The F*ck It Diet

But by the end of the two years, not only had 41 percent of the dieting participants dropped out, but the people who stayed had gained all the weight back—and then some. These women were collectively heavier than they were when they started, even though they were all still dedicated and trying to stick to the diet.

What’s even more interesting is that their health markers and self-esteem became worse than they had been when they started two years before. For both groups, they were testing blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL, depression symptoms, and more. All that dieting backfired big-time. And, as you can imagine, they all felt horrible about themselves. So the diet group ended the two years less healthy than they started, even though they were still sticking to their plans. Dieting not only made them heavier, but it screwed with their health.

And the intuitive group? The ones who strove to live healthfully and happily as they were? After two years that group had not collectively lost any weight; however, all of their health markers improved. (Again, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL, depression symptoms, etc.) They learned to live, move, and eat intuitively, learned to forgive themselves, and start doing activities for the pure joy of it, and they became healthier without losing any weight, while still being in the “obese” BMI range. They were able to improve their health without any weight loss at all.

This debunks two deeply entrenched cultural myths: First, it shows that diets don’t work long-term. No matter how much support and willpower you have, even if you stick to your diet, there is a biological and metabolic backlash. We believe diets must work because we initially lose weight, and initially improve health. So when things go south and blow up in our faces, we assume it’s our own fault. We don’t understand the long-term effects of the diet: the weight regain, how bad it is for our health and metabolism, and the fact that we get into a miserable cycle of self-blame. Really, it’s our body’s weight-regulation system that is actually running the show all along.

The second myth we can bust is the idea that thin is healthy and fat is unhealthy. These two groups of women show that you cannot tell someone’s health from their weight. You cannot tell a person’s habits by looking at them. Many fat people are actively on a diet—as they are constantly told to be—and they are trying and failing to lose weight. You just can’t tell from looking at a person.

Weight is also not as in control of our health as we think. The Health at Every Size movement is asking us to switch our goal from weight loss to healthy, life-affirming habits. Our habits dictate the health we can control, and genetics and other social, emotional, or environmental variables dictate the rest.

Blaming people for their health isn’t fair or productive, because healing is not easy, cheap, or straightforward. Wouldn’t it be nice if health were as simple as eating and exercising a certain way? But it’s not. There is no surefire way to avoid illness. Health nuts get cancer and heart attacks all of the time. And doctors and scientists disagree about the healthiest way to eat all of the time.

Of course, we want to be healthy. Of course. Wanting to be healthy isn’t the problem, but it does ignore how much of it is out of our hands. It’s ignoring that right now at this very moment we are both thriving and dying, and that if we could actually control it, the little 106-year-old Italian woman who smoked and chugged olive oil every day and cited “not marrying again” as the secret to her longevity wouldn’t be the centenarian—we would be. We would be, and we would credit kombucha and sprouts and be so, so proud of ourselves. But that’s not how life works. And it’s not how health and longevity work either.

There’s even lots of research showing that people in the overweight BMI category live longer than people deemed “normal” weight, and that people who are even moderately obese live at least as long as people with “normal” BMIs. Yep. It’s true.5

Weight-loss studies rarely look at the impact of health and weight regain over time, because it’s hard and expensive to do. They usually just focus on immediate, short-term, and temporary weight loss and improvement.

For everyone who is still sure that giving up on dieting means giving up on their health, here are some tidbits that will be helpful to hear:

One of the biggest indicators of weight is genetics.6 We all have “set points,” weight ranges that the body will try to maintain. No matter how you are eating or moving, there is a weight range your body wants to be in—some people’s are higher, and some are lower. Your body will adjust your metabolism in order to keep you in your set point range.7 We do know that dieting has been seen to raise weight set points.8 Meaning that your body will have a new normal at a higher weight than it was before you started dieting. Survival.

Exercise is one of the best things we can do for our health—but in moderation.9 Exercise doesn’t need to be painful or miserable. In fact, it is way better for you as joyful movement and something that feels good to you—not punishment. Too much forced10 exercise isn’t good for your body or longevity either.11 Just like dieting, exercise won’t necessarily change weight long-term.

Social status and feelings of personal power have more impact on your health than even your health habits.12 Autonomy and control over your day, your job, your activities, your money, and your life leads to more contentment, which is great for your overall health. And the acute stress that comes from being marginalized or powerless, or feeling shame and prejudice, are all terrible for your health,13 regardless of weight or even the way you eat. The way you are treated, and treat yourself, affects your health.

