226. Weight Loss Isn't Anti-Feminist - Shame Is
226. Weight Loss Isn't Anti-Feminist - Shame Is
In a world of polarizing wellness narratives, there’s a sneaky, unspoken double standard at play—and it’s time to name it.
On Episode 226 of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, Kayla peels back the layers of shame, feminism, and food freedom in what might be her boldest solo episode yet. This is Part 2 of a series unpacking the myth that you can’t want food freedom, self-love, and weight loss at the same time. Last week, she debunked the first two binaries—this time, she takes on the third: that weight loss and feminism are incompatible.
Her take? Weight loss isn’t anti-feminist. Shame is.
Throughout the episode, Kayla explores:
Why women feel guilty for wanting physical results
The double standards between how male and female weight loss stories are received
Why the body positivity movement, in its extremes, can still uphold patriarchal control
How shame—not desire—is the true enemy of empowerment
She also shares her own story: how childhood trauma—not dieting—was the root of her binge eating, and how her lighter body today is a byproduct of healing, not punishment.
Kayla reminds us that feminism is about choice. And if a woman wants to lose weight, love herself, and uplift others? That’s her sacred right.
This episode is not a permission slip to conform. It’s a battle cry for sovereignty. Listen in, and get ready to write your own rules.
Embodied Activation
This week’s activation invites you to step away from the noise and into your own clarity. Try this:
Take a mini hiatus from social media—maybe an afternoon, maybe a weekend.
Go on a long walk, dance, or do something creative.
Then pull out your journal and reflect on these questions:
What do I truly want in my relationship with food, movement, and self-care?
If I gave myself full permission to want it all—food freedom, self-love, weight loss—what would that look like?
What does my inner knowing say about my body and my desires?
Create a vision for your relationship with food and your body that holds space for all of it.
Write it down like it’s already yours.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome back to what might be the most fiery and controversial episode ever. And this is not for the sake of being edgy or controversial, but because this conversation has been caged inside my chest or a while and I it time to talk about it. If you clicked this episode with this title, it's because you're either curious or because there's something in you that felt the zing of truth.
When you read the title, it maybe activated something in you because you've been fighting a similar battle. I think this is something every woman struggles with on some level. The war between wanting to be the good feminist, to be a deeply spiritually evolved being while also maybe wanting to create physical results with their health or physique, and then they feel guilty about wanting those things buying.
Going to make a bold claim in this episode. Weight loss isn't anti-feminist. Shame is. Right now we're in part two of a two part series. In last week's solo episode, I talked about how women are often told they have to choose between food freedom, weight loss, and self-love. They can't have two at once, and they most certainly can't have all three.
I break down those first two false binaries, choosing between self-love and food freedom, and also the binary between food freedom and weight loss all in last week's episode. And this takes us to the final choice. Women are often hold, they have to make, and this is where it gets fiery. So get ready. How often do you go out into the world?
And get the message that you can't love yourself and care about empowering other women. If you're also trying to lose weight or pursue a body transformation, honestly, it's kind of everywhere. And remember the Titleist of this episode, weight loss is an anti-feminist. Shame is it's shame that keeps women from telling the truth about their desires.
It's shame that keeps us walking on eggshells where we're afraid to want more, be more, shine more, and it's shame, not the pursuit of weight loss that upholds the very power structures that feminism was supposed to liberate us from. I have wrestled with this a lot over the past three years, and part of me is scared to talk about this.
Yes, even though I've already shared how Boy on Boy Romance and my Kinky Erotic Blueprint helped me stop binge eating, even though I shared those things, part of me still worries about this conversation because I know it might be a divisive one. It might be polarizing. Not everyone has the same opinion, but I am choosing to speak from my lived experience.
I'm also choosing to call out what is wildly hypocritical about this entire binary because it fires me up. I'm inviting every person listening to choose sovereignty over someone else's dogma. If you listen to this episode and not a single thing resonate with your lived experience, that makes me weirdly happy, because it means you're not letting my idea or anyone else's override your own intuition and inner knowing, which is gonna be the most important thing.
So this episode comes from my lived experience and what I've discovered along the way. I sometimes hold back on sharing personal reflections, especially edgier ones, because I worry that I'll be the only one and no one will get it. But then I heard this phrase a couple weekends ago. And they talked about how we can all sometimes become prisoners of our own uniqueness.
This has been me for so long, but now I am choosing to believe I'm not so alone in this after all. Okay, so let's start with the absolute double standard that makes me lose my mind. Three years I've been hesitant to talk too much about weight loss. I've felt nervous sharing any wins or progress in the, in this area or about sharing exact numbers because I thought it might come across as toxic or shallow.
