John C. Parkin: F**k It

Alas! I have returneth from the rugged wilderness of West Virginia where the work to reward ratio is probably the highest I’ve ever encountered. I was swarmed by insects, walked through miles of nasty bogs, got completely drenched by hard rain, bushwacked up the nastiest slope of all time ever, and got ripped to shreds by thorns only to see 50 miles of trees, shrubs, and rock. The Rocky Mountains have spoiled me (where even the crummiest 3-mile hike will take you to a vista of scenery that is incomprehensible).


I did see one black bear. One glance at my intimidating presence from 70 yards away was enough to send him running for his life into the forest. 100% sheer intimidation.

But I did get some good reading in (It’s amazing how easy it is to sit down and read with full attention for 5 hours straight when there’s no access to the internet, television, phone, family, friends, fridge, or flesh of sum yung gal). The first notable mention is John Parkin’s F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way. Coming from a mostly spiritual/psychological point of view, Parkin shares many ideas about just letting go and eating the food, letting go of goal-oriented exercise and doing what’s enjoyable exclusively, and getting past the relentless pursuit of perfect health and just, well, saying Fuck It.

While there’s no doubt that many health seekers need more than anything to take a large dose of the wonder drug Fukitol that I have touted in the past, particularly myself and my readers, this is not the message many others need. Some people have clearly overdosed on the drug already and need a strong counteracting supplement to their diet and lifestyle. There are plenty of people that forego their health and have for decades, only to find that the quality of their lives is slipping away due to their convenient and habitual junk food and junk life. One 180 reader found the site when looking to clean up his diet after habitually drinking 13 cups of coffee per day and eating movie candy every night for dinner. I won’t name any names, ahem, Yusuf Clack. Excuse me. Something caught in my throat there. But you see what I mean.

Even I probably swung a little too far in the Fukitol direction over the past couple of years after becoming so disillusioned about “health food,” and I can’t help but feel thrilled at how tightening up the ship for the last 5 weeks has treated me. So Parkin’s message may be just what you need to hear. I’ll certainly never forget the times when I let go of the many health adventures I was on only to feel better instantly eating food that I had convinced myself was poison.

Or, like me, maybe you are going through one of those phases where you are eating very clean and falling in love with real food all over again (or about to do some really wild cultish-sounding nutrition stint that involves peeing on all kinds of test equipment). Who knows. But I know that Parkin’s message is good medicine for many people reading this. And I love the way he states it all. I will include some food and health related quotes that I gathered from the book below, totally unedited. If you are offended by the language, then you are probably in need of reading it the most. Thanks to Chris of http://www.zentofitness.com/ for turning me onto this book (I think that’s who it was, maybe it was another one of you British bastards, who all seemed to be named Chris and give the most outstanding book recommendations on earth).

pp. 57-58



“So why all the jokes? Because our stuff around food just consumes us. And I find this very funny. In one way or another we spend so long thinking about it. I’m a man and I think about food a lot. Maybe I’m a man who thinks like a woman. But from all that you hear, women are supposed to think about food a lot more than men.


And if we’re thinking about sex every ten seconds, I reckon we’re thinking about food for at least seven of the other seconds. It’s just amazing how any work gets done in this place.


And I’m being funny about it because that’s the first step in the Fuck It direction.


Our obsession with food is just crazy. And it is hilarious.


Food (like love and sex) is a major area of meaning for us. Though most of us are probably in denial about that. If we were asked to list the things that really matter to us, we probably wouldn’t include food. But it’s usually one of the things that matter most.


First, then, it’s worth getting conscious around food. Start to notice how much you think about it. Notice what goes on when you think about food. Notice how you are when you’re eating. Notice how you feel when you eat good food that you think you should be eating. And notice how you feel when you’re eating bad food that you think you shouldn’t be eating. Notice how you are when you see other people eating either extremely good food or extremely bad food. Notice how you feel when I keep asking you to notice how you feel. Anyway, just start to get an idea of how much food really matters to you.


Next, have a little inward giggle about how you are around food. Otherwise you’ll cry.”


p. 63


“Say Fuck It to your diet. And Fuck It when the voices start coming up. How about saying Fuck It and eating what you really fancy for your next meal? Say Fuck It afterwards when you start to feel bad. And go with it and see what happens. If you put on a bit of weight, say Fuck It.