Not feeling you have any power in your life can make you sicker than any of your health habits14 . . . that’s huge. Experiencing discrimination, or even just perceived discrimination,15 is terrible for your health. And traumatic experiences that are completely out of our control can have major impacts on our health long-term as well. For instance, survivors of the Holocaust concentration camps had significantly higher rates of fibromyalgia,16 even decades later. And survivors of childhood abuse are at higher risk for having autoimmune disorders.17

What this all really means is that we have been blaming ourselves for our health and our weight, when in reality there is so much that is out of our control. And what this also means is that social change, kindness, and empowering ourselves and others will end up being more helpful and important to our collective health than any “war on obesity.” There are unhealthy fat people and healthy fat people, unhealthy thin people and healthy thin people. Losing weight does not guarantee you good health, especially if the weight loss happens in a self-punishing way.

The Health at Every Size study is eye-opening and liberating—but it can also freak people out. Because what lots of people hear is, “You mean . . . even if I learn to eat normally, I’m stuck in this body forever!?” What’s important to realize is that we can’t control our weight long-term. We’ve tried. You’ve tried. And if you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve consistently failed to keep control—and now here you are.

The good news is, the calmer and more fed your body is, the better it will work, and the healthier and more stable your weight and appetite will be. Bodies end up right where they belong when you stop trying to control weight. The only thing we can control is how we treat ourselves, and learning to feed ourselves normally. And the sooner you can accept that your body will handle this whole weight thing for you, the sooner your health and life will improve.

GUESS WHICH INDUSTRY MAKES $60 BILLION A YEAR?

Think about how much money you have spent chasing weight loss. How many books have you bought? How many plans have you subscribed to? How many protein bars? How much money on Fitbits and other weird gadgets? How many pounds of almond flour? How much money have you hemorrhaged for the diet industrial complex? And what have you gotten out of it? Chronic low energy, and a deepening distrust in your seemingly insatiable appetite?

The diet industrial complex is made up of weight-loss programs (like Weight Watchers and SlimFast), pharmaceutical and medical companies that make weight-loss drugs, supplements, or procedures, and any other company selling beauty and “health.” These companies thrive on people believing that they are addicted to food, and that weight loss is the answer to all their problems. And they benefit from all of us feeling insecure, hating our bodies, and believing that we are just five pounds away from becoming the woman we are meant to beeeeeeee, and at the same time five pounds away in the other direction, from destroying our health.

No matter what they want you to believe, these are businesses, not philanthropic charities. They do not care about you. They make no promise to do no harm. And these businesses each make hundreds of millions because their products and solutions don’t work long-term. Because if they did, people would buy one book, or one membership, and become “cured.” Then the companies would lose that customer and revenue stream.

It may seem like weight-loss companies sprung up in response to an “obesity epidemic,” but when you actually look at the timeline, the opposite is arguably more true. The “obesity epidemic” only came around in the mid-1980s—after people had already been spending decades using cigarettes as appetite suppressants, using amphetamines, ephedra, and Dexatrim, the grapefruit diet of the 1930s, and the cabbage soup diet of the 1950s. Weight Watchers started in the 1960s, and SlimFast came around in the 1970s. But the number of “obese” Americans didn’t soar until the 1980s and 1990s, when it doubled among adults in the United States.18 We all assume it’s because of our portion sizes and sedentary lifestyles, but the 1980s and ’90s were when exercise became mainstream, and low-fat and diet foods and fake sugar were all the rage. Then low-carb became popular, but “obesity” has continued to rise despite all of our dieting. Do you see how this doesn’t entirely add up? Our collective dieting became more and more widespread first, and collective weights have only risen after, likely because of, and in response to, our dieting and fucked-up eating.

Beauty, health, and weight-loss companies have been telling women what is acceptable and attractive since marketing companies have existed. And we’ve always been suckers for it. We all want to be beautiful, and of course we do when we are taught how important it is for our future happiness, career, love life, personal Instagram lifestyle brand, whatever. But diets and body dissatisfaction are also more likely part of the cause of rising weight set points, not the cure. Dieting is directly related to people feeling more and more out of control with food.

But companies who sell weight loss have always been seen as the good guys. They want to help us become thin and healthy and happy! Weight Watchers is trying to rebrand because they just want us to live our best lives! Fuck no. They don’t care about you. Don’t blindly accept that they exist to save us from ourselves. They have always had a vested interest in perpetuating our deep cultural bias against weight, and creating products and programs that only work temporarily so you keep coming back again and again.

A scary truth is that companies that sell weight-loss programs and drugs also have a lot of power at the policy-making level and often fund the studies being used by the medical community. And many weight-loss drug companies sponsor doctors and public health initiatives. One example is our reliance on the bullshit BMI standard.

