The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

Product Information

My blood pressure would climb to dangerous levels from dill potato chips and BBQ Pringles. I'd get fat from bagels and Nutella and in all likelihood develop type 2 diabetes.

The secret to finding a diet that works isn’t even about what you’re eating — it’s about entirely changing your mindset on diets in general. Today I am sharing my conversation with Irene Lyon, a trauma expert, educator, and trained somatic practitioner. We talk about some of the basics of the nervous system, the body holding onto trauma, and some myths and misconceptions about how healing works. However, my experience with official Intuitive Eating and the official Intuitive Eating book is actually pretty limited, which means the way that I’ve referred to it (or not referred to it) should probably be examined. In fact, the book Intuitive Eating and Geneen Roth’s books are mixed up in my mind at this very moment as I write this. Maybe that’s because there is a hunger scale in both of them? (And I DEF turned that hunger scale into a diet.) But I still never re-read the book to see where my own application and interpretation had gone wrong. I kept thinking I’d figured out something that the book didn’t understand or only half explained. And because I kept seeing so many people market a bastardized version of intuitive eating as a way to lose weight, it just further confirmed that assumption. This book talks about how damaging yo-yo dieting is. It quotes studies that have been done on what not eating properly does to your body and highlights that being overweight does not mean you are not healthy and the same the other way around, there are some people who are slim and look healthy, yet they are not.

Create Account

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. 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.” We live in a diet culture, where everything is tinged with the belief that thinner is better and that less food is better — both things that can actually do a lot of damage and are squarely not true. So, in that way, I hope that my writing and my book can actually reframe food, weight, and health for anyone. But my target audience, and the people I write my “how to step out of the diet cycle” content for, are chronic dieters. 3. Who can benefit from learning to eat intuitively? Why/how? I definitely did not agree with the author's "this works for everyone" approach. What I've learned in my 35 year weight battle is that everybody is different and there is no magic bullet for every person. The author was able to reintroduce sugar and eat it intuitively without binging, cravings, etc. That is not my experience with sugar, even when I ate sugar/carbs whenever I wanted them, I always always always wanted more. If I didn't reach some kind of equilibrium in 6 years, when was it going to happen for me?

It is and it isn’t. They have the same goal: body trust, appetite trust, and food trust , with different ways of teaching and explaining how to get there. 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. Randomly mentions eating probiotics, fermented food, and adrenal support supplements (what?) on a list of “ways to improve your health with no weight loss or gyms”, without mentioning this anywhere else I was a chronic dieter and for 10 years. I would diet and binge and diet and binge, and I genuinely believed I was a food addict because all I did was think about food, and stuff my face whenever my resolve weakened. The more I dieted, the more and more out of control with food I became. But of course, instead of understanding the cycle I was in, and how much we are wired to be fixated on food when we diet…I just blamed my own willpower.But I was f***ing starving all the time. I cried a lot. I had weird food rituals to try and make sure I didn’t eat “more than my body needed”. I drank a lot of wine and coffee. And still thought about food nonstop. 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.

This was just a hot mess. A whiny, self-absorbed, annoying, not at all relatable, boring, cringe-worthy hot mess. I cannot recommend it. Once you get yourself out of survival mode, it will become easier and easier to eat what your body really needs - a healthier relationship with food ultimately leads to a healthier you.

Want a Week's Worth of Healthy Trader Joe's Recipes?

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. 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 think the most important step is to learn about the science behind weight and food and health, and basically how we’ve been misled for profit. If you can see how you’ve been continuously told you’re not good enough for profit, that anger and frustration can help motivate you forward. My book goes through the basics, and then for people who want to go even further, the book Body Respect by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor go extensively into the science. You can also read this online journal. The other important thing to do is to start following more diverse bodies on social media. Studies have shown that only seeing very skinny models and actresses in our media has trained our brains to believe that’s the only beautiful and acceptable kind of body to have, and this can actually cause perpetuate feelings of shame, which affects our relationship with food, too. And so what we have to do now is retrain our brains. 8. Anything else you want people reading this to know? Content warning (I don’t know if this is a thing that is normally given a content warning but I think I would’ve liked to know) there is a lot about Dooner’s dental procedures.