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Maintaining a low weight is one of my core values. How am I supposed to be happy if I sacrifice one of my core values?

I have heard something like this again and again, and I think… maintaining a low weight is one of your core values? Like treating others the way you’d want to be treated and being honest?

Maintaining a low weight is not a core value. It’s a fear-based ingrained societal standard, created to make money off of your insecurities. Keeping your weight below where it wants to be relies on fear and fixation. The only thing we like about it is the high of fitting in, getting praise, feeling safe, and the temporary relief that comes when we reach a goal weight. Whew, now everyone will leave me alone and approve of me. Now I’llllll leave me alone.

That’s until it isn’t good enough anymore, or we gain it back and feel horrible about ourselves, and the cycle continues.

Better focuses like health, self-care, movement, eating what feels good, and dressing yourself in clothes you like aren’t even core values. They are, however, awesome ways to take care of yourself. Feeling healthy and strong and embodied is a perfectly legitimate desire or goal, but living in a constant food and weight obsession is not.

“Staying healthy and thin/fit” as a core value also relies on the belief that health and weight are fully within your control, and that controlling your food and weight will actually lead to better health – all things that that have been proven untrue. Goals and core values that are more self-loving and self-forgiving will almost certainly end up being better for your overall health anyway.

A core value that’ll serve you better is “prioritizing your needs” or “taking care of yourself,” and if you have a weight obsession or eating disorder, prioritizing your needs is gonna look a lot like The Fuck It Diet and eating what you want.

You have every right to remain someone who judges your daily worth based on your weight, but it’s not gonna be fun for very long.

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How expensive is this whole thing? I am just supposed to let myself eat anything, anytime, anywhere? How can I afford this? Will I spend all my money out at restaurants? Or will I have to make everything at home?! How do I grocery shop now that nothing is off limits? How will I know what I’m going to crave in a few days?

Woa! Calm down! First of all, there is nothing more expensive than being on a diet. Diet food and low-calorie food is often marked up to be way more expensive than normal food (when most normal food is more filling because it usually has more calories).

But yes, staying alive on enough food costs money. And you’ll need to prioritize that if you want to heal. Frugality is sometimes a necessity but beware of the irrational fear of spending money on food. I’ve known people who had that as part of their disordered eating. Someone I knew in college refused to eat any food unless it was free and they didn’t have to pay for it. It was an eating disorder, but they were able to formally call it a financial decision.

Everyone on TFID will be in totally different financial situations, so, like all things, it will need to be tailored to what you can access and afford.

And when I say eat whatever you want, in any quantities, I don’t mean that if you crave a lobster feast and strawberry shortcake at 11 am in the middle of winter, that you need to go get that for yourself. I mean… you can, but you also can and should satiate your hunger and cravings with what’s around, and what you can afford. Maybe you can compromise with some lemony, buttery seafood for dinner, with some sort of cake or cookie and fruit.

If you have never grocery shopped for what you want, as opposed to what is on your diet, there is going to be a learning curve. You are going to have to try things out. Get things you think you’ll like. And next week, edit your choices depending on what you learned, what you liked, didn’t like, what you wanna try and have around this week. Or try going food shopping more often. If you’re looking for cheap ways to make sure you get in lots of calories, look to build meals around rice and potatoes, bread and peanut butter and cheese. See? Can’t do that on your diet.

It’s that simple. But I get it, I am a terrible grocery shopper, and also a really basic cook. But my first two years of The Fuck It Diet included a lot of sourdough bread and cheese, avocado toast, and granola and ice cream. So much ice cream that my original secret Fuck It Diet pen name was Caroline Haagen (as in Haagen Dasz ice cream brand). Now I sometimes make elaborate vegetable stews from scratch.

If you are like most people and can’t afford to eat your favorite foods out at restaurants all the time, welcome to the world. You need to learn to cook the things you like and save eating out for special occasions. Or just eat sourdough sharp cheddar grilled cheeses for a year like me. If you’re cooking for a family, navigating your cravings with your kids and partner will probably always be hard, but maybe now that you can eat Macaroni and Cheese, some nights will get easier.

And you may not always have what you crave in your pantry, so you’ll either go out and get it, or make do with what you do have. If you can make grilled cheese, you can do this. I believe in you.

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Can you teach a control freak to become more chill?

Food and body issues are a manifestation of the underlying fear that everything is falling apart. It’s a way we try to mitigate the panic of being alive. If we don’t control and micromanage this, we’re all screwed. We can’t trust anything to work if we aren’t actively controlling it and tending to it. Disaster. Chaos. Destruction.

The idea is that by controlling the way you eat, and therefore (we hope) our looks and health and mortality, we can save ourselves from being powerless and/or mortified and/or judged or… fill in the blank.

We’re not usually fully aware of this panic, it’s still the thing running the show. We are afraid of being alive. We are afraid of dying. We are afraid we have to be the ones to fix and control and heal everything.

We are making the stakes for everything so extremely, unnecessarily high. And if we don’t ____________ then _____________ will happen and it will be all our fault. And we will live or die in misery, wishing we tried harder.

Taking action is great, but the panic, control, and worry is just not a sustainable way to live.

So the biggest advice I can give anyone who identifies with being a perfectionist or a control freak is to lower the stakes.

Unless you are performing brain surgery, or conducting a military coup, or … well, doing anything with legitimately high stakes… you are making the stakes too damn high.

Catching that train, looking amazing in your pants, making sure your children finish their yogurt, making sure you buy the right yogurt, getting the best seat in the restaurant, making them like you… all are things with low stakes.

Most of the things we do throughout our days and our lives are very low stakes, but still, we hype it up to feel like if this doesn’t go the-way-I-arbitrarily-think-it-should, everything is going to fall apart.

The underlying belief that things are supposed to go a certain way, and we are supposed to single handedly make them go that way, is crazy making. And so many of us are operating under that programming.

The (il)logic of it tends to go something like this: I have to make things go a certain way and make them think I’m doing so well, or else I am failing, and if I fail, I will become ugly and poor and nobody will love me and then I’ll die and people will roll their eyes at my funeral.

You can’t live your life to try and eliminate eye-rolling at your funeral.

And that leads us to another side of this: the illusion of control.

We have some control over what is right in front of us. And we can take action. And that… is about it.

Everything else is out of our control. The results? Other people’s actions? Other people’s opinions? We can’t do anything about it. Nothing.

So we can walk around with the stakes unnecessarily high, feeling like we have control over everything that is happening, worrying that we are letting it all fall apart, and failing, and letting everyone down. But we are just making ourselves miserable, stressed, and sick.

You can let go. You can lower the stakes. And you can let go of your control. You don’t much control anyway.