BMI takes no actual health factors into account. It can’t tell you anything about your blood pressure, your glucose levels, your hormones, your metabolism, your strength, your stamina, your bone density, your cholesterol, your immunity, your cellular respiration . . . nothing. It’s literally just a math equation: weight in relation to height, and it was first published by a life insurance company in 1959 as a way of explaining their rates. This was criticized by scientists because the equation it was based on was never meant to be used for individual diagnosis.

But doctors and insurance companies liked the simplicity of the equation, and so the BMI scale became widely used in 1985 by the National Institutes of Health. Then in 1998, the World Health Organization relied on the International Obesity Task Force to create updated BMI recommendations. And at the time, the two biggest funders of the International Obesity Task Force were the pharmaceutical companies that had the only weight-loss drugs on the market. The task force changed the BMI cutoffs on a whim, and overnight millions of Americans switched from being “normal weight” to “overweight.”19 Thanks a lot, lobbyists.

The whole thing is arbitrary, because many studies have found that higher BMIs actually have lower mortality rates.20 And many studies have shown that weight loss or too much exercise has been associated with poorer health, higher stress hormones, and increased mortality.21 And still, people are told they’re unhealthy based on their BMI, even if their health is otherwise perfectly fine. It’s just assumed. Oh, you’re in the overweight category? You must be unhealthy.

We can easily compare the diet industrial complex (or “Big Diet”) to the military industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Oil, or Big Tobacco. These are all made up of powerful companies who tend to care way more about profit than anyone’s well-being, safety, or the future of the planet, and who have the resources to sway both public opinion and policies that benefit their own interests. In her book Dispensing with the Truth, Alicia Mundy calls it “Obesity, Inc.” and talks about the million-dollar funding that Weight Watchers and other groups contributed to Shape Up America!, an organization that was part of a strategy to turn obesity into a disease (!!!) so it could be “treated” by the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries. That’s one reason why I keep putting “obesity” in quotes. It was created by lobbyists.

Our cultural weight bias is so deeply entrenched that even the scientific community isn’t immune to it. Bias has the ability to skew the way people interpret and share data; it’s called publication bias. Results can be marginalized by the scientific establishment, or even by the researchers themselves, because they don’t fit with what is considered to be the truth at the time.22 Scientists’ reputations are at stake when they publish data, and scientists who find results that don’t fit with current beliefs have been frozen out of positions, funding, or committees.

Not only that, but most of the studies on weight and obesity that we hear about are ones that are funded by these pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies. Even ones touted by doctors and the government are funded by Big Diet. And when the results don’t tell the companies what they want to hear, the companies just ignore the studies altogether.

Drug companies also use tens of millions of dollars to lobby for the approval of drugs that have previously not been approved (because they are dangerous or simply don’t work). Drug companies also gave lots of money to medical groups and doctors so they would encourage their patients to use diet drugs.23 In the UK, the National Obesity Forum was partially sponsored by a number of pharmaceutical companies that just happened to manufacture the very drugs that the doctors were suggesting to combat the “obesity epidemic.”24 This is a huge conflict of interest, but this is a consistent phenomenon with big businesses—Big Diet is no exception.

Basically . . . Big Diet is not on your side. It never has been. And not only that, it’s all as corrupt as the oil companies back in the 1950s paying off scientists to claim that lead gas wasn’t bad for us (hellooooo lead poisoning!), and those cigarette ads kindly teaching us that most doctors smoked Camels.

I’m not sharing this information to depress you—I want to empower you. In order to break free from our fucked-up relationship to food and our bodies, we need to start seeing through the bullshit fed to us. We need to start being our own advocates, in the doctor’s office and when people start making hyped-up claims about weight loss and health. Anyone who tries to heal their eating without dealing with the elephant in the room—our own weight stigma against ourselves—will not be able to find real freedom and intuition with food. It’s all too connected.

THE F-WORD

Let’s also talk about the most important and controversial F-word in this book: fat. I am going to be using the word fat, and I want to explain why. It has become such a loaded word because we’ve believed that being fat is one of the worst things that we could be. We assume that using the word fat is automatically an insult, because people have used it as an insult for such a long time. In the 1800s, even before people had assumptions about fat people’s health, fat people were seen as “uncivilized,” but were also thought to be healthier 25 (probably because many of them were).

These days, one of the reasons that people think being fat has remained an “acceptable” open prejudice is because we think that people’s weight is fully their own fault—that their weight means something about who they are as a person, and that therefore we get to pass judgment and target them, so we feel better about our own miserable little lives.

