Back from the dead! I’ve decided to share this episode to my old anti-diet feed as well as my new podcast “Problematic,” since it has some crossover content…

If you wanna find my new stuff, or the video version of this episode, you can find it at carolinedooner.substack.com. If you’re still struggling with your relationship with food, make sure to read the book The F*ck It Diet!!!

Find Isabel here:

Her Website

Her Instagram

Her Twitter (aka Instagram for Men!)

The Bitcoin Podcast Episode Isabel mentioned

Big update! The chaos is ending. Listen to this episode’s intro for the explanation.

This podcast is about to become an archive of old episodes, dedicated to The F*ck It Diet. But before it ends, I need one more chaotic moment: having to repost this episode that I already posted last month. Why? After all of that, trying to merge my old podcast into substack, I decided instead, to “split” my podcasts again, and leave The F*ck It (Diet) Podcast as it’s own, standalone archive, that’s specific to the food healing journey. This way, it will better be able to support new people who are reading the book, or just finding the information for the first time.

But because I had the podcast merged for a few months over on substack, there were a few episodes that were posted on the new substack feed, that were not posted on the old feed. My episode with Irene on our nervous systems is one of them, so now that I’ve “split” the podcasts, it has to be “reposted” over here again, if I want it to be on this feed. And, I think this episode is really relevant to “The Emotional Part” of The F*ck It Diet. So I want it to be here! You may have already listened to my conversation with Irene back when I posted it last month! If that’s the case, you can just listen to my new intro where I explain why I’m ending this podcast, and starting fresh somewhere else.

My new podcast will be over at carolinedooner.substack.com (there, you can find the actual podcast link listings. So if you want to find my new podcast on spotify or apple, you’re going to have to separately follow me over there!)

Also! If you’ve listened to my conversation with Irene already, she is currently enrolling her yearly program Smart Body, Smart Mind through September 19th, 2022. If you’ve been wanting to go deep on nervous system and trauma work, make sure to check it out. To get some of her trainings for free, check out her free video series (it’s like 2 hours worth of video lessons!).

My Conversation with Irene

Today I am sharing my conversation with Irene Lyon, a trauma expert, educator, and trained somatic practitioner. We talk about some of the basics of the nervous system, the body holding onto trauma, and some myths and misconceptions about how healing works.

If you’ve read The F*ck It Diet or Tired as F*ck, you know how passionate I am about this method of healing, even though… I have been thinking about how much I should be getting back into focusing on it… And, as I say at the end of the episode, I actually just now am back into focusing on it. I just took Irene’s 21 Day Nervous System Tune Up. And I love it all so much, that I am now an affiliate for it.

What that means is, if you use my link for her program, and sign up, I will get a commission.

As I mentioned above, Irene is currently enrolling her yearly program Smart Body, Smart Mind through September 19th, 2022. If you’ve been wanting to go deep on nervous system work, make sure to check it out! To go through some of her trainings for free, check out her free trauma healing video series (it’s like 2 hours worth of video lessons!)

You can also find Irene on instagram here.

***

If you’re reading the F*ck It Diet book and want some structure + extra belief work + bonus content + 32+ hours of video Q&A replays? You can check out my F*ck It Diet Self-Study, it’s the book companion course that uses the book as a text book. Woo.

Note: This episode was actually recorded for my other podcast, Problematic. But I originally recorded the conversation when, for a short time, my podcasts were merged. So don’t let the outtro confuse you!

Today I’m sharing my conversation with Seerut Chawla. We talk about her brief foray into cancelling someone on the internet, her change of heart, and both of our experiences waking up to the insanity and cult dynamics of cancel culture… It’s a good one!

Find Seerut’s instagram, twitter, and website.

THANKS! BYE! HAPPY BELATED MEMORIAL DAY AND/OR HAPPY TUESDAY

Today I am sharing my conversation with Leslie Schilling, MA, RDN, CSCS, CEDRDS-S, where she talks about diet culture and purity culture in the church (and how is mirrors our culture at large!). We also chat about Gwen Shamblin, the infamous “Christian” cult leader, and the way the bible was (mis)interpreted.

Though, today’s episode is from the perspective how to change the mindset in the church from a focus on purity, to one of love, acceptance, and “grace” (a word Leslie breaks down in the conversation!). This episode is for all people, regardless of your religion, because the parallels run so deep.

And next episode will be a different conversation of leaving Fundamental Christianity and finding trauma healing.