My bet is that you will start to get over your issues around food.


My bet is that once you can eat what the hell you want, you won’t need to stuff the whole of a birthday cake into your mouth in one go because you know you can have more later or tomorrow if you want.


My bet is that without so much tension around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods you may well start to want to eat some of the foods that you thought were ‘good’ but were so painful to eat. You’ll find that you actually like eating these foods. But don’t start thinking they’re ‘good’, just eat what you want and see what happens.


And my bet is that, eventually, you will start to lose weight…


So Fuck your diet and start saying Fuck It; Accept how things are and how you are because everything is OK like it is – let food and your body shape matter less to you. And observe what all these zen dudes have been monking on about for so long: that when you lose your desire for something, that’s the moment when you start to get it.”


pp. 73-74


“It’s tiring and boring to wander from one therapy to another achieving different levels of success. If one therapy seems to be working, you really go for it and get your hopes up. Then it seems to stop working and you get depressed. Every therapy is offered evangelically by someone who was ‘cured’ by it and they think it will do the same for you. It may help, but it’s usually not the cure.


Of course, there’s the chance that it may be. Those hot stones under your eyelids may well cure you of your curly toenail syndrome.


But I’d prefer to look at another possibility.


Some people get so tired and bored with trying everything and spending lots of money and investing so much energy that they simply give up. They say one big Fuck It and finally give up wanting to be whole and well and perfect. They’re still feeling pain and discomfort like they always did and they just say Fuck It and give in to it. Nothing makes any difference anyway, so why should they go through the added pain of hoping it’s going to go away?


They give in fully to their condition. They surrender completely to their pain. They give up wanting to be any different from how they are, now. They probably start eating things they haven’t eaten for a while, they may start drinking and smoking again. What they certainly do is RELAX. The one thing you’ll always do when you really say Fuck It is relax.


And you know what happens? Maybe not straight away. Maybe not for a little while. But they tend to get better. This takes them by surprise, because they’d given up needing it. But they get fully better and achieve what they’d always wanted. Only they’re genuinely not bothered about their health anymore, so it doesn’t matter that much now – even now they’re suddenly in full health.”


pp. 103-104


“Any attempt you make to control yourself… to impose discipline on yourself… can create some tension. It creates pressure that you usually can’t live up to. And the disappointment you face when you can’t live up to your own expectations is even more tedious than the frequency with which you let yourself down.


So just say Fuck It to it all. Just do what the hell you want. Try not to set up daily tasks for yourself to get fitter or thinner or smarter (though we all still will, of course). Once you lose the tension of these self-imposed expectations, you will feel so much freer. And when you feel free, you will be more tuned in to what your body wants:


• You will feel like exercising when you feel energetic.
• You will fell like vegging out in front of the telly when you don’t.
• You will feel like eating healthy food sometimes.
• You will feel like eating junk at others.
• You will feel like stopping eating when you’re full sometimes.
• And other times you will eat until you feel sick.


This is life. Give in to it.


The remarkable thing is that when you give in to the natural flow of life, you will most probably exercise more than you were doing when you were a member of a gym. And you will probably eat healthier food overall than when you were seeing that nutritionist. And you will probably eat smaller portions overall than when you were on some ridiculous diet.”


p. 121


“Yes, my friends, it’s time to say Fuck It to your issues. Say Fuck It to your journey into healing and wholeness. I was on that journey, and I did find that it was going on a bit. That underneath every issue and pain was another one. Then another one. Then another one. There is a bottomless well of pain if you really fancy taking the leap.


So, thus far, we have two paradigms, two ways of seeing life and our journey through it:


1. To focus on the pleasure, and ignore the pain, at whatever cost
2. To focus on the pain, and forget about all the pleasure.


There is, of course, another way. A way where we accept that life is just a dance between pleasure and pain. If you ignore pain, it doesn’t go away. If you try to heal pain, there’s still more there. Because pain is part of life.


Life is pain and pleasure in equal measure.”

Intuitive Eating

Intuitive eating – which is best described as eating what you want, when you want, because you feel like eating it (with or without a “damnit!”) – is a great concept. Sure, it has limitations. One is that superstimuli such as artificial sweeteners, flavor enhancers, and pornographically-delightful foods like chocolate, cupcakes, Mountain Dew, and potato chips often induce us to eat, not for hunger’s sake, but out of an empty pleasure-seeking compulsion (sort of that “just one more” feeling you get when flipping through channels at the end of an unsatisfying day, or hopping around from site to site on the internet with that subtle whisper for gratification in the back of your mind).

