The F*ck It Diet

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.

WHAT IS NORMAL EATING?

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.

THE BIG WEIGHT MYTH

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.