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“I shouldn’t be this hungry.”

Judging your appetite is one of the things that will keep you very stuck.

We are trying to heal the body and mind of all restriction, not just physical under eating, but the guilt and overthinking that comes along with restriction, too — mental restriction.

If you feel guilt over your eating, you are experiencing mental restriction. It’s the kind of guilt that makes you feel like you should or shouldn’t be eating a certain way. It is very common to make major improvements with actual physical restriction and finally be eating what you’re hungry for, but still be completely plagued by mental restriction.

Guilt and overthinking about food affects the body, metabolism, hormones, stress, and appetite, and will keep you stuck in the yo-yo just like physical restriction.

Mental restriction will also take the form of anxiety, panic, and constant cycling thoughts about what you should or shouldn’t be doing, or what should or shouldn’t be happening. Without mental restriction, this whole thing would be pretty easy. The body would fix itself in a few months, and eating would normalize. But thanks to our brain. Our brains freaking get in the way.

Mental restriction often sounds something like this:

I shouldn’t be this hungry…

Maybe I’ll just do this for another week and then go on another diet if I keep eating like this.

Ok, I’m allowed to eat whatever I want, but if it doesn’t prove to me that it’s working soon, I’m quitting.

I can eat this brownie, but I’d better only eat half.

I shouldn’t be craving so much.

I’ll eat this piece of pizza and then have a salad later.

Oh I shouldn’t be eating all of this bread. I’m ruining everything.

Oh if I were really being intuitive I’d probably be eating more vegetables!

If I were really being intuitive I’d be eating less by now!

Mental restriction is constant bargaining, judging, guilt, and is normally run by old diet rules and subconscious beliefs.

A lot of this mental restriction is so habitual, and feels so normal, that we barely notice it’s happening. What we notice more, is just the general anxiety and mistrust of the process.

It also doesn’t help that everywhere you look, every person you talk to, and every magazine you’ve ever read seems to confirm, add to, and applaud your ‘responsible’ mental restriction. Our collective and cultural disordered eating just makes it harder to identify that the way we are thinking about food and weight is really weird and messed up.

Most of us have always believed that this constant judgment and worry about food was ‘responsible’. It’s not. It is actually the reason you may still be bingeing, and the reason why your relationship with food became so dysfunctional in the first place.

Without mental restriction, bingeing would just be eating a lot and it would do exactly what it was supposed to do: re-feed the body. Once we start judging the food we are eating and subconsciously deciding there will be a diet (famine) the next day, it spirals out of control.

So if you are bingeing, but haven’t been restricting physically, the cause is mental restriction, and the answer is awareness of the beliefs that are perpetuating the anxiety.

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We are a culture of Yo-Yo Dieters.

So many of us try to stick to diets, only to find ourselves bingeing, then restricting even more, then bingeing again, then restricting more, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Our eating is all over the place, our weight is all over the place, our sanity is all over the place, and we feel totally out of control with food.

So why does that happen? Why do so many of us seem to have such terrible will-power when it comes to what we put in our mouths?

It comes down to a very fundamental biological mechanism: Your body does not want you to restrict food. At all. In fact, when you restrict even just a small amount, your body responds with more fixation on food, irritability, higher stress hormones, slower metabolism and digestion, less energy, holding onto more weight… and bingeing.

That binge is your body is purposely forcing you off your diet. But because we still assume that our diet is the best thing for us, we turn around and try to restrict even harder, and then we fail even harder.

That’s the Yo Yo.

Here is the thing people never really realize: chronic yo-yo dieting is disordered.

And since eating disorders are a spectrum, the yo-yo diet is on the that spectrum. No it’s not necessarily anorexia or bulimia. (Though since yo-yos often include bingeing, there are yo-yo dieters who think they have Binge Eating Disorder. But what the bingeing really is, is a biological response to physical restriction).

Instead of letting ourselves eat, re-feed, and heal, we keep dieting harder, and that continued mental fixation on food and weight loss is where we perpetuate the disordered eating.

