Читать книгу The F*ck It Diet - Caroline Dooner - Страница 10
ONE WHY ARE WE SO ADDICTED TO FOOD?
ОглавлениеDo 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 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 body does not like it when you try to control food intake. It doesn’t understand you are trying to fit into absurdly small jeans. It fights back against famine and restriction for your survival, and the more you diet, the harder it fights back.
THE MINNESOTA STARVATION EXPERIMENT
During World War II, there was a starvation study conducted by Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota. He wanted to learn how best to rehabilitate starving people after the war—so first, he had to starve people.
Over four hundred conscientious objectors applied to participate in the study as an alternative to fighting. Only thirty-six men were chosen: those who were the most physically and mentally sound, and who were the most willing and aligned with the goals of the experiment.
The men stayed together in dorm-like rooms connected to the temporary laboratory. They were allowed to leave, but the compound was their home base. For the first three months, the men ate normally while their health was closely monitored. They were fed around 3,200 calories a day, which was considered a normal amount. (Because it is.) They took jobs on the compound and walked around twenty-two miles a week.
Then, for six months, their calories were dramatically cut—in half. They were only served two meals a day, which worked out to roughly 1,600 calories total. The participants were encouraged to keep up their walking.
In this experiment, 1,600 calories was considered “semi-starvation,” which is really horrifying when you realize that this is the same “conservative protocol” used by the FDA to “combat obesity.” You’ve probably seen that calorie number floating around fitness magazines and doctor-prescribed diets. These days, 1,200–1,600 calories is considered an acceptable daily amount of calories for men and women.
Men often run on more calories than women because of both size and muscle composition, but 1,600 is too low for anyone. In fact, even the new 2,000-calorie recommended daily intake “is only enough to sustain children,”2 according to Marion Nestle, PhD and professor of nutrition and food studies at NYU. Let that sink in.
So on only 1,600 calories, the participants’ strength and energy immediately began to decline, and they said they were constantly tired. Then apathy set in. They had all been strongly opinionated conscientious objectors, but now they didn’t really care about any of the things they used to care about. Next, sex and romance lost its appeal.
All their thoughts became about food. They became completely fixated on thinking, talking, and reading about food. (Sound familiar?) Some began to read and stare at cookbooks for hours, mealtimes became their favorite part of the day, they’d be irritable if they weren’t fed on time, and even though their food was bland bread, milk, beans, or vegetables, they thought it tasted amazing. Many men would mix their food with water to prolong the meal, or drag out meals for two hours, or sneak food to their rooms to savor it slowly.
The men had access to unlimited coffee, water, and chewing gum in between meals, and the men became addicted—some of them chewing forty packs of gum a day, and having around fifteen cups of coffee.
The men, who had been, on average, healthy and muscular to start, became extremely skeletal during those six months. Their heart rates slowed way down, and the men were cold all the time—both symptoms of low metabolism and the body trying to conserve energy. Their blood volume shrank, their hearts shrank, and they developed edema and retained water. Their skin became coarse, they were dizzy, lacked coordination, and experienced muscle soreness.
On the bright side, the whites 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 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.
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, even though they were all still dedicated and trying to stick to the diet.
What’s even more interesting is that their health markers and self-esteem became worse than they had been when they started two years before. For both groups, they were testing blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL, depression symptoms, and more. All that dieting backfired big-time. And, as you can imagine, they all felt horrible about themselves. So the diet group ended the two years less healthy than they started, even though they were still sticking to their plans. Dieting not only made them heavier, but it screwed with their health.
And the intuitive group? The ones who strove to live healthfully and happily as they were? After two years that group had not collectively lost any weight; however, all of their health markers improved. (Again, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL, depression symptoms, etc.) They learned to live, move, and eat intuitively, learned to forgive themselves, and start doing activities for the pure joy of it, and they became healthier without losing any weight, while still being in the “obese” BMI range. They were able to improve their health without any weight loss at all.
This debunks two deeply entrenched cultural myths: First, it shows that diets don’t work long-term. No matter how much support and willpower you have, even if you stick to your diet, there is a biological and metabolic backlash. We believe diets must work because we initially lose weight, and initially improve health. So when things go south and blow up in our faces, we assume it’s our own fault. We don’t understand the long-term effects of the diet: the weight regain, how bad it is for our health and metabolism, and the fact that we get into a miserable cycle of self-blame. Really, it’s our body’s weight-regulation system that is actually running the show all along.
