The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

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You'll be doing a deeper dive on releasing diet culture beliefs, and get to access 4+ hours worth of Q&A replay calls every week. An ex-yo-yo dieter herself, Dooner knows how terrifying it can be to break free of the vicious cycle, but with her signature sharp humor and compassion, she shows listeners that a sustainable, easy relationship with food is possible. 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". We need our media and our stories to feature diverse bodies and diverse faces and diverse cultures and diverse races, because what we see brainwashes us." It's not the best memoir ever written, and the idea of allowing yourself to rest isn't, in the grand scheme of things, groundbreakingly revolutionary, but I love this book.

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. 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. 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. 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. An ex-yo-yo dieter herself, Dooner knows how terrifying it can be to break free of the vicious cycle, but with her signature sharp humor and compassion, she shows readers that a sustainable, easy relationship with food is possible.Book Genre: Feminism, Food, Food and Drink, Health, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Nutrition, Personal Development, Psychology, Self Help But I still didn’t fully understand how deep it all went for me: culturally and metabolically and emotionally and on and on. And I didn’t see how messed up my relationship was with weight, and how that was actually the core of the whole thing. Weeks after reading the book, and just a few weeks before I went off to college, my mom told me she had cancer, and we both became raw vegan to try and heal all of our earthly ills (it didn’t work) (my mom is fine, but not because of raw veganism, she ditched it soon after starting chemo) (also, I have complex feelings about pharmaceutical companies too, but raw veganism was still not the answer).(Yes I was a raw vegan in freshman year of college.) 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.

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.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? 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. Except…this is about a 20-something who has very dramatic medical crises about every other year of her life. She gets plastic surgery in high school because she convinces her parents a new nose will make her happy. She also wants to be an actor. She lives in New York in an apartment her parents pay for. She studies abroad. Being an actor is overwhelming. More medical crises. Her “liver hurts” when she has a sip of alcohol. She tries to be a receptionist for a short while but then that’s exhausting and she declares…a two year rest. I wish I was kidding.

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.) There were big stretches of time when I thought this method was ‘working’. I thought I was eating intuitively… because I ‘ate what I wanted’ (weirdly slowly and in tiny amounts)… and I was skinny (thanks to genetics + semi-starvation).

I honestly only made it about half way through this book - I RARELY don’t finish a book through once I begin. While I think the overall message of the book is well intentioned and there are some good pieces of information there are definitely parts that I found problematic. A month ago I was in tears saying to my therapist, “I’m so tired. I’m tired of pretending I’m getting by. I’m tired of pretending I’m not hurting. I’m tired.” So when I saw the cover of this book on my library app, I thought it was just the book I needed. Naturally I requested it without actually reading what the book was about. 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. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent a huge majority of my day thinking about food — and not in a cheeky, cute, “foodie!” way. I’m constantly thinking about what I’m eating and if it’s enough or too much or too healthy or too unhealthy or will make me fatter or skinnier or how it can soothe me. I worry more about my eating habits than I do with anything else in my life, and it is truly exhausting. I’ve always thought, “Why can’t this be easy? Why can’t I be normal?” I really hate to give a book one star, but I had to make myself finish this book and absolutely loathed the process. The entire book is one long, incredibly self absorbed, whiny memoir about Dooner's teens and twenties related mostly to how much she hated her appearance. She lived a life of incredible privilege with parents who bankrolled her teenage nose job, acting and singing opportunities, a summer in Europe, a nice NYC apartment, overpriced foods from one extreme diet to the next, and pretty much her entire privileged existence. And during all of those years, she hyper-fixated on her acne and her weight (looking at photos online, Dooner never appeared actually overweight). Again and again and again. How is this supposed to help anybody?