Find Leslie on instagram and her website here

Read the beginning of Tired as F*ck or The F*ck It Diet

Find Summer Innanen’s free Body Neutrality Workshop here: bodyneutralityworkshop.com

Hello! Today’s episode is short and sweet… I’m starting off with a 10 minute audio-chapter from the audiobook of Tired as F*ck. And, that audio clip just so happens to be about anxiety, and what it’s like to be a person with a normal amygdala (aka, not a psychopath).

Then, I go over the three different “categories” of anxiety you will deal with when healing your relationship with food and weight!

This episode is brought to you by Tired as F*ck, coming out on February 8th! Read the beginning! Get your pre-order bonuses!

And Summer Innanen’s Free Body Neutrality Workshop. bodyneutralityworkshop.com

January 5th was the 10 year anniversary of The F*ck It Diet!!! (and my 34th birthday!) It’s not the ten year anniversary of the book… but of my actual journey on The F*ck It Diet.

So, in celebration, I got on instagram live and read two excerpts from my new book Tired as F*ck, where I talk about what my TFID “epiphany,” and what the beginning of my actual journey looked like. THEN the next day, my computer broke, so I’m currently posting this from my new $126 backup chrome book while my macbook pro gets fixed.

But in this episode, I’m sharing the clip from instagram live where I read those two excerpts!!!

Tired as F*ck comes out in exactly one month! On February 8th!!!

If you want to receive the rest of the excerpt where I share the beginning of my own f*ck it diet, pre-order Tired as F*ck, screenshot your proof of purchase, and then go to thefuckitdiet.com/fun and sign up for the pre-order bonuses!

Today’s conversation is with Africa Brooke! Coach, writer, podcaster, and author of the viral open letter, “Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness.” We talk about her journey to where she is now, the dynamics behind what we call “cancel culture,” the parallels between our own healing journeys, and tons more.

Find Africa on Instagram here

Find Africa’s website here

 

And if you want to help me/the podcast:

Check Out my second book Tired as F*ck!

In today’s episode, reporter Jessica DeFino explains how our skin works, and how beauty culture is actually damaging our skin health with skin “care” products. This is one of my favorite episodes on my podcast so far, (up there with my Laziness Does Not Exist episode from a year ago).

Just like our relationship with food and diets, where we are led to believe we need diets, which leads to worse health and a worse relationship with food longterm… the same thing is true for our skin. Beauty companies have convinced us we need their products, but their products are disrupting our natural skin barrier and biome, and lead us to needing MORE of their products. Great for them. Not so great for us.

Important Links:

Find Jessica’s Substack: The Unpublishable

Read the beginning of Tired as F*ck

Pre-order Tired AF and get your pre-order bonuses (including Author’s Commentary on The F*ck It Diet book)

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with Tash Ngindi, aka @thethicknutritionist. We talk about her early diet days, her disordered days in nutrition school, and her journey to realizing that weight loss does NOT work the way we think it does.

Find and follow her here: @thethicknutritionist and thethicknutritionist.com

***

And, as I mention at the end of the episode, you can read the beginning of my second book, Tired AF here: thefuckitdiet.com/tired 

And learn about pre-order bonuses here: thefuckitdiet.com/tafbonus

This post and episode is brought to you by my live program, The F*ck It Diet Club. It’s only running one time in 2021. Two months of live support, community, video Q&As, daily prompts, weekly beliefs to focus on, and all of us using TFID book as a textbook. Enrollment closes January 14th.

Six years before I started my own “F*ck It Diet,” I read the Intuitive Eating book by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, and decided I was going to heal my eating. I was 18 years old, and I’d already been extreme dieting for over 4 years. I was an extreme dieter, and an extreme binger. My weight violently yo-yo’d up and down every few months. And I was sure I was a food addict.

Reading the Intuitive Eating book was the very first time I had any idea that dieting was toxic, and wired to backfire. It spoke to me. I wanted to heal. But I was young, and desperate, and still stuck in extreme self-objectification. I was about to go to school at NYU for Musical Theater, and I also had a lot of health issues that I’d been trying to heal with my extreme diets. I wanted to heal my relationship with food, but I wasn’t ready. I also didn’t really understand some very important parts of the journey to food and body freedom. Remaining thin was still my top goal, and there was really no way to fully heal while continuing to prioritize weight control.

So over the next 6 years, while I thought I was eating intuitively, I was actually not. I was still dieting, and obsessing over my hunger and fullness cues, and calling it “intuitive eating.”

Then I’d read the books and blog posts from other “mindful eating” gurus, and assume they were continuing my education on intuitive eating, when in reality, they were taking me further and further away from true intuitive eating.