The second myth we can bust is the idea that thin is healthy and fat is unhealthy. These two groups of women show that you cannot tell someone’s health from their weight. You cannot tell a person’s habits by looking at them. Many fat people are actively on a diet—as they are constantly told to be—and they are trying and failing to lose weight. You just can’t tell from looking at a person.
Weight is also not as in control of our health as we think. The Health at Every Size movement is asking us to switch our goal from weight loss to healthy, life-affirming habits. Our habits dictate the health we can control, and genetics and other social, emotional, or environmental variables dictate the rest.
Blaming people for their health isn’t fair or productive, because healing is not easy, cheap, or straightforward. Wouldn’t it be nice if health were as simple as eating and exercising a certain way? But it’s not. There is no surefire way to avoid illness. Health nuts get cancer and heart attacks all of the time. And doctors and scientists disagree about the healthiest way to eat all of the time.
Of course, we want to be healthy. Of course. Wanting to be healthy isn’t the problem, but it does ignore how much of it is out of our hands. It’s ignoring that right now at this very moment we are both thriving and dying, and that if we could actually control it, the little 106-year-old Italian woman who smoked and chugged olive oil every day and cited “not marrying again” as the secret to her longevity wouldn’t be the centenarian—we would be. We would be, and we would credit kombucha and sprouts and be so, so proud of ourselves. But that’s not how life works. And it’s not how health and longevity work either.
There’s even lots of research showing that people in the overweight BMI category live longer than people deemed “normal” weight, and that people who are even moderately obese live at least as long as people with “normal” BMIs. Yep. It’s true.5
Weight-loss studies rarely look at the impact of health and weight regain over time, because it’s hard and expensive to do. They usually just focus on immediate, short-term, and temporary weight loss and improvement.
For everyone who is still sure that giving up on dieting means giving up on their health, here are some tidbits that will be helpful to hear:
One of the biggest indicators of weight is genetics.6 We all have “set points,” weight ranges that the body will try to maintain. No matter how you are eating or moving, there is a weight range your body wants to be in—some people’s are higher, and some are lower. Your body will adjust your metabolism in order to keep you in your set point range.7 We do know that dieting has been seen to raise weight set points.8 Meaning that your body will have a new normal at a higher weight than it was before you started dieting. Survival.
Exercise is one of the best things we can do for our health—but in moderation.9 Exercise doesn’t need to be painful or miserable. In fact, it is way better for you as joyful movement and something that feels good to you—not punishment. Too much forced10 exercise isn’t good for your body or longevity either.11 Just like dieting, exercise won’t necessarily change weight long-term.
Social status and feelings of personal power have more impact on your health than even your health habits.12 Autonomy and control over your day, your job, your activities, your money, and your life leads to more contentment, which is great for your overall health. And the acute stress that comes from being marginalized or powerless, or feeling shame and prejudice, are all terrible for your health,13 regardless of weight or even the way you eat. The way you are treated, and treat yourself, affects your health.
Not feeling you have any power in your life can make you sicker than any of your health habits14 . . . that’s huge. Experiencing discrimination, or even just perceived discrimination,15 is terrible for your health. And traumatic experiences that are completely out of our control can have major impacts on our health long-term as well. For instance, survivors of the Holocaust concentration camps had significantly higher rates of fibromyalgia,16 even decades later. And survivors of childhood abuse are at higher risk for having autoimmune disorders.17
What this all really means is that we have been blaming ourselves for our health and our weight, when in reality there is so much that is out of our control. And what this also means is that social change, kindness, and empowering ourselves and others will end up being more helpful and important to our collective health than any “war on obesity.” There are unhealthy fat people and healthy fat people, unhealthy thin people and healthy thin people. Losing weight does not guarantee you good health, especially if the weight loss happens in a self-punishing way.
The Health at Every Size study is eye-opening and liberating—but it can also freak people out. Because what lots of people hear is, “You mean . . . even if I learn to eat normally, I’m stuck in this body forever!?” What’s important to realize is that we can’t control our weight long-term. We’ve tried. You’ve tried. And if you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve consistently failed to keep control—and now here you are.
The good news is, the calmer and more fed your body is, the better it will work, and the healthier and more stable your weight and appetite will be. Bodies end up right where they belong when you stop trying to control weight. The only thing we can control is how we treat ourselves, and learning to feed ourselves normally. And the sooner you can accept that your body will handle this whole weight thing for you, the sooner your health and life will improve.
