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So if there’s any part of you that’s looking at me and hoping you end up where I ended up, or looking at anyone else and hoping to end up where they ended up, that’s a habit that I want you to become aware of. It’s a very human habit, we all do it, but it’s not helping. Trying to be someone else is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Your best self is probably the one who trusts yourself the most, is able to relax and be social when you feel like it, and is able to seek quiet time when you need it. Someone who is able to be spontaneous when it suits you, and willing to take up space, speak up, take risks, use your creativity, is willing for things to be messy and imperfect—and is an all-around happier human.
Some people are hesitant to go on The Fuck It Diet because they don’t know if they actually like who they really are. They’re not sure if who they really are is that special or interesting or attractive enough. I get it. That’s a scary thing to think. Thanks to lots of insidious messages from the media, from princess fairy tales, from family, from dysfunctional relationships, from other insecure women, or from diet, drug, fashion, and beauty companies, it can be hard to trust that you’re actually okay as you are, and that you don’t need to change or appease anyone. We’ll be exploring these concepts even more later in the book.
I want you to free yourself from diet cults, but I’m not ragging on God. I am a big fan of spirituality and “whatever word you’d like to use for God.” But beware of dogma. You can tell it’s all going south when you are experiencing lots of fear, judgment, and feel all-holier-than-thou.
Here is where I also tell you that once anyone starts making The Fuck It Diet into a cult—including hypothetical, foolish future-me—that is when you remember that you are your own boss, and that your own intuition is king.
DIETS UNRAVELING
Right before my own Fuck It Diet epiphany, I was paleo and kicking myself for eating too many bananas. It was around the holidays, and I was bingeing daily on paleo ginger snaps and paleo pumpkin pie made out of butternut squash and honey.
This had been my pattern for ten years. I would follow a diet religiously for a month or two or ten, and eventually find myself constantly hungry and thinking about food. Then I’d start to really take advantage of the “allowed” foods, normally bingeing on them at midnight. I would be furious with myself and every morning would try to regain control. Eventually I’d stop the diet completely, heartbroken that it didn’t heal me, or my bingeing, or my food addiction, and move on to another diet.
And now, here I was again, gaining weight again because I couldn’t even stick to a reasonable, very-low-carb paleolithic diet like the one our ancestors apparently ate. Get it together, Caroline!
My first inkling that something might be truly wrong, beyond my self-diagnosed “food addiction,” was when I started walking by the mirror and having really opposite reactions just a few minutes apart. I’d walk by and think, WOAH, I’m actually really thin . . . weird. I guess I didn’t gain ten pounds from all the almond flour ginger snaps I ate in bed last night.
Then a few minutes later I’d walk by the same mirror and think, WHAT!? How am I so big!? Oh GOD! Look at my FACE! Then the next morning, Wait, wait, I actually do look thin. WTF. I felt crazy.
It was only a month later when I had what I refer to as “my epiphany.” I was staring in the mirror over my bathroom sink, and it hit me like a bolt of understanding. I realized that my dysfunction with food was never going to change if I kept getting into this cycle over and over again. It would never change if I held on to my need to be skinny. In one moment it became so clear to me that not only was dieting metabolically backfiring, but my relationship to my weight was the core cause of my misery.
What came after the epiphany was hard, but the decision in that moment was simple. I intuitively believed that if I could surrender to the process, it would all work itself out—mind, body, and spirit. Nobody could promise me that it would work out, but on a deep level I knew that if I could be brave and embrace a higher weight, and feed my body what it needed, then I’d be free.
WHAT IF YOU’VE ALREADY TRIED?
Most of the people I work with have already tried to heal their eating. They’ve tried intuitive eating or some other version of “just be balanced” or “just listen to your body.” They come to The Fuck It Diet after being so frustrated that they Google “Why doesn’t intuitive eating work?!” Really. That’s the number-one search phrase that brings people to my site.
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 our big mistake.
Before my last-ditch-effort diet on paleo that led to The Fuck It Diet, I thought I was “eating intuitively” for six years. I thought that intuitive eating was the same as “sensible portion control.” I thought my “successful” stint of trying to eat like a “French woman” was intuitive eating. But it’s all a fucking diet in sheep’s clothing.
Now I realize that the entire time I thought I was eating intuitively, I was still focused on weight, and still scared of most foods, whether I was letting myself eat them or not. My intuitive eating was still used to try to eat less, which is inherently going to backfire.
