The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

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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. Diet culture is actually just a subset of our culture at large that’s obsessed with control, and hustling, and personal responsibility, and hyper-productivity.” 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. First of all, Intuitive Eating is a book written by two registered dietitian nutritionists, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, that came out in 1995. The book is revolutionary in its genre and field, completely evidence based, and I recommend you read it.

There is nothing helpful in this book. She says it's a book to give up self-help and hustle culture but there's no real help offered and this woman has never hustled (having to take clown and babysitting jobs on the side sometimes is as close as she seemed to get other than one brief period where she had to work as a receptionist and was devastated by how boring, exhausting and not fun it was to work a real job). She has spent decades living off of her parents and now she lives off of the success of her first book and apparently the workshops she developed from it? There is no real advice, and she didn't really "rest" for two years anyway. She continued to act and work, but she stopped trying to date by doing things like using dating apps and she said no to (more) things she didn't want to do, plus she moved to a cheaper city because her parents were going to stop paying for her expensive New York City apartment. From comedian and ex-diet junkie Caroline Dooner, an inspirational guide that will help you stop dieting, reboot your relationship with food, and regain your personal power.

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It’s not a novel idea, it’s basically intuitive eating (but claims to not be intuitive eating) regurgitated with far fewer scientifically based facts and a different name. Disclaimer: As with money topics, we would never presume that there is one universal health solution for everyone. Dieting and weight loss are extremely sensitive subjects — please only continue to read if it is healthy for you to do so. Anyone can benefit from learning to eat intuitively. There is mounting evidence that is showing that focusing on weight loss and restriction does harm to our health long term. Instead, if we focused on feeding ourselves, listening to our bodies, getting out of that yo-yo eating cycle, people have health improvements (even when no weight is lost!).

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 only read Intuitive Eating book once, when I was 18. And I’m not positive if I even finished it because I became a raw vegan 2 weeks later. But I also now understand that the goals of Intuitive Eating and of The F*** It Diet, are the same. The goal of both is to get to a place where you trust your appetite and experience instinctive, natural, easy, normal eating. So, I’m giving this book half a star, because it is a book, that someone took time to write. I’m giving it a second half a star, for the first half of the chapter entitled, “The Mental Part”, for having some decent advice and talk about self love. 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.I don’t even refer to the Intuitive Eating book at all, because my subconscious intention was to not say anything bad about it, but now I don’t feel great about saying nothing about the book either. It seems fairly useless, however, and perhaps outright dangerous, to those of us who have been or are more than 100 pounds overweight.

Another biblical group has more grace but also rules. No more than a fist-sized portion of food as that’s how big your stomach is after all. Great. What happens though when you eat one bite past the portion? Immense guilt. Guilt which leads to bingeing. So far, this seems like an excellent book for people who fit into normal size clothing who torture themselves with diets and other food restrictions. It seems like a great book for people who strive to constantly look like photo shopped magazine models, or buy into the lie that we all need to be a tight size 4 to be happy. 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. 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.

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Not long term. In fact, our bodies are hardwired against it. But each time our diets fail, instead of considering that maybe our ridiculously low-carb diet is the problem, we wonder what’s wrong with us. We berate ourselves for being lazy and weak, double down on our belief that losing weight is the key to our everlasting happiness, and resolve to do better tomorrow. But it’s time we called a spade a spade: Constantly trying to eat the smallest amount possible is a miserable way to live, and it isn’t even working . So f--k eating like that. When I finally started writing TFID seven years ago, I was radically applying a non-diet, pro-calorie, pro-being-full, “ f*** all diet and weight noise” approach, pro-gaining weight, plus a Health at Every Size (R) and feminist lens too.

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.

Says that I shouldn’t workout when I’m tired, because that’ll mess up my metabolism for reasons not stated or cited This was just a hot mess. A whiny, self-absorbed, annoying, not at all relatable, boring, cringe-worthy hot mess. I cannot recommend it. I went in, looking for another cure-it-all self-help book, but it blew my mind. Long story short, I'm burned out AF, and I felt every struggle and thought the author described because I have them too. Ironically, the only thing I haven't done while trying to fix everything and find happiness is allowing myself to rest. Not even when I took time off from work because "my doctor said I need a pause to reset myself". Book Genre: Feminism, Food, Food and Drink, Health, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Nutrition, Personal Development, Psychology, Self Help