GUESS WHICH INDUSTRY MAKES $60 BILLION A YEAR?
Think about how much money you have spent chasing weight loss. How many books have you bought? How many plans have you subscribed to? How many protein bars? How much money on Fitbits and other weird gadgets? How many pounds of almond flour? How much money have you hemorrhaged for the diet industrial complex? And what have you gotten out of it? Chronic low energy, and a deepening distrust in your seemingly insatiable appetite?
The diet industrial complex is made up of weight-loss programs (like Weight Watchers and SlimFast), pharmaceutical and medical companies that make weight-loss drugs, supplements, or procedures, and any other company selling beauty and “health.” These companies thrive on people believing that they are addicted to food, and that weight loss is the answer to all their problems. And they benefit from all of us feeling insecure, hating our bodies, and believing that we are just five pounds away from becoming the woman we are meant to beeeeeeee, and at the same time five pounds away in the other direction, from destroying our health.
No matter what they want you to believe, these are businesses, not philanthropic charities. They do not care about you. They make no promise to do no harm. And these businesses each make hundreds of millions because their products and solutions don’t work long-term. Because if they did, people would buy one book, or one membership, and become “cured.” Then the companies would lose that customer and revenue stream.
It may seem like weight-loss companies sprung up in response to an “obesity epidemic,” but when you actually look at the timeline, the opposite is arguably more true. The “obesity epidemic” only came around in the mid-1980s—after people had already been spending decades using cigarettes as appetite suppressants, using amphetamines, ephedra, and Dexatrim, the grapefruit diet of the 1930s, and the cabbage soup diet of the 1950s. Weight Watchers started in the 1960s, and SlimFast came around in the 1970s. But the number of “obese” Americans didn’t soar until the 1980s and 1990s, when it doubled among adults in the United States.18 We all assume it’s because of our portion sizes and sedentary lifestyles, but the 1980s and ’90s were when exercise became mainstream, and low-fat and diet foods and fake sugar were all the rage. Then low-carb became popular, but “obesity” has continued to rise despite all of our dieting. Do you see how this doesn’t entirely add up? Our collective dieting became more and more widespread first, and collective weights have only risen after, likely because of, and in response to, our dieting and fucked-up eating.
Beauty, health, and weight-loss companies have been telling women what is acceptable and attractive since marketing companies have existed. And we’ve always been suckers for it. We all want to be beautiful, and of course we do when we are taught how important it is for our future happiness, career, love life, personal Instagram lifestyle brand, whatever. But diets and body dissatisfaction are also more likely part of the cause of rising weight set points, not the cure. Dieting is directly related to people feeling more and more out of control with food.
But companies who sell weight loss have always been seen as the good guys. They want to help us become thin and healthy and happy! Weight Watchers is trying to rebrand because they just want us to live our best lives! Fuck no. They don’t care about you. Don’t blindly accept that they exist to save us from ourselves. They have always had a vested interest in perpetuating our deep cultural bias against weight, and creating products and programs that only work temporarily so you keep coming back again and again.
A scary truth is that companies that sell weight-loss programs and drugs also have a lot of power at the policy-making level and often fund the studies being used by the medical community. And many weight-loss drug companies sponsor doctors and public health initiatives. One example is our reliance on the bullshit BMI standard.
BMI takes no actual health factors into account. It can’t tell you anything about your blood pressure, your glucose levels, your hormones, your metabolism, your strength, your stamina, your bone density, your cholesterol, your immunity, your cellular respiration . . . nothing. It’s literally just a math equation: weight in relation to height, and it was first published by a life insurance company in 1959 as a way of explaining their rates. This was criticized by scientists because the equation it was based on was never meant to be used for individual diagnosis.
But doctors and insurance companies liked the simplicity of the equation, and so the BMI scale became widely used in 1985 by the National Institutes of Health. Then in 1998, the World Health Organization relied on the International Obesity Task Force to create updated BMI recommendations. And at the time, the two biggest funders of the International Obesity Task Force were the pharmaceutical companies that had the only weight-loss drugs on the market. The task force changed the BMI cutoffs on a whim, and overnight millions of Americans switched from being “normal weight” to “overweight.”19 Thanks a lot, lobbyists.
