07: Weight. Why do women need to be small?

May 15, 2022

This week my joy is coming from teaching a dance class for the first time in over two years with Diva Dance DC.💚 The video of the routine I taught is on my instagram here. On my dark days battling Crohn’s last summer, being able to teach dance classes again was a north star for me, and I feel immensely grateful to be in a healthy enough place to do it. When I first stepped into this role a couple years ago, my biggest fear was that I couldn’t lead because I didn’t have a “dancers” body. But there I am in all my health, fullness, and joy…crushing it. 🔥

I have danced everyday of my life…mainly in front of the bathroom mirror. Dancing is the fastest path I have to get out of my head and back into the present. I am intentionally creating my weekly class choreography with simplicity, embodiment, and joy; designed not for the trained dancer, but for every person who can’t help but put on music and dance in their room. 🤗

This brings me to my question this week:

Why do women need to be small?

I may be smiling in the above photo, but this week I am diving into weight, patriarchy, and cults. Let’s all buckle up. 🙈😬

My parents are moving out of my childhood home, and I spent last weekend cleaning out my bedroom. During the process I found gems; old report cards, letters I wrote to my family from sleep-away camp, and journal entries from as young as 4th grade. I was skimming through an old journal where I must have been around 11 filled with creative stories and random drawings. Then I came across a chart…it was filled with a series of weight entires, all around 89 lbs. My breath caught in my chest and I began to cry. I was only 11, and yet I believed it was important to record my smallness.

When I was in 3rd grade, I overheard my teacher talking about how she was concerned about my weight to my friend’s parent. I was a normal curvy, athletic kid. As an adult I want to run back to that memory and protect my little self’s ears. How dare that teacher equate my body with my worth...when I was just a little girl? But I absorbed all of her words, and I vowed not to be fat.

It began at 9, but it only got worse in middle school, when I began to understand that attention from boys was the new social currency. Being thin was of utmost importance to desire. By middle school I was tracking my eating at most meals; a behavior that at the time was common amongst my friends. I remember skipping breakfast one morning in 7th grade, and being so hungry that by the period before lunch I couldn’t focus on the test I was taking.

I internalized that I needed to be thin first and healthy second. The best way to do both was simply not to eat too much…calories in and calories out. All of this was tied to worthiness and a belief about who I was…if I was deemed “fat”, I wouldn’t be desired by boys, be a talented dancer or athlete, or even have confidence to move through the world.

I employed the most effective tools I saw around me, self-discipline and shame. It was my job to get my body under control…to stay small. In 9th grade, I made the varsity soccer team as a freshman, and that same year I asked my mom to take me to a weight watchers meeting. I didn’t see how my muscular curvy body was my strength. I had so much power in my legs that I was easily one of the fastest players on my soccer team. But my legs weren’t thin, they didn’t look how they were supposed to. I needed less of me.

In college, I nervously gravitated toward women and gender studies classes, and began learning about how patriarchy and the media try to influence women to control their own bodies. I was tired of being controlled and controlling myself. I vowed to f*ck the patriarchy and eat whatever I wanted. But then I gained more weight and that wasn’t making me happy either. So the yo-yo began; months of saying f*ck it, eating late night pizza, drinking too much and doing what I wanted, leading into months of discipline and working out 5-6x per week. On and on and on. No matter which phase I was in, every single day, multiple times a day I would look in the mirror and ask myself, am I fat? What have I eaten today? Is that too much?

The series of questions below the food were:

Am I too much like this? Too big? Can I be sexy and loved? Do I take up too much space?

In the last year, being diagnosed with a chronic illness, the consequences for not listening to my body became higher. In addition to what I ate, I began to shift how I ate. After working with an amazing nutritionist, I learned that in my pursuit of being thin, not only was I not eating enough at meals, I was not eating enough fat which keeps you full; like olive oil, tahini, peanut butter, avocado etc. I was not eating until I was full, I was eating the amount I thought I should eat. Now that I eat until I am full, I think about food less for the sheer fact that I am not hungry all the time.

I have more love for my amazing body today. I am still intently focused on my health, but I am no longer interested in measuring my smallness. Still, I am smart enough to know the journey to work through the internalized shame I have carried for so long will take years.

While its easy when we are covered in shame to believe it is a personal problem, I believe there is a broader conspiracy at play:

Women are systematically told that our value comes from what we look like, and it is best if we are small.

This sadly doesn’t stop in middle school. I know powerful, beautiful women in every decade of their life that still hold this value system close…and it only gets harder.

It starts with unrealistic dieting in school, but then in our 20s we go from teenagers running around after school to sitting at work all day, so most of us gain weight. Then the 30s often bring kids, which even though I haven’t been pregnant, I know enough about pelvic floor therapy to tell you that our bodies change in all kinds of ways. Then comes menopause which f*cks us again with intense hormone changes. Finally, post 80 we are usually frail and old and for the first time in our lives trying to put on weight. So women struggle their whole lives for perfection and thinness, and at each stage of our lives get knocked off course by the natural aging process. WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT GAME WE ARE DESIGNED TO FAIL???? (excuse my language but not my outrage 😒).

When I hear older women I love complaining that they are fat, I have compassion because I have asked myself that question almost everyday. But then I feel deep rage. This poisonous belief that we need to police our bodies never stops.