Sometimes people read my work and think I’m ragging on Intuitive Eating and saying it doesn’t work. I promise you, I am not. Intuitive eating is life changing, evidence based, and the dietitian authors of the book are trail-blazing experts who have changed more lives than anyone could begin to count. But people do misinterpret intuitive eating, en masse. A lot of those people become influencers themselves, and water down the intuitive eating teaching.

There are a lot of deeply ingrained diet beliefs that many of us hold, that will keep us from truly eating intuitively, and instead, keep us in a quasi-healed state, where we’re still sneakily micromanaging our food intake, which will inherently still keep us obsessed with food, and feeling out of control around food.

I made a lot of mistakes during those 6 long years, so I’m sharing those mistakes in the hopes that you won’t make the same mistakes I made.

Ready???

 

1. I thought I had to listen really, really closely to my hunger and fullness cues

Listening to your body is one thing. It’s what we want! But listening obsessively? Not exactly what we want. And not exactly what is gonna lead to a better relationship with food.

Here is the thing: after years of dieting, we usually feel REALLY out of control around food, so it makes sense that we assume that we need to pay extreme attention to every bite we take, and our exact level of hunger or fullness. The problem is, we don’t trust ourselves or our bodies. We are still operating under the belief that our appetite has to be micromanaged. It actually doesn’t.

In the beginning of stepping away from diets, we are often extremely hungry, hungrier than we think is ok or healthy or rational. And we think it’s a sign that we are out of control, and that our hunger needs to be curtailed. But actually, our hunger needs to be fed. Which brings me to….

 

2. I thought I would immediately eat a small / “perfect” amount of food

Along the same lines, I thought when I started ‘eating intuitively’ – I’d eat small, perfect intuitive amounts of food. But that is still diet culture. That is still making assumptions about how much we “should” need to eat. Guess what?!?! We need a lot more food that we’ve been taught, especially when we are healing from chronic dieting. We need to be FED. And before we can EVER expect to listen to our hunger and fullness, we need to prove to our bodies that we will f*cking FEED IT.

In the beginning, we will eat a lot of food, as is expected after self-imposed famine. Over time, our appetites will normalize, and it’ll be so much more easy to hear what our body wants and doesn’t want. Eventually, it begins to look and feel more like we might imagine intuitive eating to look and feel. BUT! The assumption that we should all be eating tiny amounts of food, from now until the day we die, is incorrect and ridiculous. Feed yourself. Food is life.

3. I still thought I was a food addict

Still along these same lines, I thought I had to micromanage my hunger and fullness because I was a food addict. After all, I acted like a food addict, and had acted like one all my life:  hoarding food, bingeing on food in secret, thinking about food nonstop, going on food benders while I was trying to stick to a diet, etc. I felt completely out of control.

Then, in the beginning of eating intuitively, I felt absolutely ravenous. And I was sure that was another sign of my food addiction. I thought that food addiction was my disease, and intuitive eating would help me “mindfully manage” my food addiction.

No no no no no! I was just chronically hungry! And guess what chronic hunger does to you? It makes you feel addicted to food. It makes you think about food nonstop, binge, and feel out of control around food.

I don’t believe that food addiction is real, food fixation is real (and it feels a whole lot like food addiction), food as a coping mechanism is real. But not food addiction. The cure for “food addiction” is, ironically, more food.

4. I still thought I really shouldn’t eat that many carbs

Another big mistake I made, was assuming that because I had PCOS, I couldn’t really let myself eat what I wanted. I was trying to “eat intuitively” – but curb my appetite. Again… this is not intuitive eating, and what it meant for me, was that I never really stepped out of the restrictive cycle.

5. I was disappointed with myself when I “ate too much”

Because I was still trying to “listen closely to my hunger” so I would eat the smallest amount possible, all of the time, there was still a way to do it wrong and “blow it” by “not listening well enough” to my appetite and “eating too much” – again… this is just a diet in sheep’s clothing.

6. I didn’t understand that bingeing was trying to protect me

I still saw my urges to binge, and my past bingeing, as proof I was a food addict. That was why I was approaching intuitive eating with such an obsessive “I. MUST. PAY. ATTENTION. TO. EVERY. BITE. AND. CURTAIL. MY. URGES.” energy. I didn’t understand how much my bingeing was actually just an attempt to overcorrect my constant dieting. I didn’t understand that eating a lot was healing. I didn’t understand that my body was trying to protect me from myself. I still saw eating a lot as inherently bad- and that was a huge roadblock to true healing, and true trust in my appetite.