The whole thing is arbitrary, because many studies have found that higher BMIs actually have lower mortality rates.20 And many studies have shown that weight loss or too much exercise has been associated with poorer health, higher stress hormones, and increased mortality.21 And still, people are told they’re unhealthy based on their BMI, even if their health is otherwise perfectly fine. It’s just assumed. Oh, you’re in the overweight category? You must be unhealthy.
We can easily compare the diet industrial complex (or “Big Diet”) to the military industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Oil, or Big Tobacco. These are all made up of powerful companies who tend to care way more about profit than anyone’s well-being, safety, or the future of the planet, and who have the resources to sway both public opinion and policies that benefit their own interests. In her book Dispensing with the Truth, Alicia Mundy calls it “Obesity, Inc.” and talks about the million-dollar funding that Weight Watchers and other groups contributed to Shape Up America!, an organization that was part of a strategy to turn obesity into a disease (!!!) so it could be “treated” by the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries. That’s one reason why I keep putting “obesity” in quotes. It was created by lobbyists.
Our cultural weight bias is so deeply entrenched that even the scientific community isn’t immune to it. Bias has the ability to skew the way people interpret and share data; it’s called publication bias. Results can be marginalized by the scientific establishment, or even by the researchers themselves, because they don’t fit with what is considered to be the truth at the time.22 Scientists’ reputations are at stake when they publish data, and scientists who find results that don’t fit with current beliefs have been frozen out of positions, funding, or committees.
Not only that, but most of the studies on weight and obesity that we hear about are ones that are funded by these pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies. Even ones touted by doctors and the government are funded by Big Diet. And when the results don’t tell the companies what they want to hear, the companies just ignore the studies altogether.
Drug companies also use tens of millions of dollars to lobby for the approval of drugs that have previously not been approved (because they are dangerous or simply don’t work). Drug companies also gave lots of money to medical groups and doctors so they would encourage their patients to use diet drugs.23 In the UK, the National Obesity Forum was partially sponsored by a number of pharmaceutical companies that just happened to manufacture the very drugs that the doctors were suggesting to combat the “obesity epidemic.”24 This is a huge conflict of interest, but this is a consistent phenomenon with big businesses—Big Diet is no exception.
Basically . . . Big Diet is not on your side. It never has been. And not only that, it’s all as corrupt as the oil companies back in the 1950s paying off scientists to claim that lead gas wasn’t bad for us (hellooooo lead poisoning!), and those cigarette ads kindly teaching us that most doctors smoked Camels.
I’m not sharing this information to depress you—I want to empower you. In order to break free from our fucked-up relationship to food and our bodies, we need to start seeing through the bullshit fed to us. We need to start being our own advocates, in the doctor’s office and when people start making hyped-up claims about weight loss and health. Anyone who tries to heal their eating without dealing with the elephant in the room—our own weight stigma against ourselves—will not be able to find real freedom and intuition with food. It’s all too connected.
Let’s also talk about the most important and controversial F-word in this book: fat. I am going to be using the word fat, and I want to explain why. It has become such a loaded word because we’ve believed that being fat is one of the worst things that we could be. We assume that using the word fat is automatically an insult, because people have used it as an insult for such a long time. In the 1800s, even before people had assumptions about fat people’s health, fat people were seen as “uncivilized,” but were also thought to be healthier 25 (probably because many of them were).
These days, one of the reasons that people think being fat has remained an “acceptable” open prejudice is because we think that people’s weight is fully their own fault—that their weight means something about who they are as a person, and that therefore we get to pass judgment and target them, so we feel better about our own miserable little lives.
Hopefully it goes without saying that whether people’s weight is in their control or not, treating a human being poorly because of how they look, or how we perceive their health to be, is cruel. It’s never been okay and it never will be, misinformation or not. Fat people are subjected to constant judgment and scrutiny, they get dismissed by doctors, they are passed over for jobs and used as the punch line of jokes. And we all hope that if we can just work really, really hard not to be fat, then we can avoid the misery we put them through. We can avoid being the punch line of jokes, or being called a fat bitch.
Our relationship with weight, and our deep fear of becoming fat ourselves, is one of the biggest causes of our dysfunction with food. Neutralizing the word fat, as well as the actual body type, is a really essential step in healing your relationship to food. No matter what we weigh, our fear of being fat is fucking with us all.
