In 2010, I saw a statistic on the CDC website that said something like by the year 2030, 100% of black women were going to be overweight and obese. I shared that statistic with some male friends that I knew and I asked them what they thought about it. They thought for a minute and as they were thinking, they came to the conclusion that that statistic might have some truth to it. So I went out into the world and I observed the black women that I came across in the supermarket, the drug store, on the street, etc and I saw some truth in the statistics as well.
I’m 45 years old and I’m a black woman and I have never had a weight problem. As a matter of fact, a few months ago I ran into a high school friend of mine who stopped me on the street and he was surprised as to how I hadn’t changed a bit. I’m actually one size smaller than I was now than what I was in high school.
Many people tell me that it’s genes, but none of the women in my family on my father’s or my mother’s side are a size 4, 6, or even an 8 except for my sister who is a size 6.
So some eleven years later, I created an entire course and coaching program to help black women to deal with our issues around health and weight.
Some things that I noticed in the black community is how we have a defeating relationship with food, diet, nutrition, and health. We also have a terrible relationship with science.
In the black community, there is this idea that if you are bigger in size that you are healthier. I was always told that I was unhealthy because I was so skinny growing up. I was told this by my peers and people in my family. I used to think that there was something wrong with me that I sometimes would overeat and eat really late at night and then go to bed because I wanted to find ways to gain weight. On top of thinking that there was something wrong with me, I was teased without mercy by my peers and people in my family because I was so small. Of course, this doesn’t happen anymore. But the insults still have an impact on my today.
I have heard many of my Latina sisters speak of this same cultural norm. As a matter of fact in some Latinx cultures, they will say a woman is looking “fuerte” which literally means strong when she is thick or plump in certain areas. One of my Dominican sisters said that women with big butts, hips and good legs are the most attractive to men and her dad even said that they would never date a skinny woman as there is a popular saying that skinny women aren’t good in bed.
Some of those sayings and references exist in Black culture as well and while there is nothing wrong with celebrating bigger women, there is something inherently dysfunctional when we celebrate disease and excess and there is plenty of excess in the black community. Have you ever noticed at black holiday dinners how much food is around? At black households do you notice how people gather in the kitchen? Do you notice how decadent and excessive we are about your food? Do you notice how some black people over season or over table salt their food?
With the decadence, and cultural references, many black women believe that we are naturally bigger women and that we have bigger bones and fatty mass in our bodies. Many of us believe that our weight gain is attributed to hormones and genes.
While I am not disputing any of this, I think we need to dig deeper.
Over 70% of black women by the time they are 18 years old have been the victim of sexual assault usually by someone in their families. And that percentage are only the ones who have told or remembered. Many black women are equal or major contributors to their households when it comes to finances. If we looked at studies that measured stress levels and mental illness among black women, I think we would be astonished.
Janie Crawford, the heroine in the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God written by anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston referred to black women as mules of the world when she says, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see”. So what is a mule? A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse or a mare. They have different chromosomes. Mules tend to be stronger than the horse from which they came, they require less food, and they are more independent. While Janie was not denigrating black women, she was admiring them for their strength, but at what cost have black women been strong for so long and admired for it? And how does this strength impact our health mentally, physically, sexually, and emotionally?
So while weight gain can be so simple as solving it by cutting back on our calories and increasing our daily exercise. But what happens when you do that and you get temporary results? What happens when the decadence doesn’t go away, or the stress, or the belief that in all categories of health, wealth, love, relationships, stress, education, etc, black women fare worse than most? What happens when you haven’t dealt with the other issues that are deeper than just the food and lack of exercise?
I can’t give you all of the answers here as I’ve created an entire course to address this, but I will say that black women and our issues with health, but particularly with weight are deeper than just food, diet, and exercise. It has a lot to do with us holding the weight of the world on our shoulders and I look forward to diving in with a bunch of black women to transform and heal that idea so black women can reap the rewards that we have so toiled so long for.
