I recently heard from a new reader, concerned that I am negative about some of Intuitive Eating’s guidelines.

Intuitive eating, at its core, is about listening to your body and trusting your body to lead the way with eating, as opposed to listening to diet rules.

Your body will naturally lead you to the kinds of foods, and amounts of food, that you eat.

That’s excellent! Being an intuitive eater is the goal!

However, the way many people teach and practice intuitive eating, including the famous book of the same name, focuses on rating your hunger on a scale of 1-10.

I read the book and used that method for years before the Fuck It Diet, and though I had times when I thought I was healed and normal with food, I was not. I was concerned with amounts, I ate crazy slow, and when I didn’t I thought I was “doing it wrong”. But most importantly, I was afraid of gaining weight.

It always blew up in my face. And I still thought about food all the time.

The good thing about the hunger scale, is that any attempt to bring people into their bodies, and teaching them to feel their bodies, is good.

But here are my major issues with it:

1. ‘Rate your hunger/fullness level’ easily feels like a rule to people coming from a diet mind-set
2. This rule easily becomes obsessive and a way to eat “correctly” or “incorrectly”
3. It makes being “too full” seem like a negative thing, therefore there is still a way to “fail”
4. The goal is still “eat less” to “control your weight”

That is still a diet.

People’s goals with this “rate your hunger” version of intuitive eating usually means they are keeping their old diet goal of eating less, for the purpose of controlling or losing weight. And this means that you won’t be healing the biggest cause of food dysfunction: fear of weight.

Our dysfunctional relationship with our bodies and our weight is the reason we are dysfunctional with food. It is the reason we do not trust our appetites. We judge our choices and we think we are gluttons and food addicts. We don’t realize that our bodies and minds are reacting to any sort of restriction as a survival mechanism. This survival response is not healed by rating your hunger or trying to make sure you don’t get too full. That is just more of the same with a different name.

I consider that a temporary bandaid.

So yes, I am negative about rating your hunger, and judging your success based on that.

Rating your hunger for the casual awareness of “eh, I’m not that hungry”, or “yea Im really hungry” is fine, but like, why do you need a number? Just use words.

I don’t work with extreme eating disorders. Because I don’t want to.

I am also not qualified to, and I never personally had one, but mostly… I don’t want to. It’s really hard, dark, heavy stuff.

And most importantly, you cannot save someone who does not actually want to be saved.

You can’t change someone who is only half willing to change.

My personal issue with food and weight was obsessive, miserable, chronic dieting and orthorexia, plus body dysmorphia, horrible body image, and weight fixation. And still, nobody could have saved me from myself. Nobody could get through to me past my own decision about what was important. I had to come to it on my own. And I had to want it badly.

I had to surrender to my biggest fear: being ugly. While at the exact same time, actively changing my beliefs about beauty and worth.

That’s a paradox: do the work to unlearn what you’ve learned about beauty. Unlearn all the reasons you believe gaining weight would make you ugly and unworthy. But at the same time, accept the possibility of actually being ugly.

Because if you feel worthy even if you believe you aren’t beautiful, you can’t lose.

That’s really what it comes down to: Wanting to be happy more than you want to be beautiful.

And I must always remember that I can’t force that epiphany on anyone – just as nobody could have forced it on me.

If The Fuck It Diet helps you with your eating disorder recovery, great. That’s wonderful. But I am not in the business of healing people or converting people, because I don’t believe you can do that.

The truth remains the same no matter how far down the food/weight rabbit hole you are: If you aren’t willing to do the really scary work, you won’t recover, no matter how many of my blog posts you read.

The desire to heal has to be stronger that your desire to stay feeling control.

Your desire to feel discomfort and pain has to become stronger than you desire to numb.

The desire to be healthy has to be stronger than your desire to be skinny.

The desire to live has to be stronger than your desire to wither away.

You have to be willing to face your biggest fear of being bigger. And nobody can force that on you.

Again, your desire to be happy, has to be stronger than your desire to be (your definition of) beautiful.

The Unwillingness to Be Alive

The other thing with eating disorders, both mild and extreme, it is a subconscious unwillingness to be in your body, to have a body, and to be a human.

It is an unwillingness to “be here”. On this earth. In this body.

Your body is where all the pain and trauma is, so the idea goes that if you can just shrink it, you can avoid some of this earthly pain.

But it’s inherently anti-life. And in order to heal, you have to be willing to ride in the messiness of humanity. It’s not easy, that’s why so many people are looking for a way out.

There has to be a major choice for something different, because how do you heal if you aren’t willing to be fully alive? You can’t.

You have to want to be alive and ugly, more than you want to be beautiful.