There are lots of fat people who are reclaiming the word fat for themselves—and unlike words like curvy and chubby, the word fat isn’t a euphemism. The word fat is allowed to be neutral. That doesn’t mean that every fat person wants to be called fat, especially since many people still use the word as an insult, but there is a world where people are self-identifying as fat and trying to take away the stigma of the word and the body type itself.
Words like obese and overweight are judgmental, medicalized words that were basically made up by Big Diet for profit. So unless I’m referring to studies that use BMI directly, I won’t use those terms either, and if I do, they’ll be in quotes.
All of this being said, I am not fat and I cannot speak for fat people. I recommend you also listen to what fat people have to say about their experiences. But for now, I am going to be using the word fat in this book. To paraphrase Hermione Granger, fear of a word just increases fear of the thing itself. I think that applies here.
Have you ever noticed how fad diets can become cultish? It took me a long time to see the parallel, because I was in the cult, and cult members never think they are part of a cult.
Whether you consider yourself religious or not, looking at the parallel between diets and religions, and the societal roles they play, can be very illuminating. For better or worse, depending on your outlook, we are generally a more secular culture than we used to be, and in a way, dieting is filling a role similar to the one that religions used to fill. For many of us, dieting has become our new religion, and food and weight have become our morality.
Looking at the positive side of religion, it offers community, structure, ritual, and an attempt at spreading kindness, love, spirituality, healing, acceptance, and charity.
On the dark side, religions have historically taken advantage of shame and dogma, and ignited our “fear of the other” and people who are different from us. People start feeling like they know the one true way. They have figured it out. OUR way is right, THEIR way is wrong. We need to convert the heathens who have yet to see the light and teach them the error of their ways.
It is the kind of moral superiority that we use to try and make ourselves feel temporarily safe. And through the ages, so many acts in the name of religion have been used as an outlet for the darkest parts of humanity. Witch burning. Holy wars. Refusing to make cakes for people whose personal lives you don’t agree with.
So how is this like dieting? Diets seem to offer health, structure, purity, safety, nourishment, nutrition, sometimes environmental responsibility, and—we all hope—a better life.
But diets feed into the exact same human fear that causes holy wars: I know the way. WE know the way, and you don’t. We are doing this right, and you are doing this wrong. We are following the moral and right way to live. This way of living will keep me safe and on the path of righteousness. I need you to hear the good word of coconut oil and follow my coconut oil path.
I don’t eat grains because I am smart and informed and responsible. I know ALL about phytic acid, and you should too, because YOU are fat and eating all the wrong THINGS.
We evangelize, we spread the good news, and in a strange way, through diets, we are also seeking salvation and eternal life. It is our way of convincing ourselves that we are safe. It lets us feel better for a moment because at least we’re doing better than them. It’s the dark side of humanity wrapped up in a new cult.
And let me tell you! I have been a member of some diiiiet cults. (Mostly through online diet message boards.) I was a disciple! I spread the word. I drank the organic probiotic Kool-Aid. I paid the membership fees ($30 for a jar of raw sprouted almond butter). I’ve been a sucker. I’ve been judgmental. I thought I was possessed by the devil of refined sugar and food addiction. I’ve been there, and I speak firsthand.
I know what it feels like to believe. I know what it feels like to think that your cult is, well, first of all, not a cult. But I know what it feels like to believe that your diet is the right way. I know how safe it feels to follow a plan and really, really hope and believe that it will actually deliver on all of its promises.
And it all stems from fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of mortality. Fear of imperfection. Fear of losing control. Fear of aging. Fear of not being safe. Fear of the sins of the flesh. It’s sad, it’s lonely, it’s isolating, and it is so, so human.
Part of the big problem with the diet and beauty industries (and many other industries that capitalize on your insecurities) is that your fears are being exploited. They want you to believe you aren’t good enough as you are. They make you believe we are all supposed to look the same. They want you to believe that you need them to save you.
So if there’s any part of you that’s looking at me and hoping you end up where I ended up, or looking at anyone else and hoping to end up where they ended up, that’s a habit that I want you to become aware of. It’s a very human habit, we all do it, but it’s not helping. Trying to be someone else is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Your best self is probably the one who trusts yourself the most, is able to relax and be social when you feel like it, and is able to seek quiet time when you need it. Someone who is able to be spontaneous when it suits you, and willing to take up space, speak up, take risks, use your creativity, is willing for things to be messy and imperfect—and is an all-around happier human.
