The F*ck it Diet

 Last night I was thinking that if someone asked me to list the most influential books of this year, I would have a hard time. I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the 1972 seminal work by Walter Rodney. That changed the way I saw whiteness and Europe's legacy in the world forever. 

I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, which changed the way I think of the environment and human impact on the globe forever. 

Now I'm reading The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner, which is taking the wool out of every tenet of our diet culture, with massive implications. 

It seems to me that cultivating anti-diet thinking is as radical and as hard as cultivating anti-racist thinking. So deeply ingrained are diet beliefs (even if they are wildly contradictory, like some of our racist beliefs) that it must take consistent, deliberate and brave examination of them to change how we think and act. 

Dooner includes several writing prompts and action exercises in the book. I'm listening to the audiobook, but the prompts are available in a PDF. I was scrolling through them this morning. I've been writing responses to them in the order that they appear - I'm a very good student after all. Today I came across this one: 

And I scrolled right past it. Who needs a five minute rest. That little action revealed my own beliefs about silence and rest. Even as a Quaker I immediately dismissed this as something that people tell us to do but which is not actually important. Then I thought, hey, I have the time, I'm not meeting my friend for breakfast for two hours. Let me spend five minutes lying on the couch. 

And I did. I thought about my body for a few minutes. Then I thought about other things. I crossed my ankles. I watched the baubles on the wall sway in the breath of the heater. Then the timer went off and I bounced back up, ready to resume the useful part of my day. 

Maybe I should do that every day.