The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

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A lot of my writing over the years has talked about how I turned ( what I thought was) “intuitive eating” and “listening to my body” into a diet. I turned it into a weird stressful attempt to eat the smallest amount possible. I interpreted good advice through a fat-phobic, food fearing, diet culture belief system. Says that I shouldn’t workout when I’m tired, because that’ll mess up my metabolism for reasons not stated or cited I definitely agreed with a few things. I feel the human body is still a "caveman" body - doing anything possible to survive possible famine. I believe that if you overly restrict intake, your body will eventually binge, because it thinks it's starving.

So TFID was developed as a separate way to become a normal, instinctive eater, while also examining why my first attempts at “intuitive eating” had so epically failed. And in my book, beyond talking about the way we eat, there’s a lot of focus on diet culture, on our emotions, and on our beliefs too. I was going to let myself eat. I was going to let myself gain weight. And I was going to see if it could bring my healing and liberation and a better relationship with food. I’ve had body image issues my whole life for reasons I won’t go into here. But I’m taking control now. I still want to be thin because that’s how I like to see myself, but not because that’s what others want or expect of me. And I’m willing now to trust my body and give it what it wants and let it do its thing. I ride my Peloton bike because I feel stronger each time. Not because I must to lose weight. I wrote the way I needed to hear it explained. I needed to hear more about our relationship to weight. And I needed to be less afraid of eating lots and lots of food. (And clearly I needed someone screaming at me with curse words.)

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The hardest thing about this cycle is that it’s insidious. Dieters keep doubling down on their diet efforts, not realizing that dieting and restriction is fanning the flames of food obsession and cravings in the first place. Add to this two biblical-based weight loss programs, one of which I lost a lot of weight because I was waiting for hunger and eating only until satisfied, and never eating if my stomach didn’t growl. If I ever wanted food outside of physiological hunger, I was to pray to God to fill the void I was looking to food for. It worked for a while until I would want to eat birthday cake at a party but I wasn’t truly hungry. When I didn’t want to be rude, I’d eat it and then feel tremendous guilt and shame. I’d disclose it to people in my group and be further shamed for still living in “my sin.” If I had truly laid my sin down, I wouldn’t have eaten that cake. This was definitely a fun, well-researched book. A little repetitive, but with a topic like this you often have to pound ideas into people’s brains. This book could be a little vague and too all encompassing, it could have almost been two separate books with different topics. But I guess, two for the price of one? I liked the myth busting about diet culture and the relation between health and weigh. I also liked that it was not only an anti-diet book, but a life style book.

I honestly only made it about half way through this book - I RARELY don’t finish a book through once I begin. While I think the overall message of the book is well intentioned and there are some good pieces of information there are definitely parts that I found problematic. Lastly, it was all very pretentious. I get that this is her life experience and her pain is real. But I am really supposed to take life experience advice from a 30 year old who hasn’t really done anything? She’s very clearly wealthy that her parents would pay her rent in NYC for 2 years after college, so it was so hard to relate to her or take her seriously. She’s obviously successful with these books and her seminars, but I feel like everything reeks of privilege. And the plastic surgery as a teenager/young adult was pretty horrifying. I’m pretty sure there’s no earthly way anyone would ever lose weight eating this way, so I’m not sure why they even bother calling it a diet. Actually, I’m fairly certain eating this way is a great way to ensure an early grave.Life is exhausting. And we do not live in a culture that supports and allows for healing from that exhaustion. We live in a culture that sees hyper-productivity and exhaustion as a badge of honor."