I love doing things symbolically. My favorite day of the week is trash day because I love symbolically getting rid of things and making space. “I DON’T NEED THINGS!!!!!”

Here are some symbolic steps you can take to move towards food and body normalcy.

 

Clothes

Get rid of clothes that are too small or don’t feel good to wear: Go through your clothes and get honest with yourself about the things you haven’t worn in over a year, the things that you don’t enjoy wearing when you put them on, the pieces you have been hoping to lose weight for, and things you plain just don’t like wearing – those things that have sit in your drawer for months and months.

Give them away. 

Get some clothes you like, that fit: Just do it. You don’t need to have a lot of clothes. You just need to have clothes that fit, that you like wearing.

Bra: If you are a woman with big boobs, you must, for your own happiness, shell out money for a bra that actually fits. I wear a 30F-H, depending, and my quality of life is significantly better when my bra fits. I fluctuate, and yes, it’s frustrating and expensive. But when my bra doesn’t fit, my clothes are at odds with my body. When it fits, and when I make sure that I own bras that fit, I am symbolically at peace with my current size.

 

Social Media

Unfollow all fitspo and diet accounts: Either make sure to primarily follow social media accounts that are feminist, fat positive, and anti-diet, or get off social media altogether. Social media is designed to be addictive – and it can be a force for good, but it can also be incredibly anxiety producing.

Consider doing an actual social media break or cleanse. We can get addicted to the way people see us through social media, and a break can be really helpful and allows us to reset our mindless scrolling habits.

 

Devices (fitbit, scale)

Get rid of your scale: Fucking Seriously.

Get rid of your fitbits and calorie trackers and pedometers: You don’t need to track things in order to live a healthy lifestyle. The goal is to get intuitive.

 

Diet Books

Get rid of them: Give them away or better, throw them out. Or burn them. Safely.

 

…If you are resisting doing any of these things, ask yourself: why?

If the answer is money, remember you spend money on things you prioritize.

Prioritize feeling good in your body.

Over and out.

What I’ve learned from the Fuck It Diet have been some big life lessons. 

Yes there is the basic stuff about restriction and food: your obsession with food is perpetuating your obsession with food, biologically.

But the deeper lessons that have changed my life are much less physical lessons, and way more spiritual lessons. The relationship you have with food and your weight, is actually all happening in order for you to learn some big things about your relationship to life.

Here are the big life themes that I keep coming back to again and again, both in teaching the Fuck It Diet, and also with my own relationship to other challenging parts of life. These are themes that keep teaching me things, in many areas of my life:

Trust. Trust of your body. Trust of the process. Trust of your intuition. Trust that you are being guided, by life, in big and small ways. Trust that you don’t have to be perfect or get it right or figure it out immediately, or ever. Trust that it’s allowed to be a process. That it’s allowed to be slow – that it’s allowed to fall apart.

Surrender. Surrendering to what is happening. Surrender to the place you’re in now. Surrender to the emotions that are happening now. Surrendering to learning whatever you are supposed to learn from your struggles now. Surrendering to your body, to hunger, and to cravings.

Ease. We all think that pushing, and muscling, and controlling will help… and it just doesn’t. It’s not sustainable. And it doesn’t really work. Life is not always easy, but there is an ease that you can always seek out and lean into. Eating can and should be easy. And along the same vein of surrender and trust – lean into ease. Because life is hard, but ease is helpful.

Lower the stakes. Notice a theme? Yea. We makes the stakes for everything so high. Everything is do or die. Everything feels like make or break. In truth nothing really is. And even the big things don’t need to be worried about. It doesn’t help. Zoom out. Lower the stakes. Let it fall apart.

Being in your body. Something I also call grounding. We want to avoid what we are feeling at all costs. Being in our bodies forces us to feel what what is there – and it’s uncomfortable. But being willing to feel is so healing, both for your relationship to food and eating, and also everything else. A willingness to be here, taking up space, being a human, on this plane…

Taking Up Space. We have some weird beliefs about our worth, and what makes us worthy to speak up and be present in our lives. The one I like to point out is that women think we don’t deserve to take up space unless we are… tiny. Which is a paradox. You are allowed to take up space no matter what. There are a lot of other beliefs we have about our worth, and all are worth examining. What do you think will make you worthy of respect and love? Examine that shit.

Perfection doesn’t exist. Perfect food doesn’t exist. A perfect body doesn’t exist. Perfect health doesn’t exist. A perfect life doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t exist. So stop trying to get it and stop beating yourself up for not having it.

Stop doing shit you hate. Stop eating food you hate. Stop doing exercise you hate. Stop doing jobs you hate. Stop seeing friends who deplete you. Stop dating people you don’t like.

Rest. DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO EARN RELAXATION AND REST? NO YOU DON’T. YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONSTANTLY BE PRODUCTIVE. Let yourself rest. Rest rest rest rest ease ease ease ease trust trust trust lower the stakes. We have so many unhelpful, fucked up beliefs about worth and rest in this culture/country. I barely even have the words right now to explain how much I want you to be able to rest, probably mostly because I am tired and need to rest.

Anyway, this is advice I still have to keep taking and applying and re-applying to different areas of my life

So I thought maybe you’d like to re-hear it, so you can re-apply it too.