I think this really all started about three years ago where I found myself in a room where I got told. If you ever try to help women lose weight or talk about weight loss in your content, you don't belong here. You are hurting people and the implication was that if you do this, you are bad. My intention has never been to hurt anyone.
I wanna help. I wanna make people feel better about themselves. So I've been in this purgatory of wanting to help women achieve their desires, but also wondering if helping them achieve part of what they want, which is often weight loss is wrong, or pushing the Patriarchy's agenda. And then I had this revelatory conversation with this really cool guy about a month ago.
He is hopefully going to be a podcast guest in this new year, so you guys will fully get to hear his story. So he has lost about 300 pounds and he did it largely through journaling and he quit drinking. He really turned his life around and as I was listening to him share. I realized something profound.
This man has forever had the privilege of sharing his weight loss journey without a single hangup. He's gotten to pursue it without apology. It feels safe for him to celebrate it because he is not exposed to the same backlash women get in certain circles. I realized, wow. So body positivity, extremism is literally just the patriarchy in another costume.
And note, this is the extreme version of the movement, not the movement to appreciate your body for everything it does for you, regardless of its size and shape. This is gorgeous and so needed. But the version where women get messaging that it's never okay to want to change your body because then you must hate yourself.
This is still the patriarchy because women are not being given the uncomplicated, right? To pursue a body transformation and to celebrate it openly. They have to add disclaimers. Or maybe avoid talking about it in certain circles because they're worried about triggering other women who are still struggling.
This is not feminism, and this is another double, double standard women are faced with every single day, and it's not just this double standard. In her book, untamed Glennon Doyle talks about how. When a man becomes happier and more confident, which often happens when you start taking better care of your physical health, people like him and trust him more.
But when a woman becomes happier and more confident, people like and trust her, less then in rage becomes her Soroya. Elli talks about how when men get angry. They're seen as powerful, capable, and driven. But when a woman gets mad, she's a bitch. She's hysterical. Crazy. Even so maybe the new wave of feminism is less about burning brass and more about burning the double standards that still exist.
Real email empowerment. To women having access to the same benefits. Men have true equality. Women have every right to be happy, competent, and shine without having to worry about it, making them unlikeable. And they also have every right to tap into their sacred, righteous, holy rage when things are unjust, without worrying about getting labeled crazy or dismissed.
Sometimes I think we're so busy talking about whether or not people should count calories, that we aren't even noticing how much extra permission and access men still have in other areas. Permission and access to pursue health and transformation without shame. Permission to feel the full range of human emotion.
Anger, rage, joy, confidence without backlash or judgment. Not to mention permission to love, discipline, structure, and focus all of the things that in the right doses create safety and support for feminine magic, not the erasure of it. If men. Can chase goals without guilt, feel feelings without judgment and love their morning routines without losing their humanity or their divine feminine card, then women damn well deserve the same.
And anyone who tries to tell us otherwise isn't promoting equality, they're policing it. Also real feminism is supposed to be about choice. Feminism was what allowed women to choose between staying at home to love up on their children and be a stay at home mom. Perfect. It also gave them the choice to not have children and pursue their gift careers instead, also.
Perfect. But the really cool thing is that we now live in a why choose world where if women want it, they can have both. I have had the absolute honor of meeting so many entrepreneurs who do both. They're incredible moms and they have these thriving soul aligned businesses. So can we please realize that the health and wellness space needs to create the same permission slips?
If a woman wants to lose weight however she chooses, that's her right? And if she chooses to never step on a scale again and wholeheartedly love herself without ever pursuing another change, perfect her choice. And for the woman who wants to build better habits. Her relationship with food and dedicate herself to a workout program while also loving and appreciating herself for who she is Now, she doesn't have to choose.
She can have both and so can you. Feminism was supposed to give us choice and permission. Slips not another place where we have to walk on eggshells while also knowing. No matter what I do or what I think this is gonna make somebody angry. So this is your invitation to do you, even if other people don't get it, even if it makes people angry or they misunderstand you.
I realize something recently in the wake of a seven week scale free experiment that I did. After that experiment, I finally admitted to myself that maybe I'm tired of just chasing food freedom for the sake of food freedom and wanna use food freedom and deep self-love as the vehicles to what else I want, which is to sustain a body transformation while running a business.
And this isn't about hating my body. It isn't about feeling like I need to change it because it's not good enough. Body is pretty amazing, does a lot for me and allows me to have some epic experiences. At the end of the day, this isn't even about pounds lost or a certain size. It goes so much deeper than that for me, and I know it goes deeper for many others as well.
