The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner

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.

TWO