People going through their own healing relationship with food always want to know what other people’s experiences were like. Understandably. It can be helpful to hear what someone else went through, and it can be inspiring to hear how different they now feel on the other side.

But it can also be dangerous if you start comparing every little thing in your journey to someone else’s.

Oh man, I’m experiencing this thing they didn’t. It must not be working for me.

Oh man they felt normal after a 2 months?!

So if you can remember that everyone’s starting place, journey, and timeline is different, I’ll talk about what the stages of my Fuck It Diet were. The Master Fuck It Diet, if you will. The Fuck It Diet that started the Fuck It Diet. Ok.

Pre Fuck It Diet: Lots of diets. Lots of body dysmorphia. Orthorexia. Lots of constant thinking about my weight. Some very dedicated bouts of “intuitive eating”, which were very rules-based attempts, and I was still very concerned with the whole thing resulting in making me skinny. I considered myself “healed” many times (cause I was sometimes skinny and sort-of eating what I wanted.)

Phase 1: EPIPHANY: “I’m so miserable, I’m bingeing, I’m irrationally obsessed with being skinny, and I think I have body dysmorphia.”

This was a BIG time of discovery. This was a BIG time of shifting my perspective on weight. It’s when I realized that weight was THE REASON I was unable to eat normally. My health fear was secondary.

This was when I decided I needed to allow myself to gain weight. This was when I realized that the more I ate the better it would be. This is when I read Health at Every Size.

I was still afraid of gluten during this time, trying to slowly add in foods that freaked me out. It last a few months.

Phase 2: AHHHHHHH!

This was when I started reading The Artist’s Way, which lined up with, and continued to challenge my relationship to, perfectionism and control.

This was when I started this very site you are reading. This was when I felt like I NEED TO SHARE EVERYTHING I AM LEARNING.

I bought bigger clothes. I now ate bread. I was still afraid of everything but I was doing it, sometimes worrying I was going to ruin everything… but I was still doing it.

I would say this phase lasted 1.5 years and I had moments of thinking I could try to “eat healthy”, which means, feeling I should eat a certain way, for a week here and there. Then I’d wake up.

Body image was both really hard, and also very liberating.

I started puffing out my stomach on purpose to be like YEA MY STOMACH IS FILLED WITH FOOD, WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT, WORLD!?

My fears of food and eating mostly went away during the course of this phase.

Phase 3: Energy Work This phase started with me doing EFT/Tapping on my residual fears about weight. The willingness to feel what was scary to feel before, and processing old shit. This shifted a LOT more for me, and I barely thought about my weight, and started eating even more. Lost some weight accidentally.

Phase 4: Weight-Neutral Broke up with a boyfriend, gained some weight, and didn’t give a shit and decided to just keep doing what I was doing and accept the weight if it was supposed to be part of my life. This was big.

This phase is probably the same phase I am in now. Phase 4. Healed with food and a de-charged relationship with my weight.

And let me say, my weight has fluctuated. Not wildly, no, it’s still so much more stable, no matter what I eat. Other things seem to change it, like seasons and emotions and hormones and … just other things. Because that’s life. Nothing stays the same. We are always in flux. Weight is just another one of those things.

This last and longest phase has been accompanied by lots of spiritual, emotional, and energy work, which hasn’t been used for my relationship with food, because that’s been good, but more the other parts of my life. Basically, now that my food is normal, the question is, how can I live more? How can I apply The Fuck It Diet to all areas in my life?

That’s the goal guys. Get past the food stuff and into the life stuff.

Food is just the beginning.

You got this.

(News: I have a podcast! Listen! Rate it! Review it on iTunes!)