I think this is where we have to get off social media and go inwards to get real with our own heart's desires and what our spirit craves and why. It's very hard to do that when you're scrolling Instagram, and one reel is from a plus-sized woman who's sharing the hateful comments they're getting about their bodies.
And your heart aches for them because they don't deserve that. And then you wonder if you're somehow part of the problem for wanting to change your own body. But then the next post is some super fit woman doing obstacle course racing and climbing ropes, and doing these wildly acrobatic things. And part of you feels a yearning there too, because wouldn't it be cool to see if your body was capable of that as well?
Personally, I think the more time we spend in the internet versus the internet, the more clarity we'll find on this topic. And here is what I know to be true from my own Deep Soul inventory. This is gonna be your embodied activation after the podcast. By the way, it's taking a mini hiatus from social media, maybe an afternoon, maybe a weekend.
Honestly, I did an entire month once and it was such a good month. Just throwing that out there. Then after you take this break, you're gonna get out your journal and reflect on these Aries we've talked about in the last two solo episodes. You're gonna journal about what you want and why, and you're gonna create a vision for what your relationship with food.
Self-care and movement might look like if you let yourself want it all. When I dive into my own story, here's what's real. I was not the little girl who was told she was fat by her parents and put on diets at age six. Dieting was never my biggest roadblock on my journey. Did I experience the negative impacts of diet culture in my teens on early to mid twenties?
Absolutely. I think it's unavoidable, and I've done a ton of work to heal those aspects within myself a ton. I've read every Janine Roth book. I'm kind of obsessed with what she teaches. I've become certified as a mind body eating coach through the Institute for the Psychology of Eating and their work around chronic dieting and weight loss and eradicating diet culture has been some of the most influential in my life and in my career.
I think it's been all the work around diet, culture, and learning about health at every size has made me deeply sensitive to the ways I talk about weight loss or body transformations. Even if I'm simply referring to my own experiences with these topics, I've been low key, terrified of triggering other women or seeming fat phobic or brainwashed by the patriarchy.
But in my heart, this is what I know to be true. For me, the excess weight I put on as a child was not about dieting. It wasn't about hating my body. I did start to encounter those challenges later in life with bullying and comparison with other girls, but that was not the core wound. I began binge eating and sneaking food at a young age after some deeply traumatic experiences.
The weight gain for me personally occurred as a response to the ways I was using food to feel safe and survive in incredibly difficult circumstances. It's never been about food and weight. It's been about safety and if that lands, I'm going deep into this in next week's solo episode. When I'm in a lighter body these days, it's not because I'm on some wild diet or restricting myself when I'm in a lighter body these days, it's because one, I'm taking amazing care of myself, not just with food and movement.
I talk to myself, how gentle I am, how much I look for what's right about me instead of what's wrong. Number two, it's because I'm turning to aligned ways of navigating emotions without food. Number three, it also means I'm consistently expanding my ability across all. So for me personally, being in a lighter body is a sign of healing my inner child, releasing the remaining charge from old traumas, and loving myself so hard.
I don't self abandon or self punish. So the next time someone has the audacity to imply that every single person's desire for weight loss is about being brainwashed by diet culture, I think I'm just gonna sick my inner child on them. The one who gave that weight outta protection and fear and pain.
She's excited. We don't have to keep it around. And if someone dares try to take that excitement for her. She might just stomp on their foot and dump two pounds of glitter on their head. Earlier I mentioned that I'm finally admitting I want to sustain a body transformation while running a business. This part is so important and I want you to really take this in if you are also someone who gets your food stuff together, but then you try to go do the big scary thing and your food challenges come back.
I already know I can maintain a body transformation. I did it for over two years, while working at my last job because I was comfortable. It was familiar, low stakes, low pressure. I have yet to grow into the woman who can be as consistent with her health habits as she'd love to be while running a business.
The truth is, I crashed hard the last time I attempted to build a business back in 2020. It was the biggest rock bottom I experienced. My health plummeted. My eating was out of control. I went back to almost my heaviest weight ever, and there were multiple reasons why this all occurred. So when it came to go on this business building journey, again, I'll admit it, I was scared.
I didn't wanna lose my health and my self trust in the pursuit of like I had the previous time. And in one of my earlier podcasts about magic goal setting, I talk about how if you are always setting a weight loss goal as your top priority every year, this might be the time to do something different.
