The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner

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      I’d spent ten years thinking that skinniness would make me like myself. I thought that skinniness would make me happy. And that is a method for happiness that doesn’t last.

      Skinny doesn’t create happiness—just ask any model or any “successful” dieter. Sure, once you reach your goal weight, you think you’re happy for a moment. If you’re reading this book, you already know that it doesn’t last. Changing this search for happiness-through-skinniness-and-beauty to something more real, attainable, and life-affirming is a big part of this book.

      But the part we are going to focus on first is the fact that diets don’t even work. The way we try to exert control over our bodies is biologically flawed and set up to fail from the start. When we try to override our survival response, our survival response wins. Every time.

      We will get into it all. But first let me tell you what I did after my bathroom mirror epiphany. I decided to learn to eat normally—and I finally understood what that meant: I had to eat a lot more than I ever thought was okay before. I decided to give in to all of the foods I was afraid of, and all the hunger I had been trying to repress for the past ten years. And I mean all of it. There was a lot of hunger.

      I also decided to research all of the reasons dieting doesn’t work. I armed myself with every bit of scientific information I needed to keep myself trusting that not dieting was the right path. I found a whole movement dedicated to educating the world on why the way we approach health and weight loss is deeply flawed. I learned about all the ways I was actually screwing myself over with diets—on a biological, chemical, and hormonal level.

      But most importantly, I decided I was going to learn to like and accept myself at whatever weight I ended up. I really wasn’t sure what that weight was going to be because I’d been yo-yoing up and down many times every year for the past ten years. I thought my weight might end up at the top of my yo-yos, my highest weight, where I’d always felt like a serious failure. There was nothing more panic-inducing to me than seeing my weight up there, but I was choosing to change my priorities, big-time. I decided, Fuck it. Seriously, fuck it. I was too miserable not to do this.

      I was going to learn to like myself wherever my weight fell, because I could not spend one more day fighting myself, waiting for that magical, elusive day when I would finally become permanently skinny and content. I knew that this was the only way out of the trap I was in—and The F*ck It Diet was born.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

      This 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.

ONE

       WHY ARE WE SO ADDICTED TO FOOD?

LET’S GO ON A FAMINE

      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 СКАЧАТЬ