But it’s worth recognizing how much more intelligent our bodies are than our minds when it comes to our physiological needs. A very simple example of this occurred the other day and really made me think. I hadn’t thought about it much before because it is so truly automatic, intuitive, and instinctual.

That simple example is how thirsty you get when you eat salty food. At first glance this seems like nothing. Like no big deal. But truly, the vast system of regulatory mechanisms in our body involved in this simple impulse is humbling.

The human body has a very tight range when it comes to the ratio of fluid to sodium. It wants to maintain that level for optimum health. If you consume salty food, you need more water. If you consume food without salt, you need less water to dilute the small amount of natural sodium found in the food. But our thirst really does a fantastic job of regulating this for us. Thirst is a manifestation of dozens of biochemical communications that result in a little lightbulb going off in our brains that says, “Damn an ice cold glass of “x” would really hit the spot right now.”

But even something so simple as sodium regulation is highly dependent on you being attuned to the cues your body gives you to drink. The danger arises when we have an external idea about whether water is good or bad for us, or salt is good or bad for us, or whether or not we should drink water with meals, or being told that we could die from dehydration if we don’t drink 6 quarts of water a day while working out in the hot sun (A safety handbook given to Forest Service employees, for example, suggests that one quart of water needs to be consumed every hour when engaged in hard physical labor. My supervisor just about died from doing this once, from inducing severe hyponatremia – dangerously low sodium levels, out in the middle of frickin’ nowhere).

All of this junk is mental interference that clogs up an otherwise well-oiled and sophisticated system. But even the smallest idea can do it, such as thinking that sugar will cause "insidious weight gain" and drinking water instead of Gatorade during intense physical labor/exercise.

It’s also a great example of how something simple and pure, like water, can save your life or be deadly depending on the context. Context is everything, and even water has a long list of “contraindications” depending on the circumstance. Our bodies are always in flux with changing demands, situations, and a constantly-transforming physiology dependent on something as simple as the time of day. A study mentioned in a book Rob A. sent to me actually showed that the prime determinant in whether a person developed side effects from chemotherapy (such as hair loss) was the time of day that the chemotherapy was given!

As it pertains to water, many people could benefit from drinking more water I’m sure, but give too much water to an infant and it can trigger seizures from low sodium levels, as this study shows.

That study is actually what got me so intrigued by this simple salt and thirst regulation system, as supposedly it is very difficult for those with a low metabolism to retain salt, and low sodium levels can induce seizures. The person I know who has problems with seizures hates water and loves salty food – and thinks it would be healthier to drink more water and avoid foods with a high sodium content. I think her body probably knows best on this one, and it is no accident that these are her preferences.

Speaking of which, I have made mention several times already of allowing this person’s daughter to eat absolutely everything she wanted starting two months ago. Back then she had severe sleep problems and was wetting the bed 3-4 nights per week. She has not had these problems at all in about six consecutive weeks since she was allowed to turn up her nose at dinner when it didn’t look good and eat massive gobs of ice cream instead. No longer is she forced to clean her plate or eat her vegetables, or meat, or starch, or whatever. And her tastes and cravings have become very well-rounded – with no more tension and anxiety and battle over eating time either. Intuitive eating can be a great thing.

And you never really know what your body might need to rebalance itself. I just received an email yesterday about many health benefits a person experienced after ditching coconut oil and eating a bunch of mayonnaise instead.

Think about all the mental interference you put up between your body and its natural cravings, impulses, and preferences. Many people notice health improvements when they just step out of the way. And this goes not just for eating, but for everything in life – certainly the type, duration, and time of day you get some exercise and movement, or the time you wake up, or whether or not you lay down and take a nap in the afternoon.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post to this, as intuitive “living” is only one tool in the toolbox. As you know, information can help, and investigation (of how you respond to certain foods, drinks, exercises, bedtimes, supplements, etc.) can help even more. Each by itself is limited in its usefulness, but taken together could be a pretty sophisticated way for figuring out how to get and keep your body in a harmonious balance.