Wait ... is The F*ck It Diet the same as Intuitive Eating? Is it different?
When I started writing about this subject, I considered F*ck It Diet to be more radical than intuitive eating.
Intuitive Eating (the book) seemingly hadn’t worked for me. It was just another way to overthink the way I was eating.
Well… it turns out, I misapplied it. I did it wrong. I turned it into a diet.
I read the book and used that method for years before the Fuck It Diet, and though I had times when I thought I was healed and normal with food, I was not. I was concerned with amounts, I ate crazy slow, and when I didn’t I thought I was “doing it wrong”. But most importantly, I was afraid of gaining weight.
It always blew up in my face. And I still thought about food all the time.
In the years since I’ve come to udnerstand that true intuitive eating is fully aligned with The F*ck it Diet.
Intuitive eating, at its core, is about listening to your body and trusting your body to lead the way with eating, as opposed to listening to diet rules.
Your body will naturally lead you to the kinds of foods, and amounts of food, that you eat.
Being an intuitive eater is the goal!
However, what I will say, is the way that The F*ck It Diet communicates intuitive eating, is different. It’s intuitive eating with … f*ck it attached. And that sentiment can be a very helpful nudge for the disordered eater who, like me, are tempted to turn Intuitive eating into a diet, the way I did.
The way many people teach and practice intuitive eating, including the famous book of the same name, focuses on rating your hunger on a scale of 1-10.
The good thing about the hunger scale, is that any attempt to bring people into their bodies, and teaching them to feel their bodies, is good.
But here are the incorrect ways the hunger scale can be applied by those of us coming from a diet mentality:
‘Rate your hunger/fullness level’ easily feels like a rule to people coming from a diet mind-set
This rule easily becomes obsessive and a way to eat “correctly” or “incorrectly”
It makes being “too full” seem like a negative thing, therefore there is still a way to “fail”
The goal is still “eat less” to “control your weight”
That is still a diet.
People’s goals with this “rate your hunger” version of intuitive eating usually means they are keeping their old diet goal of eating less, for the purpose of controlling or losing weight. And this means that you won’t be healing the biggest cause of food dysfunction: fear of weight.
Our dysfunctional relationship with our bodies and our weight is the reason we are dysfunctional with food. It is the reason we do not trust our appetites. We judge our choices and we think we are gluttons and food addicts. We don’t realize that our bodies and minds are reacting to any sort of restriction as a survival mechanism. This survival response is not healed by rating your hunger or trying to make sure you don’t get too full. That is just more of the same with a different name.
I consider that a temporary bandaid.
So yes, I am negative about rating your hunger, especially in the early stages of this healing process.
