The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner

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      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.

WHAT IS NORMAL EATING?

      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 before eating becomes easy. But you can do this. And by George—whoever George is—I will help you get there if it is the last thing I do.

THE BIG WEIGHT MYTH

       A diet is a cure that doesn’t work, for a disease that doesn’t exist.

       —SARA FISHMAN AND JUDY FREESPIRIT

      We’ve been taught that being fat and gaining weight is unhealthy. It’s what everyone, including your doctor, has been taught. It is our collective belief system. We don’t really even question it—we just know it’s true. Fat = unhealthy. But . . . it’s just not supported by science. There are so many studies that show that weight and health are not as connected as we have been taught, and that dieting is not the cure.³

      Some incredible research on this subject has been done by Linda Bacon, PhD, author of Health at Every Size and Body Respect.⁴ She has her PhD in physiology, and graduate degrees in psychology and exercise metabolism, and signed a pledge not to accept money from the weight loss, pharmaceutical, or food industry when she got her PhD. Decades ago she began researching weight loss to try and figure out how to successfully lose weight and keep it off, but started noticing that dieting and exercising for weight loss always backfired long-term. After people’s initial weight loss, they would gain all their weight back (and more), nearly without fail. Sometimes they would even gain weight when they were still religiously keeping up the diet and exercise regimen that helped them lose weight in the first place. She began to see that our cultural assumptions about the simplicity of weight loss were totally incorrect, so she organized a study to examine this assumption even more deeply.

      The Health at Every Size study followed two groups of women in the “obese”* BMI range over the course of two years. The first group I’m going to call the diet group. They followed a standard weight-loss protocol for obesity that focused on a low-calorie diet and lots of exercise. Their protocol was highly regulated and led by one of the top obesity experts in the country. Everything was figured out for them on their plan, and they had extensive check-ins for support to make sure they had everything they needed to stay on track.

      The second group I’m going to call the intuitive group. They were not told to lose weight, but instead to learn to accept themselves as they were. They started learning to eat instinctively, many of them for the first time after years of dieting. They were taught to listen to their cravings and hunger cues. They were encouraged to enjoy their food and to eat things that made them feel good. They were given permission to move in ways that made them feel good. They were led through exercises in self-forgiveness and self-love, and were guided to heal their shame and guilt over their eating and weight. Essentially, they were taught shame-free intuitive eating.

      One of Linda’s colleagues was worried that the intuitive group would ruin their health, so she insisted on testing the nondieters’ blood lipids and blood pressure three months into the study—and if the markers were getting worse, they’d stop the study. Linda agreed and three months in they were tested, but nothing was wrong with them, so they continued eating what they wanted.

      This is what happened over the course of this two-year study: at the beginning, the diet group lost lots of weight and their health markers improved, just like we all assumed they would. Calorie restriction leads to weight loss; weight loss leads to better health.

      But by the end of the two years, not only had 41 percent of the dieting participants dropped out, but the people who stayed had gained all the weight back—and then some. These women were collectively heavier than they were when they started, СКАЧАТЬ