Because I'm gonna guess you already know you can lose the weight under certain circumstances. But can you train your nervous system and build your self trust to the point where your habits become almost untouchable no matter what you're pursuing? That is what I'm focused on. This year, I'm focused on being the woman who pours her heart into building this business before there's any applause.
Before people get it because like I'm not selling ozempic or some trendy workout fad, I'm selling deep identity level transformation that leads to deep health, food freedom, and yes, even a potential weight loss result, if that's your desire, and I'm doing it using spicy fan fiction and imagination. And boy on boy AI powered romance.
I know it's gonna take some time for it to reach the people it's meant for. By the way, if you know any women who love spicy fan fiction, heated rivalry and why choose book talk stories, please send them to my podcast. I will love you forever anyways. I am willing to do my part and get uncomfortable and be messy as I figure everything out because I believe in this so strongly.
This is going to mean dealing with all my stuff. The visibility, fears, the fears around being judged, misunderstood, rejected. The anxiety that shows up when there's not as much evidence or certainty as I'd prefer. My good friend Caleb once said that entrepreneurship is the most advanced personal growth journey that you can go on.
All of this to say my pursuit of weight loss isn't about an exact number. I do believe in health at every size in that I don't think we know what any one person's ideal weight is. I think the body is deeply wise and will find that happy place on its own if we love up on it and take good care of it.
And from my own history, I've seen glimpses of what that healthy, happy range is for myself. Not an exact number, but a range. When I'm outside of that range, I have less energy. My workouts suffer, especially running. There was a little while when we first moved to Prince George where it hurt to run because of the weight I gave back, and running is life for me.
So for it to hurt and for me not to enjoy it. It really sucked. When I'm outside this healthy range, I feel it in my energy, in my runs and in my joy. And then there's someone else who's helped me give language to all this, and that's Elizabeth Benton from the Consistent podcast. She talks about weight loss without shame, and recently she shared something that hit me really hard.
There is actually evidence linking excess weight to reduced brain function, and this stopped me in my tracks. Because I'd always noticed that when I was heavier, I would struggle with focus and creativity, but I always assumed that was just because of the binge eating or the stress. Her episode reminded me it might actually be both, and to do something big.
Like building a fan fit, coated mystery, school of healing and sexual reclamation for high performing women. I feel like you're gonna need all the brain power, all the creativity and all the mental stability possible. And if bulk food freedom and weight loss support those things, then yeah, I want both.
Weight loss might not be the top priority for me this year. That honor goes solely to my business and creative goals, but I also believe that for many reasons, weight loss will both support these goals and be a natural byproduct of doing the personal growth work inside my business building endeavors.
So when the weight loss happens along the way, while it's not the focus, I'm going to celebrate it. I'm for celebrating it either. Like I said, your embodied activation is to take some time to get clear on your own why and desires. Take a break from the internet, spend time that's just you listening and conversing with you.
Maybe you go on a long walk or dance or do something creative before pulling out your journal. Maybe this episode sparked some thoughts or realizations that you wanna journal on, and whatever you decide after listening, whether you want self-love, food freedom, weight loss, or all three, give yourself permission.
Let yourself want it fully and unapologetically because your hunger is powerful as hell and it's time you let yourself use it. I also know what a deep layered journey this can be. You're attempting to untangle so much societal conditioning, so much noise so that you can consistently tune into your own body, your own desires.
So if you're looking for a deeper dive with some powerful support, they have two ways to support you. Consistency is foreplay. This is where you get one-on-one coaching and subconscious rewiring, so you learn how to stop apologizing for your goals and build in the pleasure led devotion to make them happen once and for all body business, all of the above.
This is where you're deeply supported. All one-on-one clients also get my signature Food Freedom Fantasy Framework. This is a course portal and group experience that turns your food freedom journey into a self-love book talk romantic using spicy archetypes, dance alchemy, and imagination. This is the most creative and potent and magical thing I've ever created, and it gives you the embodied journey to build the food freedom that allows space for all of your other fantasies to come true.
Links to more information will be in the episode description or just head to embody writing warrior.com and click the work with me tab. Or if you wanna see part of this method and action. I have a free masterclass coming up. Emotional eating to emotional freedom is for you if you're ready to break up with those unwanted eating habits once and for all.
It's also helping you escape the trap of prolonged stress, frustration, or sadness because it literally helps you create your own emotional weather. And this is not some two hour Zoom sales pitch. I teach you a practical five step journaling routine you get to keep for life, and you also get to do a full length dance alchemy session.
So you don't just learn about transformation, you encode it into your physical body. I'll link the signup to that in the notes as well. Until next time, I'm pushing you an incredible rest of your week.
