I have really exciting news, for me at least… Harper Collins / HarperWave is going to publish The Fuck It Diet book in early 2019.

This same week I found my old blogspot blog that I started back in junior year of college. It was called Non-Quick Oatmeal because I believed in slow food. This was back when I knew I loved to write and was also trying to legitimize my obsession with food.

So the site started as a terrible, terrible food blog, with dark pictures taken on my flip phone. If you read any of the 2009 and 2010 posts (don’t), you will regret it and be bored to tears. However, it is some pretty solid support for the concept of just starting, even when you have no fucking idea what you are doing.

The more I wrote, the more I found out that my talent and passion was NOT writing about “how crispy nachos were”, but instead, the stories before and after the nachos. And luckily for the 4 friends who read my blog, it started becoming more of a weird essay situation, and not a food blog anymore.

I remember thinking, “ugh I really love writing. I wonder how I could become a real book writer where I just write funny essays and never have to leave my house again. In the very least I wonder how I can have like, 40 readers instead of 3 and a half.” But I didn’t know how.

So I just kept writing and having to leave the house.

Starting The Fuck It Diet site was a totally different situation. I wasn’t trying to do anything except share some REALLY IMPORTANT SHIT I WAS LEARNING. I wasn’t trying to be funny or entertaining. The Fuck It Diet wasn’t supposed to be funny. I was so serious. FUCK IT. FUCK THIS. WHY ARE WE COUNTING ALMONDS.

I was anonymous. I didn’t want anyone who I knew in my real life to know I was writing about this. My name was Caroline Haagen, (as in Haagen Dasz). It was beyond me. I just had SHIT TO SHARE AND IT FELT VERY IMPORTANT AND SERIOUS.

This whole thing was also decidedly NOT THE ORIGINAL PLAN. I didn’t want to be a warm and fuzzy self-love body-image teacher. I wanted to be a BEAUTIFUL BROADWAY ACTRESS. BUT NO, LIFE HAD OTHER PLANS, AND THERE I WAS NAMING MYSELF AFTER ICE CREAM TRYING TO LEARN HOW TO EAT RICE AGAIN.

For a long time I thought that my regular facebook/nonquickoatmeal/email writing voice was the opposite from my “teaching you to not be so fucking miserable” voice of TFID. Maybe it was. I don’t know. All that matters is that now they are not separate. They have been joined. They are two that have become one. And I now spend my social media energy and time on instagram trying to perfect this union with varying degrees of success.

So I would just like to take a moment to revel in the mysteries of the universe, to honor the deep jankiness I started from, and to be amazed that now I get to have a book deal writing a funny book about pseudo-eating disorders.