The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner

Sometimes you walk through the library and see a book on a table and you just can't look away. That was the case with The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. I'm going to be honest with you, SmartGirls, and say the cover of this book really spoke to (or shouted at)  me. I know, don't judge a book by its cover, but this one gave me an idea that I might really like it. After all, the subtitle says "Eating should be easy" and I totally agree with that one, don't you? So I took it home and had relatively high hopes that it might be the answer to all our dreams. Could we really just say "F it" and eat what we want? According to Dooner, yes.

This book begins with the story of The Minnesota Starvation Experiment which was conducted during WWII to find how to best help starving people after war. First step: Find some people and starve them. Thirty-six men were chosen from among a group of conscientious objectors looking for an alternative to fighting. They were healthy at the beginning of the experiment but had their food intake reduced from 3,200 calories a day to 1,600 calories per day. Does that number seem familiar? If you've ever read a fitness magazine or any diet book ever, you know that 1,600 calories is often recommended as a maximum number of calories allowed to lose a even just a little weight. In this experiment, however, it was considered "semi-starvation." How scary is that?! Within six months, these previously healthy men became "extremely skeletal", their heart rates slowed, their blood volume shrank, their hearts shrank, and they experienced a whole host of other physical and psychological problems. One man had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a mental hospital where he received...wait for it...FOOD. After a few weeks he was completely back to normal.

All this, Dooner says, is proof that restrictive calorie diets only serve to harm our bodies and force our metabolisms to slow, which makes it harder for us to lose weight. And drive us crazy.

So what should we do? Here are the rules for How to go on The F*ck It Diet:

1. Stop restricting.

2. Trust your body, appetite, and cravings.

3. Eat deliciously and normally for the rest of your life.

4. Embrace life in a (probably) not-stick-figure body.

5. Do cool, fun things, and enjoy your life. 

Sure, this all sounds like the perfect way to justify eating what you want, and maybe it is, but it also makes some sense. Throughout Donner's book, she offers scientific studies to back up her claims as well as testimony from people who have tried it and made it work. 

Bodies end up right where they belong when you stop trying to control weight. The only thing we can control is how we treat ourselves, and learning to feed ourselves normally.

This book was interesting sometimes, long-winded at others. I think this could have been shorter; it did feel like it repeated itself fairly often, perhaps to pad the pages. Still, if you're looking for something different that just might work, pick it up and see what you think for yourself.