7. I didn’t understand how important weight gain was, both physically and mentally

This is really really really important: I was still using intuitive eating as a way to try and eat less, and a way to try and stay small and/or become smaller. This was my biggest mistake, and my biggest misunderstanding. I was using intuitive eating as a diet, and had no deeper understanding of body diversity, weight stigma, or health at every size. I had no willingness to really examine my own prejudices and biases against body size, both other people’s and my own.

I didn’t understand that weight gain had the power to not only help my body trust that it was being fed, but also teach me to accept my body where it wanted to be.

8. I didn’t understand how much of a factor fatphobia played in my dieting, and how much it was blocking my progress with intuitive eating

Along the same lines, I didn’t understand cultural fatphobia, how insidious it is, and how much it was controlling my every thought and every action. I didn’t understand that I needed to examine everything I had learned about health and weight and beauty and worth, and until I did that, I’d stay stuck in a petrified quasi-recovery, afraid of my true hunger, and true body.

9. I still thought that being thinner would “heal me”

One of the big reasons I held onto my attempts at weight control for so long, is because I believed that being thinner would heal me of my health problems. That’s what we are all told, right? “Just lose weight and you won’t have issues anymore!” Our culture is so ingrained with the belief that thinner is always healthier. But guess what?!?! IronicalIy, my decade long attempts to diet and become smaller was actually really fucking bad for me. It took me hearing from people that under eating food and carbs actually messed up their hormones, before I was able to see that something wasn’t right in the way I was approaching health (and happiness).

 

Before I could heal, and embark on my F*ck It Diet, I had to be ready to uncouple weight and health, I had to understand that my ravenous hunger was trustworthy, I had to be willing to combat the fear I had of weight gain, and the beliefs I had about weight gain and fatness. But honestly, one of the biggest catalysts was that I had to be miserable enough in the diet/binge cycle before I realized that the difficulty of rebelling and healing was worth it. I had to see, first hand, that diets would continue to backfire. Even sneaky, faux intuitive eating diets.

But, I will say, healing is possible. If “Intuitive Eating” didn’t work for you the first time, you may want to re-examine and try again, because healing is so, so worth it.

For more on this you can read my book, The F*ck It Diet, or if you already have, join The F*ck It Diet Club before January 14th 2021!

Of course, also read the Intuitive Eating: 4th edition – and don’t make the mistakes I made!

Today I'm sharing my chat with Annie, one of my very best friends from all the way back in High School. We talk about our disordered eating that started in high school, and how we got out of the diet cycle in our twenties. Annie also just had a baby and has things to say about toxic diet culture during pregnancy. Content Warning: Talk about disordered habits, disordered thoughts, and pregnancy weight gain amounts. Annie's current favorite pregnancy & post-partum accounts: @Drsterlingobgyn @drcassidy @mypelvicfloormuscles @ourmamavillage @prenatalyogacenter @karrie_locher @drnicolerankins @onestrongmamaprenatal Annie also mentioned that if anyone has questions for her about pregnancy/post-partum, they can follow her private instagram @anniebmccarthy and DM her :-) *** Sponsors: -TANYA MARK. Tanya is a non diet nutritionist, body image coach, and she’s professionally certified in Intuitive Eating and Eating Psychology. She gets it. It’s not easy ditching diet culture’s BS messages. And she has a plan for you. If you’re ready to ditch food guilt and body shame for good, grab her free guide: 5 Steps to Stop Feeling Crappy About Your Body & Make Eating Easy. Grab the free guide and get started today. And follow Tanya on Instagram! -SIDE BY SIDE NUTRITION. Side By Side’s dietitians work to empower people to become their own nutrition experts. Their team of health at every size and weight inclusive nutrition therapists work virtually all over the United States - and locally in Colorado. They work both individually with clients of all ages, genders, and diagnoses in addition to running ongoing online groups - including an IE and body image support group, meal support groups, Binge Eating Disorder Support Group, and Restorative Yoga. They put out free weekly content on their YouTube channel, blog, and instagram to help inspire your journey to a trusting and self-compassionate relationship with food and your body. They offer one on one nutrition and body image therapy to those who struggle with eating disorders, disordered eating, chronic dieting, they also take a variety of insurances including the large commercial insurance companies Cigna, Aetna, and United Healthcare. If you are ready work one-on-one, you can email [email protected] or call 708-717-7394. sidebysidenutrition.com