I am about to go somewhere crazy, but stay with me for a second. My friend Kathleen sent me a podcast about the cult NXIVM. This is some real whack-a-doo stuff, and I ended up spending 90 mins watching a documentary about it. The next day I had this aha moment. The documentary explained one of the critical ways NXIVM cult-leadership exercised control over its members, is by encouraging them to practice calorie restriction in the name of self-improvement. Not only did members control their eating themselves, but more seasoned members of the cult trained newer members on how to do this and made sure they were sticking to their protocols. If female members remained distracted with obsessively counting calories, and further distracted because they were hungry, they couldn’t see the broader more oppressive, powerful forces at play. Which reminded me of another oppressive powerful force…patriarchy.

Now I don’t believe that patriarchy is exactly a cult, but it certainly encourages all women to control themselves, and women to police each other.

Here is some logic that I want you to take with a grain of salt but I believe is directionally correct:

If we buy into the definition that patriarchy is a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it…
And we believe the best (and maybe only way in the past) for a woman to acquire power is to get it from or in association with a man
Then its deeply important to take male desires into account if you want to have any ounce of agency and power over your life
If men believe you should be… thin or curvy, have large breasts or be flat chested, unemployed or employed…it is in your best interest to try to live up to that standard
In a system of patriarchy, male approval will reward women with a crumb of power by association
If male approval rewards thinness, women begin to believe their power comes from thinness, and believe they can’t step into a positions of power without thinness
If women remain focused on staying thin, and are distracted because they are constantly hungry, they have no energy to see the oppressive forces at play, realize they already have their own power within them, and actually TOPPLE THE PATRIARCHY. Damn, point 1 for patriarchy.

This system of beliefs is in the water in our culture, and flowed right into my 3rd grade classroom. Thats how a grown ass women in a position of authority, a teacher, ended up sharing her concerns about the body of a 9 year old girl (me) with another grown ass women. By shaming me and making sure I wasn’t deemed “fat” within our patriarchal system, they were likely subconsciously hoping that I could maintain my ability to be desirable, avoid future shame, and therefore have choice in my life.

Honestly, writing this story out is the first time I have had compassion for the older women involved in this story. If they were that scared for a young girl, what was their inner dialogue about their own bodies?

There is a real cost to all of this:

TIME: Obsessing about our bodies takes a lot of time every single day. If I was designing a society where I wanted one half of the population to be excluded from power and instead attend to the needs of the other half, without rebelling, I would also probably give them a meaningless task like measuring their weight and counting their calories everyday.

Living WITHOUT: If we move through the world and everyday think I can’t have this, I can’t have that, then we get used to telling ourselves, “I can’t have what I want”; we ultimately get accustomed to living with less. (This was my friend Kathleen’s synthesis not mine, but I heard her say it, and my brain went 🤯).

Losing our COMPASS: The more insidious cost is disconnection from our own navigation systems. At the beginning of my last relationship, my partner asked me one day what do you desire? What do you want for you? I ran the question through my brain and it got stuck in the macbook rainbow wheel of death…cannot compute.

That’s the cost I didn’t fully understand of looking to the outside to understand if I am hungry. I was completely out of touch with my own desire. Not listening to myself when it came to food didn’t just stay within decisions about food. I couldn’t just turn on my navigation systems for other things. Being disconnected from my own desire and hunger impacted my relationships and my work. If I didn’t believe my body could be trusted to tell me when and how much to eat, then my instincts probably couldn’t be trusted in other areas. I now believe that our bodies are our compass. If we listen to them they give us all the information we need about what we want; what makes us come alive and what turns us off. I am in the process of trusting my body again.

SHAMING: The fat standards I impose on myself and think about everyday, invariably seep out of me. I judge other women’s bodies even when I don’t want to. She’s beautiful and thin, and she’s not. Its automatic. I am unlearning this poison too.

So, to myself I say (and for anyone who needs to read this)- Going forward I will continue to do my best to trust my hunger. I know I am capable of lighting up the world, but I need to eat and be full to do it. My hunger is my compass. If I disconnect from my hunger and my desires I will disconnect from my power.

My power is not acquired through men. I already have it.🔥

As my favorite author Glennon Doyle says, “You are not crazy…You are a goddamm Cheetah.”

Happy Sunday Folks. Let’s listen to our hunger and light the world up. ☀️💚 Also F*ck the patriarchy.

P.S. I am not entirely sure how men fit into this conversation, but I believe building a more beautiful world requires everyone, and therefore Team Joy is gender inclusive. There are wonderful, kind, conscious men on Team Joy who want to dismantle patriarchy and build a more equitable future just as much as I do. Saying F*ck the patriarchy, is not the same to me as saying F*ck men. I love men. But I want to live in a society where both men and women hold power. Designing systems where men have power over women is bad for men too.

Men of Team Joy- please help me out here. I have begun reading about masculinity and have begun to understand how patriarchy is a box for all of us. If we tip the scale in one direction and say women need to be small, then the inherent flip side is men need to be big (muscular and strong?) to be worthy, loved, and have power. How does all of this policing and body control effect you? I would like to write about masculinity in the future- if you feel compelled to help or want to share ideas please comment below or write me at isabelscher13@gmail.com.

P.P.S. When I have shared my struggles with weight in the past, the instantaneous response from other women is to tell me I am not fat (that is how we are trained to respond). I truly do not need anyone to write me back saying I am not fat; I am on my own self-love journey, and am feeling good about my body today. 💚 Keeping the conversation about being fat or not, keeps the conversation around how each of us individually is living up to these unrealistic standards. I am much more interested in engaging on why women need to be small in the first place, and how we each reclaim our power.