Been there, done that...now I want to stop

If it's a diet, chances are I have been on it. I started dieting at the ripe old age of 15, when I decided I weighed too much at 140 pounds on a 5'7" frame. Part of it was the general pressure of high school, part of it was that I developed early (I was 11 when I suddenly had boobs), and part of it was that my best friend was 6 feet tall and weighed twenty pounds less than me and was absolutely gorgeous. I guess I thought if I got smaller, a few things would happen. One, people would stop thinking I was 20. Two, I'd be gorgeous like my best friend. Three, I wouldn't get catcalled by pervy middle aged men.

So I started basically with trying not to eat. But let me back up a little first. I grew up out in the country. We grew our own veggies, my mom baked her own bread, and my grandparents raised beef cattle just up the street. Sure, we ate white flour and white sugar, but everything was homemade, and I was an active kid. Always a tad on the stockier side, but that's just how I was made. Then I hit eleven, and got hips and breasts, and other kids started picking on me for being different. Somehow between 11 and 15, I came across books like  The Hunger Scream, and The Best Little Girl in the World, and decided that just not eating would solve my problems. I had to catch a bus to get to school 7 miles from home, and would pick up a yogurt (always lowfat vanilla), and I would eat it very, very slowly, thinking that had to be enough to get me through to dinner. Of course, it never was, and I'd inevitably pick up a donut or some such healthy thing on campus (I loved buttermilk bars so, so much).

This progressed to a series of diets over the next 30+ years, all failed of course. Among them (in no particular order; note: several of these were repeat offenders):

The Rice Diet
The Scarsdale Diet
The McDougall Plan
Slimfast
Dexatrim
Eat for Life
Cher's Forever Fit
Atkins
Paleo
Keto
Veganism
Raw veganism
Weight Watchers in various incarnations
The Cabbage Soup Diet
Fit for Life
The South Beach Diet
The Zone
Juice fasting
The Master Cleanse (I think I made it through two whole days!)
Suzanne Somers' Eat Great, Lose Weight
The Sonoma Diet
Carb cycling
Intermittent fasting
A super low carb and very high protein diet recommended by a fitness freak friend
The hcg diet
The Food Addicts Anonymous food plan
French Women Don't Get Fat


I am sure there are more, and I'll come back to add them to this list as they pop into my head. It's actually really ridiculous that I have spent so much of my life trying one diet after another without success. I was embarked on a crazy rollercoaster of ups and downs, fresh starts and bitter endings, potential and letdown.

And you know where this work, money, etc., got me?

Up to 200+ pounds. I theorize now, based on actual science, that I have damaged my metabolism. Yes, I had a couple of kids in there, but that doesn't account for all of it. Repeated studies have shown that yoyo dieting, of which I am a master, can raise your body's set point range. This makes me think of this...

So now that I am in this place, where I know dieting doesn't work, and frankly at 46 I am sick to death of it, what do I do?

I read Intuitive Eating a while back, and thought "That's nice, but crazy. I have no intuition when it comes to eating, so I'll just stuff myself until I explode." Nevertheless, I "tried" it, and then went back to the comfort zone of a "real" diet. I think I've done this about 10 times. I also worked really hard to turn Intuitive Eating into a diet! See, they have this hunger/fullness scale that really appeals to the diet control freak hidden deep inside me. I couldn't eat until I reached a certain level of hunger. And then I had to listen really hard to what my body wanted, even if that was just inconvenient. And then I had to stop eating before I was too full. During all this, I would join fitness groups on Facebook, and intuitive eating groups, and food addict groups, and bounce back and forth between all of them, between eating anything and everything, and limiting what I ate to a calorie count, or specific food groups.

One day, on an intuitive eating group, I saw a recommendation for a book called The F*ck It Diet. I got it on Audible right away. I listened to it in the car, and I was blown away. The author made SO much sense! Suddenly, intuitive eating didn't seem unrealistic, and I became aware of what I am actually doing to my body when I keep forcing it into a diet state. The author's recommendation for recovery is to eat and rest, and so I've been eating and resting, mostly.... when I'm not panicking myself back into a diet. I found, through that same intuitive eating group, that the author had extra resources. I'll admit... my first two times through the book, I didn't do any of the exercises, and one of the extra resources is a list of all the writing exercises and activities.

So that's what this blog will be. I'm going to start at the beginning, and work my way through all the prompts. And most of all, I WILL NOT DIET. I'll get going with the first two "assignments" which are to eat as needed, and rest (i.e. lie down) -- really rest, lying down -- for 10 minutes during the day (no phones, no reading, etc.). I'll report back next week, though I'll add that my first rest session, which ended maybe 15 minutes ago, was lovely!