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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.

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How DOES a normal person eat?

This totally depends on your definition of ‘normal.’

Here’s the truth: most people are a little disordered with their eating these days. Obsessive or disordered eating is common, so you could call it normal.

But it’s not normal – it shouldn’t be normal. And it’s definitely not healthy.

So instead of calling it normal eating, I call it ease with food.

This is how a person who has ease with food eats:

-They can go through their day and pretty much only think about food when they are actually hungry.

-They have a strong, healthy appetite for lots of food, and yet their weight stays stable in their weight set range, because their metabolism isn’t compromised and stressed from dieting.

-They eat what they crave, and crave what they need. Sometimes salads, sometimes cookies, sometimes fruit, sometimes steak, etc.

-They can eat a meal and stop in the ballpark of satiation and fullness without overthinking it.

-They can eat distracted, or tired, or stressed, or sad and still stop once they get full, because when food is neutral, and the body is fed, food intuition is easy.

-They will have a strong sense of what food they want, when, and how much, but it won’t be that important that they follow it perfectly, because life is too short to obsess about food, hunger, and satiation levels.

How do we get there? How do we find ease with food? How to feel neutral and even joyful with all foods, not just your “safe” diet foods?

Eating.

BELIEVE ME, back before the F*** It Diet, I was so far from normal and so fixated on food and weight, that I wasn’t even sure what the other alternative was. I had no idea what it was supposed to look like.

I would look at people who didn’t overthink food and think, “Well — I guess they are just lucky to not have a food addiction.” I didn’t realize that my “food addiction” was biologically driven, and constantly being made worse by every diet I went on.

I didn’t realize that, in a way, we are meant to be fixated on food. Because food is a fundamentally important part of staying alive, so when the body senses that food access is scarce, our food fixation increases. Thankfully the reverse is also true. Hallelujah. Once the body knows it will be fed, it can calm down.

 

 

(**Bleeped words are just for iTunes rules. Blerg. I know.)