The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 in order to keep you going during the famine.

      During your recovery from the famine, every time you see food, you’re gonna eat it. Because of course you are. There was just a famine! You were starving for a half a year! Or five years! Your body is not convinced that there isn’t another famine right around the corner, so you’re going to be eating a lot for a while. You’re going to need to rest for a while. And you will gain weight during this recovery, as you should.

      Once your body is fed for a long time, and not worried about any more famine, you will slowly come back to normal. Food won’t be as stressful. You will slowly trust that there is enough food again, and your body’s metabolism will eventually normalize. Your appetite and desire for food will eventually normalize, and your weight will eventually stabilize—maybe slightly higher than it was before, just because of a fear of future famines, or maybe not.

      I’m sure that you’ve made the connection by this point, but let me spell it out anyway: dieting is putting your body through a famine. That may sound like a stretch, but it’s not. Not at all. You’ll say, “No no, I eat plenty, even when I’m on a diet.” Or you’ll say, “Um, I am bingeing all the time, there is no way my body doesn’t have enough food.”

      It doesn’t matter. If you are still eating, but just not quite eating to satiation, or if you’ve been yo-yoing between dieting and bingeing, the body reads that as a famine state. Let me say that again: If you are yo-yoing between dieting and bingeing, you are putting your body through a constant crisis.

      This is a crisis and survival state. Before our current diet culture—which, by the way, is only decades old—the only reason you ever would have eaten less than sufficient food would have been if there was a shortage: a famine. Eating less than you are hungry for triggers your body’s survival mode, changing your hormones and brain chemistry, which then lowers your metabolism and makes you biologically obsessed with food. The mental fixation is actually caused by the physical restriction.

      Food fixation and bingeing are both caused by your body trying to force you off your diet/famine for your survival. If you trusted the food your body was forcing you to eat, followed your natural hunger, and let yourself recover, you’d recover relatively quickly. Your body knows what to do. It might take a few weeks or months, but then your appetite, metabolism, and weight would eventually stabilize.

      But we never let ourselves do that. We don’t let ourselves eat a lot because we don’t trust our appetites or our weight. We have been told that eating a lot is bad, and a sign that we are surely food addicts. In fact, we fight our natural urges to eat a lot and to rest, fearing that we are lazy and irresponsible. We trap ourselves in this famine state, and so the food fixation continues. Then we become one of those old ladies in the nursing home worried that their pudding is going to make them fat.

      When you restrict, your body is wired to compensate for the lack of food, slow down your metabolism, fixate on food, and hold on to weight. When your metabolism is compromised, your body is going to, basically, slowly deteriorate your health in order to keep you alive for as long as it can, in the hopes that one day you will be able to eat a lot again and give your body a chance to repair and recover.

      If you are obsessed with food, you have triggered a famine state. If you are bingeing, you are in a famine state. This is true no matter how much you weigh, or how much you are sure you are already overeating.

      You can put your body in crisis mode even if you are only restricting “a little.” If you are keeping yourself hungry often, it’ll happen. It’s also very important to note that your body can be in this state even if you are not very skinny. Many people who don’t look underfed are in a famine state. This biological and metabolic phenomenon will happen whether you are tiny or fat. The body will need more fat while it recovers no matter what, as a sort of insurance policy.

      It’s hard for us to believe that the cure for our food addiction could possibly be through eating more and letting our body heal from the reactive and food-obsessed famine cycle. We are too afraid of food and calories and weight, so we never recover, and our obsession and bingeing continues. The yo-yo gets worse, our metabolism stays suppressed, our brains fixate on food—and our body puts on weight at any chance it gets.

      We are convinced that our main issue is food addiction and overeating but we are completely oblivious to the fact that it all stems from restriction. In fact, we can argue that fat bodies are wired to resist diet/famine even better. Your body doesn’t want you to lose weight, for fear of an upcoming famine. And through this lens, a fatter body is better wired for survival.

      The СКАЧАТЬ