Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman Page A

half a piece of cake.” The truth of the matter is that we are powerless over our addictions. We don’t want to make you feel like you can never eat your favorite foods ever again. We just want to impress upon you that it is very easy to obliterate all your progress with one bite, sip, or puff.
    Anyway, after one month of pure living, if you did eat the food you’ve been fantasizing about, you probably wouldn’t even enjoy it.
    Really. You’d see that your brain has been tricking you and your taste buds all along. Now that your taste buds have healed and become more sensitized and your brain knows the truth, those old chemical, sugary, artificial, dead, rotting foods will taste “off” or “less than” somehow.
    If you do decide to partake in a vice item after thirty days, it cannot be out of weakness or for lack of preparation. You should never be somewhere and just say, “Fuck it.” It should be a calculated, scheduled, premeditated choice. The portion should be decided on beforehand, should be smaller than you would normally have had, and served on a plate. (The package should be put away before you start eating.) Sit down at a table. Eat very slowly. Try not to finish the whole thing. Do not have another serving. Take note of how you feel while you’re eating it, immediately after, an hour later, in bed that night, and the next day. Chances are, because your body is now pure, the vice item will make you feel a little nauseous, or headache-y, at the very least. And it most certainly won’t taste as good as you imagine it will. Do not discount these negative feelings.
    They are your new, healthy, clean, pure organs speaking to you.
    Enough of all this melodrama. It’s not like you’re gonna be hungry and cranky for all of eternity. We know that dieters always “crash” when their favorite foods become forbidden. So we devised the Skinny Bitch plan to allow for cookies, cakes, chocolate, burgers, ice cream, etc. They just aren’t the same ones you’re used to.
    You’re not giving up anything; you’re just trading in all your old, gross food. Big deal. The new stuff is just as good. So don’t kid yourself with the old “I had a craving” routine. Nobody’s buying it.
    The only thing more annoying than the “Where do you get your protein?” question is the “My body is craving meat, I must need iron” comment. Most cravings are not reliable indicators of what your body needs. Smokers crave cigarettes, alcoholics crave alcohol, drug addicts crave drugs, and junk food eaters crave junk. If you eat shit for a few days, and you begin to crave a salad or a piece of fruit, that’s a craving you can trust. Otherwise, it’s just your addiction talking. Bitch-slap it, and get a hold of yourself. But feel free to try and understand your addiction first.
    In order for us to survive, our brains came equipped with dopamine, a pleasure-producing chemical. Dopamine is released during sex (or even just while flirting), so that we procreate and the human race won’t die out. And food stimulates dopamine release so that we’ll remember to eat and nourish our bodies. Basically, anything the brain perceives to be as enjoyable will cause dopamine to lock onto brain cells and build a permanent memory trace of where pleasure comes from. Even though this evolved out of the need for survival, sometimes this can be a bad thing. Heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine all trigger the brain’s pleasure circuitry. And not surprisingly, chocolate, sugar, and cheese also affect this same part of the brain. So you see, we can be physiologically addicted to food. Any food can trigger the brain’s pleasure center. Some of us are fortunate enough to experience dopamine ecstasy while eating broccoli, and we actually crave this healthy food. But the types of food and the degree of pleasure they bring will differ from one person to the next.
    The trick is resetting our memory traces to feel pleasure from healthy food, and no