Hopefully it goes without saying that whether people’s weight is in their control or not, treating a human being poorly because of how they look, or how we perceive their health to be, is cruel. It’s never been okay and it never will be, misinformation or not. Fat people are subjected to constant judgment and scrutiny, they get dismissed by doctors, they are passed over for jobs and used as the punch line of jokes. And we all hope that if we can just work really, really hard not to be fat, then we can avoid the misery we put them through. We can avoid being the punch line of jokes, or being called a fat bitch.

Our relationship with weight, and our deep fear of becoming fat ourselves, is one of the biggest causes of our dysfunction with food. Neutralizing the word fat, as well as the actual body type, is a really essential step in healing your relationship to food. No matter what we weigh, our fear of being fat is fucking with us all.

There are lots of fat people who are reclaiming the word fat for themselves—and unlike words like curvy and chubby, the word fat isn’t a euphemism. The word fat is allowed to be neutral. That doesn’t mean that every fat person wants to be called fat, especially since many people still use the word as an insult, but there is a world where people are self-identifying as fat and trying to take away the stigma of the word and the body type itself.

Words like obese and overweight are judgmental, medicalized words that were basically made up by Big Diet for profit. So unless I’m referring to studies that use BMI directly, I won’t use those terms either, and if I do, they’ll be in quotes.

All of this being said, I am not fat and I cannot speak for fat people. I recommend you also listen to what fat people have to say about their experiences. But for now, I am going to be using the word fat in this book. To paraphrase Hermione Granger, fear of a word just increases fear of the thing itself. I think that applies here.

YOUR DIET MIGHT BE A CULT

Have you ever noticed how fad diets can become cultish? It took me a long time to see the parallel, because I was in the cult, and cult members never think they are part of a cult.

Whether you consider yourself religious or not, looking at the parallel between diets and religions, and the societal roles they play, can be very illuminating. For better or worse, depending on your outlook, we are generally a more secular culture than we used to be, and in a way, dieting is filling a role similar to the one that religions used to fill. For many of us, dieting has become our new religion, and food and weight have become our morality.

Looking at the positive side of religion, it offers community, structure, ritual, and an attempt at spreading kindness, love, spirituality, healing, acceptance, and charity.

On the dark side, religions have historically taken advantage of shame and dogma, and ignited our “fear of the other” and people who are different from us. People start feeling like they know the one true way. They have figured it out. OUR way is right, THEIR way is wrong. We need to convert the heathens who have yet to see the light and teach them the error of their ways.

It is the kind of moral superiority that we use to try and make ourselves feel temporarily safe. And through the ages, so many acts in the name of religion have been used as an outlet for the darkest parts of humanity. Witch burning. Holy wars. Refusing to make cakes for people whose personal lives you don’t agree with.

So how is this like dieting? Diets seem to offer health, structure, purity, safety, nourishment, nutrition, sometimes environmental responsibility, and—we all hope—a better life.

But diets feed into the exact same human fear that causes holy wars: I know the way. WE know the way, and you don’t. We are doing this right, and you are doing this wrong. We are following the moral and right way to live. This way of living will keep me safe and on the path of righteousness. I need you to hear the good word of coconut oil and follow my coconut oil path.

I don’t eat grains because I am smart and informed and responsible. I know ALL about phytic acid, and you should too, because YOU are fat and eating all the wrong THINGS.

We evangelize, we spread the good news, and in a strange way, through diets, we are also seeking salvation and eternal life. It is our way of convincing ourselves that we are safe. It lets us feel better for a moment because at least we’re doing better than them. It’s the dark side of humanity wrapped up in a new cult.

And let me tell you! I have been a member of some diiiiet cults. (Mostly through online diet message boards.) I was a disciple! I spread the word. I drank the organic probiotic Kool-Aid. I paid the membership fees ($30 for a jar of raw sprouted almond butter). I’ve been a sucker. I’ve been judgmental. I thought I was possessed by the devil of refined sugar and food addiction. I’ve been there, and I speak firsthand.

I know what it feels like to believe. I know what it feels like to think that your cult is, well, first of all, not a cult. But I know what it feels like to believe that your diet is the right way. I know how safe it feels to follow a plan and really, really hope and believe that it will actually deliver on all of its promises.

And it all stems from fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of mortality. Fear of imperfection. Fear of losing control. Fear of aging. Fear of not being safe. Fear of the sins of the flesh. It’s sad, it’s lonely, it’s isolating, and it is so, so human.

Part of the big problem with the diet and beauty industries (and many other industries that capitalize on your insecurities) is that your fears are being exploited. They want you to believe you aren’t good enough as you are. They make you believe we are all supposed to look the same. They want you to believe that you need them to save you.