YOU’RE IN CHARGE (FINALLY)
Think of all of the unspoken things that dieting promises: that if you follow this simple four-month plan, you will become someone else—someone better. Eat only raw foods and practice daily sungazing at dawn, and not only will you be beautiful, but you will transcend this earthly plane. The promise is that with lots of willpower, you can obtain a perfect body, and when you do you can finally be proud. If you follow someone else’s rules, everything will finally become perfect and easy. And if you let yourself slip and gain weight, you should be ashamed.
Obviously, all of this is a recipe for physical, mental, emotional, and existential disaster.
The Fuck It Diet promises none of those things. You will probably not obtain your old definition of a perfect body. But you will get your calmest, happiest body, without the extra stress and yo-yo and impaired metabolism. And to get there, you can’t follow anyone’s rules but your own. Not even my rules, because my whole goal is to get you to a place where you are able to trust and follow your impulses and intuition and appetite, without the absurd pressure of weight control and weight loss.
Before diets—even if you can’t remember it—there was a time when you knew how to eat, and you didn’t see yourself or your worth based on weight or food, even if that was all the way back when you were a little kid.
This is no longer a journey of control, willpower, and perfection. This is a journey back to whoever you were before diets, before you veered away from yourself and went down a path that took you here, reading this book. That diet path was a path of listening to what other people expected and wanted of you, and the never-ending saga of trying desperately to get approval from anyone and everyone but yourself. You can keep trying to grasp onto that control, but it will continue to be the miserable, tragic, exhausting saga that it has already been.
This book is going to encourage you to unlearn all of the things that made you stop trusting yourself. And you will have to relearn all of the things that will allow you to trust yourself again. What this also means is that your specific journey is going to look different from the next person’s.
It’s important to say that this book is not a quick fix. The Fuck It Diet is basically a life-and-heart overhaul. This isn’t a thirty-day Fat-Burning Extravaganza and “now you’re happy and beautiful forever” kind of thing. It’s not a “this new shiny-and-matte lipstick will never come off and you’ll be beautiful and impressive and happy all weekend” kind of thing. It will probably be really scary, because I’m asking you to let go of so many of the things that used to make you feel safe and worthy. Instead, I want to help you find ways to feel worthy that transcend the way you look or how impressive you convince yourself and other people you are.
The rest of this book will be helping to heal your relationship to food and weight: How to actually live a life without diets.
There are four parts that make up The Fuck It Diet journey, so to speak: physical, emotional, mental, and then the final thriving part once you have your life back. Fair warning: because this is a book, I had to choose an order, but these steps are not really linear at all. I wish for both of our sakes that they were, because it would make going on The Fuck It Diet easier. It may be helpful to plan on reading this book twice. The first time through, just take in the different things you may experience, and then the second time, slowly address all the areas yourself and apply the exercises more deeply. But again, you’re the boss. You do what feels right.
THE PHYSICAL PART
In this section, we are going to reverse physical restriction and its biological effects by eating. This is the part that usually shifts the quickest. It’s not as difficult or complicated as you might think to take the body out of crisis mode. All it takes is a lot of food and rest. Luckily for you, getting out of the biological starvation mode will directly help a good chunk of your obsessive mental fixation on food, too.
THE EMOTIONAL PART
Next we are going to talk about our emotions, and how important it is to come back into our bodies and feel what’s waiting to be felt. We will address emotional eating, how it is different from bingeing, and how to address it without restricting. We will also be talking about another survival state in this section: our old friend fight-or-flight, and how this state is directly tied to old unresolved emotions. Becoming more willing to feel all of the things you have avoided and pushed down through the years will help not only your relationship with food, but everything else in your life too.
THE MENTAL PART
Whether we know it or not, we have absorbed so many rules about eating, food, and weight that don’t serve us. These rules become our beliefs, which are able to affect everything we do and think and feel. Our beliefs have a lot of power over us, especially if they are lurking in the shadows. So in this section you are going to learn how to become aware of your beliefs, and learn tools to lessen their power over you so you can begin to see clearly again. Whew!
THE THRIVING PART
My ultimate goal is to get you fully intuitive with food. Once you get out of your own way when it comes to eating, this is where the fun stuff happens. In this last section we focus more on deep rest, self-care, boundaries, figuring out what you actually enjoy, and more. This is where you get to really discover who you want to be without the distraction of food and weight.
Throughout this book I will also be sharing five main tools that will act as your anchors on The Fuck It Diet. They are all very, very simple, and will not take that much time, but they will make a huge difference. Don’t let their simplicity fool you; they are game changers. These are the five tools that I hope you take with you into your life after you finish this book.
But! None of this healing happens by thinking about eating or thinking about giving up control over food—it only happens by doing it.
And with that being said, let’s do it.
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