Reddit reviews The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy

Looking at the summary of that book on Amazon...

They say don't judge a book by its cover, but I'm going to do the opposite, be very judgmental here and say that this summary doesn't fill me with the hope that this is a measured take on ED recovery or healthy lifestyle habits. It seems like precisely the sort of summary that'd be a motherlode of fatlogic. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just bait to get HAES advocates to read it, who knows?

Still, the message of the person writing this... Yeah, an anorexic probably needs to let go of the fear of gaining a healthy amount of weight. But you know what? It's been said here before, by ED sufferers, that nothing makes an anorexic run away in screaming panic from the thought of treatment and recovery quite like the idea that they'll end up obese.

Yeah, if you're BMI 15, you need to let go of the fear of gaining weight. If you're BMI 25, not so much.

I'm a diagnosed ADHD person and in typical fashion, I haven't finished Your Life Can Be Better yet. It's chock-full of tips for folks with ADHD to learn how to person more effectively. However, I've already gotten a couple of great tips out of what little I've read, and I recommend checking it out. Here are those tips and a few others.

1. Remember that tasks =\= projects. YMMV, but generally projects would take more than 30 minutes to do.
   
2. Break projects up into the tiniest tasks. This should result in a long list. (Step 1, make a list of tasks. Step 2, open Microsoft Word. Etc.) Doing this will help you find your starting place, make larger tasks and projects seem less overwhelming, and hopefully help you prioritize what needs to be done in order to make the big projects happen.
   
3. Hide 95% of that list you just made from yourself. Keep it out of your sight. Otherwise, your brain will get overwhelmed by the super long list, and it'll feel like you have an unbearable amount of work to do, which defeats the purpose of breaking things down in the first place!
   
4. Only look at the next 3ish things you need to do.
   
5. Bonus: Make one of those 3 things something you've already started doing. (Step, 1, make a list of tasks. Oh snap, you're basically done with that one already!)
   
6. Keep things in ONE system that will be readily accessible to you. I use Wunderlist as a sort of task warehouse, but my Inbox (first list I see when I log in) only has 1-3 items in it at any given time. The rest are just dumped in whatever sub-list I want them to be in, and when I need to work on Area of Life X, I go to that task list and pull out a couple of things.
   
7. Don't try to force your brain to work on stuff when all you can do is stare at a blank Word document and wish you could be a person who just gets shit done. (Also, very few people "just get shit done.") Really give yourself permission to take breaks.
   
8. This book is about why diets don't work but also about so many other things, and one of my biggest takeaways has been that you can't berate yourself into self-improvement and "you can't hate yourself into happiness." It's okay to seek structure since that seems to help you, but don't let it come at the cost of ignoring your needs and not embracing the things about yourself that are worthwhile and important and have absolutely nothing to do with turning papers in on time.
   
9. Encourage yourself the way you would encourage a friend. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to someone you love and adore. Hopefully you are someone you love, but if not, this is a good way to start working on it.
   
10. Housekeeping stuff you may or may not already know: Talk to professionals and seek diagnosis if that is right for you. If you are diagnosed, consider talking to your campus disability services office about possible accommodations. Regardless, keep open lines of communication with your professors. They want you to succeed and may surprise you with how understanding they can be.

Oh my god, same tbh. Like yesterday I just… inhaled a bunch of grapes, and did so today for breakfast, and then went back for other stuff that I normally never would’ve.

On one hand, part of me is like ‘oh no I’ve flipped around and I’m binging out and this is terrible and I’ll never be normal again’ but I think one thing that is helping is like I’m trying this based on stuff that was in the Fuck it Diet book where it… actually outlines feeling precisely this way, and takes you through it in terms of why you’re reacting like that and what’s going on mentally.

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the book - and in fact, disagree pretty hard with some areas - the parts where it describes like - basically thinking of it as if your body has been NOT eating for a while and on that level doesn’t KNOW that the food supply it now has access to isn’t going to suddenly stop again (i.e. you’ve been putting your body through an artificial famine) it’s just going to overload on things.

So what she suggests is just to give in to it, to kind of like - not forever - let yourself reassure your body that food is going to be there, that it doesn’t HAVE to be anxious, that you CAN have it if you want it, and to think of that as the first step of recovery. Only after that initial reassurance is there on a very subconscious level (and I know in my case, it definitely isn’t yet) can you start to actually return to some kind of normalcy.

That’s why I’m treating the way I just am craving fucking everything as a chance to like just sit back and log exactly what it is I’m craving and in a way trying to enjoy or go with it. Like, what DO I want? How is my mood affecting me? Was this worth it? Did I enjoy it as much as I expected? And seeing it as part of a process and letting it take as long as it needs, mostly.