food was increased by 400 and 800 calories had no improvement at all. He gave them supplements and protein shakes. They still didn’t improve. The only thing that worked was more food. And lots of it. Upping their calories above what they ate before the experiment had an immediate positive effect.
However, for many of the participants, the emotional disturbances of starvation lasted throughout the rehabilitation process, and some reported being even more depressed and anxious during the re-feeding and rehabilitation than they had been during the restriction. That’s important information for us, because it means that—hormonally and chemically—it can be a very bumpy road while you re-feed yourself after famine and dieting.
Only twelve men stayed for some extra months after the end of the experiment for what Keys called “unrestricted rehabilitation.” On average, these men ate 5,000 calories a day, but sometimes as many as 11,500 calories a day. They often talked about a hunger sensation they couldn’t satisfy, no matter how much they ate or even how full they were.
The men said there were lingering effects of this experiment, and many of them had recurring fears that food would be taken away from them again. Three of the men became chefs—all men who had no real interest in food or cooking before the experiment.
Many of them said they were very hungry and fixated on food for months or years after the starvation experiment. And in my research of this study, I’ve read mentions of the therapeutic effects of many, many milkshakes. That’s the 1940s for you.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR DIETERS?
I mean . . . you see the problem, right? You see that mainstream recommended weight loss and “weight maintenance” diets—which recommend anywhere between 1,200 and 2,000 calories a day—are right around how many calories these men were eating to induce biological starvation responses and deep, lasting fixations on food? You see how extreme the physical and mental consequences were on a diet of 1,600 calories a day? How everything in these men’s bodies and minds screamed for food, and how in the end, the only cure was lots and lots of food, for a long, long time?
What these men experienced is nearly identical to what people experience on diets, and what they experience when trying to get their body out of diet crisis state. When you diet, even if it’s just a little bit, even if it’s a seemingly reasonable sixty-day plan you found in Shape magazine, you put your body into a reactive, food-obsessed survival state. Your fixation on food is not happening because you are lazy or irresponsible—it’s an inescapable protective measure meant to keep you alive.
And for those of us who have a lot of trouble staying on a diet, even for just a day? Congratulations: that’s actually a good thing! “Successful” calorie restriction has immediate and dramatic physical and mental effects. If those men hadn’t been so closely monitored and controlled, they would have gone off their “diets.”
Staying on a diet is at odds with our biology. But the saddest part of our diet-centric culture is that when our bodies force us off our diets, we keep forcing them back on. To become normal with food, you have to deliberately step out of this cycle, and get your body out of this crisis and survival state and back to some sort of normalcy.
Back before The Fuck It Diet, I was so far from normal eating and so fixated on food and weight that I didn’t even know what it was supposed to look like. I would look at people who didn’t overthink food and think, Well, I guess they are just lucky to not have a food addiction. I didn’t realize that my “food addiction” was biologically driven, and that I was constantly making it worse by every diet I went on.
I didn’t realize that, in a way, we are meant to be fixated on food. Because food is a fundamentally important part of staying alive, so when the body senses that food access is scarce, our food fixation increases. Thankfully the reverse is also true. Once the body knows it will be fed, it can calm down. Hallelujah.
Here are some things you’ll experience when you are not stuck in the food survival state anymore, and become a “normal eater”:
You can go through your day and pretty much only think about food when you are hungry.
You will have a strong healthy appetite for lots of food, yet your weight will stay stable because your metabolism isn’t compromised from dieting.
You eat what you crave, but you crave what you need. Sometimes salads, sometimes a cookie, sometimes fruit, sometimes steak, etc.
You can eat a meal and stop in the ballpark of satiation and fullness without overthinking it.
You can eat when you’re distracted or tired or stressed or sad and still stop once you get full.
You will have a strong sense of what food you want, when, and how much, but it won’t be that important that you follow your cravings perfectly, because life is too short to obsess over food.
This list is just a taste of what can naturally happen when you finally get out of the biological famine state. Ironically, it takes a good amount of relearning