New Diet Claims to Let You Eat Whatever You Want

From Cosmopolitan

Tracy Carneal,a 20-year-old from Arizona, dreamed of being a model since she was 12. She was counting calories by the time she was 15, keeping as little weight as she could on her 5-foot-8 frame. But last fall, when excessive running and food restriction caused her to tear her quad in three places, she knew something had to change.Carneal had been an active Instagram user ever since she stumbled on the #StrongNotSkinny hashtag last summer. She noticed that many of these women also used the hashtag #IIFYM."I saw all these girls who had gone from that really low-calorie place I was at to eating higher calories and weightlifting," she says. "I just saw this transformation in them and got inspired."Carneal started her account as a way to connect with that supportive fitness community. While recovering from her injury, she decided to try IIFYM herself.IIFYM stands for "If It Fits Your Macronutrients," which are proteins, fats, and carbs. Popularized by bodybuilders and physique competitors in the last five years, the diet has gained a mainstream following recently thanks to Instagram. The hashtag #FitFam is used on Pinterest and Twitter too, but there's more of a community on Instagram. Members with fitness-focused accounts share workouts, recipes, motivational messages, pictures of their biceps, and before-and-after photos.The rules of the IIFYM diet are simple: You can eat whatever you want as long as you stay within a target range for each macronutrient each day and meet a fiber goal. Your "macros" are based on your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which uses age, gender, weight, height, and exercise level to estimate how many calories you need each day. The carbs/fats/proteins ratio will vary depending on your goals.Searching #IIFYM on Instagram can be a disorienting experience. There's the parade of muscular bodies: semi-clothed selfies taken in gyms, bathrooms, and locker room mirrors. But there's also a lot of food, and not always the healthy-looking kind. Stuffed pancakes drowning in syrup, bowls of candy-topped ice cream, gobs of peanut butter.Carneal showing off her arm musclesIt was this combination of ripped bodies and mouthwatering food that drew me to the diet when I stumbled across it a few months ago. I'd been half-heartedly lifting weights for a couple months, but the IIFYMers I started following lifted weights - like serious weights, not the barbells that come in different colors. They pooh-poohed the "cardio bunnies" and bragged about how little time they spent on the elliptical. The more I looked at those women (and there are plenty of men too), the more I thought, why shouldn't I have abs, not to mention biceps, not to mention a few pounds of muscle on my wimpy frame? Could I get ripped while eating ice cream?While IIFYM is new in name, sports nutritionists have relied macro-based diets for decades. "IIFYM does seem to be based on nutrition science," says Elisabetta Politi, director of Duke University's Diet & Fitness Center. Weight Watchers, one of the most popular diets in the country, also uses macronutrient values to calculate its points system for foods. And Politi says the algorithm of IIFYM's online calculator follows major health organizations' guidelines for fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.But IIFYM has raised eyebrows among some experts because of its eat-what-you-want approach. "Real health and wellness is going to be driven by micronutrients in addition to carbs, proteins, fats," says Heidi Skolnik, a New York-based nutritionist. "Calcium, iron, potassium, antioxidants: These are things we need in small amounts but have a huge impact on almost every pathway in our bodies." Also, an IIFYMer could theoretically eat only processed foods, though followers of the diet say that's nearly impossible if your macros are set correctly.During my own attempt at the diet, I worked with Ben Esgro, a bodybuilder and dietitian who has tracked his macros for 10 years. I signed up for his basic nutrition package, and for $300, I got my starting macros and weekly adjustments for a month. I filled out a form with my stats (height, weight, exercise regimen, current eating habits), and a few days later, he emailed me my first numbers. He would adjust them every week, making it even more difficult when he gave me guidelines on when to consume my carbs.The first week the tracking was kind of fun - my macros were like a puzzle to assemble throughout the day - but the diet quickly turned isolating. My boyfriend and I used to cook together, but it became too stressful. I couldn't resist pulling out my phone to check my portion sizes "one last time." Trolling #FitFam profiles one night, I read one IIFYMer's transformation story with horror - her relationship ended when her boyfriend got tired of eating alone. By week two, I felt bloated, exhausted, and cranky. I was constipated, and my protein powder was giving me horrific gas.Then I began making progress at the gym. I had always been sore the day after working out, but I started waking up feeling like the fucking Terminator. I couldn't stop looking at my arms in the gym's mirrors. But as proud as I was of my new baby muscles, I also discovered that my brain liked tracking macros a little too much. The diet revealed an obsessive streak I never knew I had. And although I promised my boyfriend a dinner out on Valentine's Day, he nearly dumped me when I asked our server if he could please weigh my fish. I wish I could say I quit then, but I held until the mental strain of doing it every day became unbearable.Many IIFYM followers on Instagram say they are recovering from eating disorders. They say they are using IIFYM to "reverse diet" after long periods of restriction by increasing their macros at a gradual pace. Though Carneal has never been formally diagnosed with an eating disorder, she'd been restricting for most of her young-adult life. She said she felt full all the time when she first started IIFYM, but her body adjusted quickly. Eventually, she doubled her previous caloric intake and showed off her #gainz to her 2,900 Instagram followers.IIFYM has not been studied as a transitional tool for recovery, but Dr. Russell Marx, chief science officer at the National Eating Disorders Association, warns that any strict diet usually stands in the way. "The focus of recovery needs to be about getting rid of rules, not creating them," he says. He points to the psychological burden of tracking everything you eat. "People who develop [eating disorders] have a certain temperament," he says, which can include anxiety disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and perfectionism. "When you get into a diet like IIFYM, you can exacerbate those obsessional, anxious, need-to-focus-on-every-detail tendencies."While Carneal credits IIFYM with pulling her out of her disordered mindset, she discourages younger girls, many of whom contact her through Instagram, from trying it. She is careful to tell them not to idolize the bodies they see on Instagram, and under a recent post of herself in a sports bra and running shorts, she wrote, "As much as I would like to say my abs always look like my best ab pictures- they don't. I capture them in their best light...So please- Don't base how you view your own body and what you want to look like on pictures you see in the magazines or even on Instagram! We are all unique and should cherish our bodies and not try to be anyone else!"Carneal stopped tracking her food in February after five years of counting calories and about five months of IIFYM. "Once I got to the high calorie amount, I knew that I was going to be able to step away from it," she says, admitting it was nerve-wracking at first. "I do keep a slight mental count of what I am consuming, but all in all it is nice not having to record everything," she wrote on her blog. "It feels like I am sort of feeling 'normal' again." She said she wouldn't hesitate to go back to IIFYM if she felt like she was restricting again, but for now, she's trying to eat intuitively."There's no 'going over,' there's no 'going under,' she says. "It's just what my body feels like eating. And if I want to add a little extra peanut butter, I will."Follow Amanda on Twitter.Photo credit: Getty Images