The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner
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recovery from the famine, every time you see food, you’re gonna eat it. Because of course you are. There was just a famine! You were starving for a half a year! Or five years! Your body is not convinced that there isn’t another famine right around the corner, so you’re going to be eating a lot for a while. You’re going to need to rest for a while. And you will gain weight during this recovery, as you should.
Once your body is fed for a long time, and not worried about any more famine, you will slowly come back to normal. Food won’t be as stressful. You will slowly trust that there is enough food again, and your body’s metabolism will eventually normalize. Your appetite and desire for food will eventually normalize, and your weight will eventually stabilize—maybe slightly higher than it was before, just because of a fear of future famines, or maybe not.
I’m sure that you’ve made the connection by this point, but let me spell it out anyway: dieting is putting your body through a famine. That may sound like a stretch, but it’s not. Not at all. You’ll say, “No no, I eat plenty, even when I’m on a diet.” Or you’ll say, “Um, I am bingeing all the time, there is no way my body doesn’t have enough food.”
It doesn’t matter. If you are still eating, but just not quite eating to satiation, or if you’ve been yo-yoing between dieting and bingeing, the body reads that as a famine state. Let me say that again: If you are yo-yoing between dieting and bingeing, you are putting your body through a constant crisis.
This is a crisis and survival state. Before our current diet culture—which, by the way, is only decades old—the only reason you ever would have eaten less than sufficient food would have been if there was a shortage: a famine. Eating less than you are hungry for triggers your body’s survival mode, changing your hormones and brain chemistry, which then lowers your metabolism and makes you biologically obsessed with food. The mental fixation is actually caused by the physical restriction.
Food fixation and bingeing are both caused by your body trying to force you off your diet/famine for your survival. If you trusted the food your body was forcing you to eat, followed your natural hunger, and let yourself recover, you’d recover relatively quickly. Your body knows what to do. It might take a few weeks or months, but then your appetite, metabolism, and weight would eventually stabilize.
But we never let ourselves do that. We don’t let ourselves eat a lot because we don’t trust our appetites or our weight. We have been told that eating a lot is bad, and a sign that we are surely food addicts. In fact, we fight our natural urges to eat a lot and to rest, fearing that we are lazy and irresponsible. We trap ourselves in this famine state, and so the food fixation continues. Then we become one of those old ladies in the nursing home worried that their pudding is going to make them fat.
When you restrict, your body is wired to compensate for the lack of food, slow down your metabolism, fixate on food, and hold on to weight. When your metabolism is compromised, your body is going to, basically, slowly deteriorate your health in order to keep you alive for as long as it can, in the hopes that one day you will be able to eat a lot again and give your body a chance to repair and recover.
If you are obsessed with food, you have triggered a famine state. If you are bingeing, you are in a famine state. This is true no matter how much you weigh, or how much you are sure you are already overeating.
You can put your body in crisis mode even if you are only restricting “a little.” If you are keeping yourself hungry often, it’ll happen. It’s also very important to note that your body can be in this state even if you are not very skinny. Many people who don’t look underfed are in a famine state. This biological and metabolic phenomenon will happen whether you are tiny or fat. The body will need more fat while it recovers no matter what, as a sort of insurance policy.
It’s hard for us to believe that the cure for our food addiction could possibly be through eating more and letting our body heal from the reactive and food-obsessed famine cycle. We are too afraid of food and calories and weight, so we never recover, and our obsession and bingeing continues. The yo-yo gets worse, our metabolism stays suppressed, our brains fixate on food—and our body puts on weight at any chance it gets.
We are convinced that our main issue is food addiction and overeating but we are completely oblivious to the fact that it all stems from restriction. In fact, we can argue that fat bodies are wired to resist diet/famine even better. Your body doesn’t want you to lose weight, for fear of an upcoming famine. And through this lens, a fatter body is better wired for survival.
The body does not like it when you try to control food intake. It doesn’t understand you are trying to fit into absurdly small jeans. It fights back against famine and restriction for your survival, and the more you diet, the harder it fights back.
THE MINNESOTA STARVATION EXPERIMENT
During World War II, there was a starvation study conducted by Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota. He wanted to learn how best to rehabilitate starving people after the war—so first, he had to starve people.
Over four hundred conscientious objectors applied to participate in the study as an alternative to fighting. Only thirty-six men were chosen: those who were the most physically and mentally sound, and who were the most willing and aligned with the goals of the experiment.
The men stayed together in dorm-like rooms connected to the temporary laboratory. They were allowed to leave, but the compound was their home base. For the first three months, the men ate normally while their health was closely monitored. They were fed around 3,200 calories a day, which was considered a normal amount. (Because it is.) They took jobs on the compound and walked around twenty-two miles a week.
Then, for six months, their calories were dramatically cut—in half. They were only served two meals a day, which worked out to roughly 1,600 calories total. The participants were encouraged to keep up their walking.
In this experiment, 1,600 calories was considered “semi-starvation,” which is really horrifying when you realize that this is the same “conservative protocol” used by the FDA to “combat obesity.” You’ve probably seen that calorie number floating around fitness magazines and doctor-prescribed diets. These days, 1,200–1,600 calories is considered an acceptable daily amount of calories for men and women.
Men often run on more calories than women because of both size and muscle composition, but 1,600 is too low for anyone. In fact, even the new 2,000-calorie recommended daily intake “is only enough to sustain children,”2 according to Marion Nestle, PhD and professor of nutrition and food studies at NYU. Let that sink in.
So on only 1,600 calories, the participants’ strength and energy immediately began to decline, and they said they were constantly tired. Then apathy set in. They had all been strongly opinionated conscientious objectors, but now they didn’t really care about any of the things they used to care about. Next, sex and romance lost its appeal.
All their thoughts became about food. They became completely fixated on thinking, talking, and reading about food. (Sound familiar?) Some began to read and stare at cookbooks for hours, mealtimes became their favorite part of the day, they’d be irritable if they weren’t fed on time, and even though their food was bland bread, milk, beans, or vegetables, they thought it tasted amazing. Many men would mix their food with water to prolong the meal, or drag out meals for two hours, or sneak food to their rooms to savor it slowly.
The men had access to unlimited coffee, water, and chewing gum in between meals, and the men became addicted—some of them chewing forty packs of gum a day, and having around fifteen cups of coffee.
The men, who had been, on average, healthy and muscular to start, became extremely skeletal during those six months. Their heart rates slowed way down, and the men were cold all the time—both symptoms of low metabolism and the body trying to conserve energy. Their blood volume shrank, their hearts shrank, and they developed edema and retained water. Their skin became coarse, they were dizzy, lacked coordination, and experienced