This means that there are wayyyyyyyy more eating disorders and disordered eaters than we think there are. And they go undiagnosed because we’ve been taught how normal it is to obsess over food and “losing a few”.  We think it is normal to live in a chronic binge/repent cycle for the rest of our lives, blaming ourselves endlessly for our lack of willpower, and having the topic dominate our conversations with other women.

“Well I gained weight”, “Oh me too”, “No you look tiny!”, “Oh! Well thanks.” “I would do anything to not be obsessed with crackers.” “Tomorrow I’m gonna be good”. And on and on.

What is important to remember is that this cultural obsession with a tiny body is relatively new, and our cultural relationship to food is also new. Never did we treat food with such judgment and obsession. Never before did we try to abstain from arbitrary foods based on ever changing fads. Never before did we pray to be able to walk away from the table hungry. Never before would this kind of feeding and eating have made any sense.

And even though this way of eating is now extremely common, it is still disordered.

And our bodies are not having it.

We also believe that the only way to have an eating disorder is to be emaciated. NOT SO. You can be thin, middle ground, or very fat, and be suffering from a restrictive eating disorder. The difference here, is that the disorder will be praised.

I really, really hope that in the coming years we can start to have a different dialogue about health and food that is not so black and white. I hope we can move into a place that’s a lot more supportive of different body types, understanding weight science even more, and that a nourishing and intuitive version of eating can replace this restrictive madness.

(If you are suffering from an eating disorder, please seek treatment. The Fuck It Diet is geared towards yo-yo and chronic dieters, not extremely restrictive eating disorders. TFID will never stand in place of treatment, this is simply a supplement and not specifically geared towards anorexia. Check out The Eating Disorder Institute which is more geared towards EDs.)

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We’ve been told that calories in versus calories out is how-weight-works.

“Eat less than you expend and you’ll lose weight”.

But this is what really happens:

“Eat less that you expend and you’ll lose weight at first, but then you’ll gain it all back and think it’s your fault- but it is actually because your body will compensate your metabolism in order to keep your weight stably around the same place, because biologically that is how we have survived as a species during all those years when food wasn’t as easy to ensure or come by.”

I understand that it’s a mind trip after the simplicity of calories in vs calories out.

Because first few times you dieted, I bet you really did lose weight easily. Then, when you gained it back, you were sure it was your fault. But it wasn’t. Your body made sure that that happened. And it even wanted you to go a bit ABOVE where you started, just for good measure.

But now you’re convinced that if you can just do it like you did the first time, you’ll lose weight again, but THIS time you’ll keep it off. This time you’ll do it right. This time you’ll succeed and be beautiful and happy foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr.

But it’s harder to do now because your body isn’t having any of this shit. You’ve already pressed your luck, and now your body is fighting back harder.

And even if you happen to muster the willpower to override your body’s efforts to make you eat and keep on weight, and even if you actually do lose weight again, your body will immediately lower your metabolism and make you expend less in order to eventually bring your weight back up. It will also wire you to crave more food than you ever would have wanted under normal eating and metabolic conditions.

It should be noted that increasing exercise will have the same effect. The body will encourage rest to make up for your exertion. And if you force more exertion, it’ll just slow down your system altogether.

There’s a good reason why Michael Phelps ate 12,000 calories a day. That’s what extreme exercise requires. (And it’s also around the amount that men rehabilitating from semi-starvation ate after the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.)

So, for any of you who thinks that weight is just a matter of decreasing your consumption, and are confused and frustrated that it’s not working anymore… it’s just because your body wants you to chill the eff out and start eating normally again.

It also wants you to put on weight.

You know why? Weight is actually healthy. Letting yourself gain weight actually is the only way to heal your metabolism.

Paradoxically, once you stop trying to control your appetite, and finally eat whatever it wants (even if that’s a LOT), it’ll heal. It’ll speed up. It’ll trust that there is food. And that is the surest way to have a healthy stable weight for you.

Bring on the calories.