Getting to 'F*ck It'
I’ve been working through the “F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy” by Caroline Dooner the last few weeks, and it has been exactly what I’ve needed. Until now, almost five months in on my quest to heal my relationship with food, “Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch had been my primary guide. While it’s been revised several times over its 28 years, it is largely the original framework dieticians Tribole and Resch created to help guide their patients to food and diet freedom. With its 10 principles for ditching diets and diet culture and making peace with food, it was a solid starting point.
But from Day 1 of this journey, I’ve had trouble calling what I’m doing intuitive eating. Probably because after a lifetime of dieting, none of it felt intuitive. Also because I knew it would be a long process, perhaps many years, to get to a place of peace or mastery with intuitive eating, where I wasn’t challenging every bite or questioning every food choice, and where I wasn’t overeating or under eating, where I was simply sated. Basically, it felt weird to say I was eating intuitively when I feel like it would take years before I was actually an intuitive eater. But what really kept me from talking about what I was doing was my in-progress body. How would I explain to, let’s face it, most of the planet that I’m following a framework for eating that would almost certainly lead to weight gain, especially initially, as my body worked to get to its ideal place?
Many elements of “Intuitive Eating,” especially rejecting diet culture and honoring hunger, got me on the path to success, but some five months in, there was still an undercurrent of unrest, something wasn’t working for me. When I read the “F*ck It Diet,” it became clear. You see, no matter what I did in the name of following intuitive eating, I was still operating with the goal of eating the smallest amount possible to get me to a minimum level of satisfaction.
Thanks to “Intuitive Eating,” I was more mindfully eating, checking in with my hunger cues and plotting them on my mental hunger scale as I chewed, because I was still thinking, “I need to stop as soon as I get the first sign my body might be getting full.” Because I was now eating way more food and more frequently, I was still feeling like it was “wrong” or like it was a temporary stage of intuitive eating that I needed to get past ASAP. There were questions and judgment too.
I had thoughts like … I just ate two hours ago. Can I really be hungry again?
Is this real hunger or emotional hunger?
Should I be hungry this late at night?
I questioned whether I should be having dessert before bed, even if it was only a few bites. In the morning, I deliberated about my food choices and how filling they were. I was second guessing why I still wanted chocolate for breakfast three months into intuitive eating.
Shouldn’t I be craving healthy food for breakfast yet? Is this normal? What’s wrong with me?
The “F*ck It Diet” spends a large portion of the book addressing the need to give yourself permission to eat, no matter how much it is, no matter when it is, no matter what it is, because it is absolutely critical for the healing process. The “Intuitive Eating” book does too, but it hits differently. Early on, I saw eating whatever I wanted as a temporary step I had to take, a step that would cause temporary weight gain, but would eventually go away. The “F*ck It Diet” set me straight.
Dooner writes, “Even when I thought I was learning to eat intuitively, the goal was still weight loss, therefore the way I was eating was always with that unspoken rule to try and eat the smallest amount possible so I could lose weight.”
That’s exactly what I was doing.
My questions, and the judgment that went along with them, were subtle forms of restriction. They were holding me back from getting to a place of being neutral with food, really neutral with food, because I was still worried about what would happen to my body. This makes sense because my end goal was still to eat intuitively — and be skinny.
I suspect a majority of people who try intuitive eating start from a place of being fed up with diets, especially diets not working. They’re tired of the self-loathing and self-obsession. They see intuitive eating as a salvation, one that is acceptable as long as it doesn’t mean permanent weight gain.
I also suspect many people abandon intuitive eating when they start gaining weight and worry that they will be a larger weight forever. That’s exactly where I was a few weeks ago — questioning whether eating intuitively and rejecting dieting would be worth it. I was stressed over what was happening to my body. I didn’t like the way I looked or physically felt. I was also worried that I would be an outlier, one of those people who genetically have to be heavier, whose set point is much higher than average. What if I ended up really, really heavy?
Since I began this process, my biggest fear was that I would end up grossly larger than I was when I started. That weight gain wouldn’t just be a temporary side effect as my body course corrected from a lifetime of restriction. I prayed that would not be the case or that if it were, I would come to a place of body acceptance. And I had been leaning in hard on that thought the last few weeks as I was struggling in my larger body. The “F*ck It Diet” addresses this head on:
“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 a big mistake.”
Something unexpected happened to me while I was in Raleigh. What finally crystallized for me is that my body size is not my choice. I have been fighting myself for years over something that naturally does not want to be changed. And I could keep fighting, just as I have for years, but it’s really not going to change my body — it just makes me feel bad about myself.
I’m done fighting what isn’t meant to be.