Some people are hesitant to go on The Fuck It Diet because they don’t know if they actually like who they really are. They’re not sure if who they really are is that special or interesting or attractive enough. I get it. That’s a scary thing to think. Thanks to lots of insidious messages from the media, from princess fairy tales, from family, from dysfunctional relationships, from other insecure women, or from diet, drug, fashion, and beauty companies, it can be hard to trust that you’re actually okay as you are, and that you don’t need to change or appease anyone. We’ll be exploring these concepts even more later in the book.
I want you to free yourself from diet cults, but I’m not ragging on God. I am a big fan of spirituality and “whatever word you’d like to use for God.” But beware of dogma. You can tell it’s all going south when you are experiencing lots of fear, judgment, and feel all-holier-than-thou.
Here is where I also tell you that once anyone starts making The Fuck It Diet into a cult—including hypothetical, foolish future-me—that is when you remember that you are your own boss, and that your own intuition is king.
Right before my own Fuck It Diet epiphany, I was paleo and kicking myself for eating too many bananas. It was around the holidays, and I was bingeing daily on paleo ginger snaps and paleo pumpkin pie made out of butternut squash and honey.
This had been my pattern for ten years. I would follow a diet religiously for a month or two or ten, and eventually find myself constantly hungry and thinking about food. Then I’d start to really take advantage of the “allowed” foods, normally bingeing on them at midnight. I would be furious with myself and every morning would try to regain control. Eventually I’d stop the diet completely, heartbroken that it didn’t heal me, or my bingeing, or my food addiction, and move on to another diet.
And now, here I was again, gaining weight again because I couldn’t even stick to a reasonable, very-low-carb paleolithic diet like the one our ancestors apparently ate. Get it together, Caroline!
My first inkling that something might be truly wrong, beyond my self-diagnosed “food addiction,” was when I started walking by the mirror and having really opposite reactions just a few minutes apart. I’d walk by and think, WOAH, I’m actually really thin . . . weird. I guess I didn’t gain ten pounds from all the almond flour ginger snaps I ate in bed last night.
Then a few minutes later I’d walk by the same mirror and think, WHAT!? How am I so big!? Oh GOD! Look at my FACE! Then the next morning, Wait, wait, I actually do look thin. WTF. I felt crazy.
It was only a month later when I had what I refer to as “my epiphany.” I was staring in the mirror over my bathroom sink, and it hit me like a bolt of understanding. I realized that my dysfunction with food was never going to change if I kept getting into this cycle over and over again. It would never change if I held on to my need to be skinny. In one moment it became so clear to me that not only was dieting metabolically backfiring, but my relationship to my weight was the core cause of my misery.
What came after the epiphany was hard, but the decision in that moment was simple. I intuitively believed that if I could surrender to the process, it would all work itself out—mind, body, and spirit. Nobody could promise me that it would work out, but on a deep level I knew that if I could be brave and embrace a higher weight, and feed my body what it needed, then I’d be free.
Most of the people I work with have already tried to heal their eating. They’ve tried intuitive eating or some other version of “just be balanced” or “just listen to your body.” They come to The Fuck It Diet after being so frustrated that they Google “Why doesn’t intuitive eating work?!” Really. That’s the number-one search phrase that brings people to my site.
If you’ve tried to heal your eating by not dieting before, and it didn’t work, that is most likely because you were ignoring your relationship to your weight and still trying to make intuitive eating into some kind of diet. Most of us think that if we can just “eat intuitively,” we will eat like a bird and become the naturally thin and happy version of ourselves. So many of us try to heal our eating without changing our relationship to weight as well. Ignoring how closely our feelings about eating and weight relate to each other is our big mistake.
Before my last-ditch-effort diet on paleo that led to The Fuck It Diet, I thought I was “eating intuitively” for six years. I thought that intuitive eating was the same as “sensible portion control.” I thought my “successful” stint of trying to eat like a “French woman” was intuitive eating. But it’s all a fucking diet in sheep’s clothing.
Now I realize that the entire time I thought I was eating intuitively, I was still focused on weight, and still scared of most foods, whether I was letting myself eat them or not. My intuitive eating was still used to try to eat less, which is inherently going to backfire.
Think of all of the unspoken things that dieting promises: that if you follow this simple four-month plan, you will become someone else—someone better. Eat only raw foods and practice daily sungazing at dawn, and not only will you be beautiful, but you will transcend this earthly plane. The promise is that with lots of willpower, you can obtain a perfect body, and when you do you can finally be proud. If you follow someone else’s rules, everything will finally become perfect and easy. And if you let yourself slip and gain weight, you should be ashamed.
Obviously, all of this is a recipe for physical, mental, emotional, and existential disaster.
The Fuck It Diet promises none of those things. You will probably not obtain your old definition of a perfect body. But you will get your calmest, happiest body, without the extra stress and yo-yo and impaired metabolism. And to get there, you can’t follow anyone’s rules but your own. Not even my rules, because my whole goal is to get you to a place where you are able to trust and follow your impulses and intuition and appetite, without the absurd pressure of weight control and weight loss.
Before diets—even if you can’t remember it—there was a time when you knew how to eat, and you didn’t see yourself or your worth based on weight or food, even if that was all the way back when you were a little kid.
This is no longer a journey of control, willpower, and perfection. This is a journey back to whoever you were before diets, before you veered away from yourself and went down a path that took you here, reading this book. That diet path was a path of listening to what other people expected and wanted of you, and the never-ending saga of trying desperately to get approval from anyone and everyone but yourself. You can keep trying to grasp onto that control, but it will continue to be the miserable, tragic, exhausting saga that it has already been.
This book is going to encourage you to unlearn all of the things that made you stop trusting yourself. And you will have to relearn all of the things that will allow you to trust yourself again. What this also means is that your specific journey is going to look different from the next person’s.
It’s important to say that this book is not a quick fix. The Fuck It Diet is basically a life-and-heart overhaul. This isn’t a thirty-day Fat-Burning Extravaganza and “now you’re happy and beautiful forever” kind of thing. It’s not a “this new shiny-and-matte lipstick will never come off and you’ll be beautiful and impressive and happy all weekend” kind of thing. It will probably be really scary, because I’m asking you to let go of so many of the things that used to make you feel safe and worthy. Instead, I want to help you find ways to feel worthy that transcend the way you look or how impressive you convince yourself and other people you are.
The rest of this book will be helping to heal your relationship to food and weight: How to actually live a life without diets.
There are four parts that make up The Fuck It Diet journey, so to speak: physical, emotional, mental, and then the final thriving part once you have your life back. Fair warning: because this is a book, I had to choose an order, but these steps are not really linear at all. I wish for both of our sakes that they were, because it would make going on The Fuck It Diet easier. It may be helpful to plan on reading this book twice. The first time through, just take in the different things you may experience, and then the second time, slowly address all the areas yourself and apply the exercises more deeply. But again, you’re the boss. You do what feels right.
THE PHYSICAL PART
In this section, we are going to reverse physical restriction and its biological effects by eating. This is the part that usually shifts the quickest. It’s not as difficult or complicated as you might think to take the body out of crisis mode. All it takes is a lot of food and rest. Luckily for you, getting out of the biological starvation mode will directly help a good chunk of your obsessive mental fixation on food, too.
THE EMOTIONAL PART
Next we are going to talk about our emotions, and how important it is to come back into our bodies and feel what’s waiting to be felt. We will address emotional eating, how it is different from bingeing, and how to address it without restricting. We will also be talking about another survival state in this section: our old friend fight-or-flight, and how this state is directly tied to old unresolved emotions. Becoming more willing to feel all of the things you have avoided and pushed down through the years will help not only your relationship with food, but everything else in your life too.
THE MENTAL PART
Whether we know it or not, we have absorbed so many rules about eating, food, and weight that don’t serve us. These rules become our beliefs, which are able to affect everything we do and think and feel. Our beliefs have a lot of power over us, especially if they are lurking in the shadows. So in this section you are going to learn how to become aware of your beliefs, and learn tools to lessen their power over you so you can begin to see clearly again. Whew!
THE THRIVING PART
My ultimate goal is to get you fully intuitive with food. Once you get out of your own way when it comes to eating, this is where the fun stuff happens. In this last section we focus more on deep rest, self-care, boundaries, figuring out what you actually enjoy, and more. This is where you get to really discover who you want to be without the distraction of food and weight.
Throughout this book I will also be sharing five main tools that will act as your anchors on The Fuck It Diet. They are all very, very simple, and will not take that much time, but they will make a huge difference. Don’t let their simplicity fool you; they are game changers. These are the five tools that I hope you take with you into your life after you finish this book.
But! None of this healing happens by thinking about eating or thinking about giving up control over food—it only happens by doing it.
And with that being said, let’s do it.
