on capitalism + women being depleted
I’m just over a year and seven months into eating disorder recovery. I was very surprised to even learn I had an eating disorder. It hadn’t even occurred to me that that could be a possibility, because I was never “thin enough.”
I’m sure there are millions of people out there - women especially - who have a story similar to mine.
I only learned that an eating disorder was the problem after I’d spent a good two years talking to various health care specialists to try and understand what was going wrong. I went to multiple Registered Dieticians and NDs, because I knew that Medical Doctors don’t learn about nutrition in school, and I also knew that Western medicine has an awful history of gaslighting women, which continues to this day.
I was trying to figure out why my menstrual cycle had gotten 5 days shorter than it had always been. Why my hair was falling out, and I was so bloated that I looked 8 months pregnant even when I’d barely eaten anything at all. It felt like my digestive system had kind of stopped working. My armpits inexplicably itched. I was super tired all the time.
And even though I was still in an intentional caloric deficit, I was gaining weight.
Just before I turned 37 in April of 2021, I went through an egg freezing procedure. I was having my most successful financial year ever, and I could finally afford to do it, right at the tail end of the age range that they tell you you should.
It seemed like I was a great candidate. I was told that tests showed that my egg stores (or whatever?) were like that of a healthy 30 year old. Leading up to the procedure, I was told that there were 22 follicles that looked like they would mature into eggs, which I understand is a great number to get, even if you’re a lot younger than I was at that time.
But then something went awry. The clinician was surprised to see that my follicles were maturing/growing too fast (I’m sure I’m using incorrect approximations of the terminology, but you know what I mean), so they cut the dosage of the so-called “trigger shot” - the hormone you inject the night before the retrieval procedure, which tricks your body into believing its pregnant so that it doesn’t shed the 22 eggs you’re spending $6K+ to grow (at a for-profit clinic, probably, like mine was) - in half.
And then the eggs didn’t mature as they were supposed to, and they “only” got 5, which isn’t a very favorable outcome at any age. This was almost 5 years ago now, and I’m probably not going to do a procedure like this again.
The reason I’m relaying this anecdote is that it was one of the clues that something in my body wasn’t working correctly. My hormones were so out of whack that even a clinician who worked with women to harvest eggs every day was surprised to see the effects of their dysfunction.
But my weird symptoms had really kicked off maybe 9 months before this, when I was at the lowest weight I’d seen since I was 15 years old. I reached this weight after about a year and a half on the ketogenic diet, which I thought I had thoroughly researched in advance. However, the thing about the published data surrounding keto is that, like the vast majority of medical research, it had heavily focused on the effects on the bodies of men, to women’s detriment.
Turns out female bodies can go into a sort of crisis when on a restrictive diet like this for too long. But no one told me, because very few people seem to know.
For me, this was triggered when I also started cutting calories to around 1700 per day, though I knew my “maintenance” intake to be about 2300. This was a larger cut than I had ever done before. Even still, I didn’t think this was a crazy amount to reduce. Don’t people who are dieting sometimes go down to 1200 calories per day? That’s what the shitty fitness apps had told me was okay.
I won’t bore you with too many more details. Suffice it to say that my body went haywire, and weird things kept happening for a long time. Over this investigative period during which I was just trying to find someone, anyone, who could tell me what was going wrong, two different Registered Dieticians in two different countries - one even worked at a fancy clinic that worked with Olympic athletes, as well as people in eating disorder recovery - told me that I wasn’t eating enough. One RD said I wasn’t eating enough carbs, even though I’d gotten off keto by that time. The other RD told me that I wasn’t eating enough calories at all.
And I didn’t believe them. How could I have not been eating enough? I “wasn’t thin.”
…and now, 5ish years later, I’m finally starting to heal. But it’s been a huge pain in the ass, and genuinely a trial because of all of the ramifications of not being healthy. As I type this, I am very fat. I gained a tremendous amount of weight through this process, as I finally started feeding my body what it was asking for after years of not. It’s held on to every bite, it seems, not trusting that there won’t be another famine following this feast.
The idea is that, once I’ve fed it enough for long enough, consistently, without slipping any restriction in - which I did, unintentionally, just a few weeks ago, pushing this body to revolt again - the excess weight will shed naturally. This process had already started happening, before my recent relapse, and even if you do everything perfectly it can still take a long time to get well. So I have to live in this very fat body for a while, if I want to come out on the other side of this fully healthy, for the first time ever in this life.
Why am I telling you this? One reason is that I want to shout this experience from the rooftops so that more women know. It was YouTubers - Kayla Rose Kotecki and Becky Freeman - who finally helped me fully comprehend what was happening and how to heal it. It wasn’t MDs, or even RDs. I wish this had been general knowledge, so that I not only didn’t have to actively search for years to find out why I was sick, but so that others have the information, and can avoid getting sick in the first place.
I saw a GLP ad on Reddit the other day. It had a quote it claimed was from a woman, which said something like, “I worked out every day and ate at a deficit and I was still gaining weight.” It made me want to burn it all to the ground.
This woman was where I had been….and the for-profit GLP company was exploiting the lack of information out there about this phenomenon to trick women who feel this way, non-diabetic women who may or may not be obese, into paying $450 a month, or even more, for the product they sell.
Which brings me to the larger issue, the mission behind why it seems like I’m in this body with this set of experiences in this lifetime.
It sure seems to me that the man-made systems of this world, which virtually all of them are, are set up to varying extents to deplete the feminine energy in everyone, of every gender. But I want to make sure to properly acknowledge female people when describing this, and everything that happens to us as a result of it. I find that this phenomenon is so insidious that many people aren’t conscious of it.
That seems to be my big mission this lifetime. Doing my part to bring healthy feminine energy back to Earth, in all its abundance, so that we all feel it flowing through us, bringing us creative impulses, helping us to feel wholly nurtured. And in bringing the feminine back to a healthy balance, the unhealthy masculine will have to heal itself too. The yin and the yang have been terribly out of whack for a long time.
This is what Seeds is. I looked around - and don’t get me wrong, it was an iterative process - and I started to see that this imbalance in yin and yang energies was everywhere, but it was perhaps most pervasive, and affecting us most in the granular day-to-day, because it is baked into the old economic system.
Unless you’re totally off grid in every way, virtually all of us have to interact with the old economic system in some capacity. At this stage of history, the vast majority of adults have to interact with it often multiple times a day. Even as a kid, you’re aware of it too, as you begin to recognize that others around you have access to things that money can access, and your family doesn’t - or vice versa.
So because it’s so pervasive, my theory is that, if Seeds can help to heal this imbalance in the economic system through helping others and rewarding giving, which to my mind are behaviors that align with healthy feminine energy - and, at scale, if Seeds is helping to bring Vipassana meditation to more people who are interested in it as well - that’s going to have a profound direct impact on real lives, but also a cascading effect that, at its best, may be able to provide real healing that reaches millions. If Seeds becomes synonymous with the concept of money - because money is a necessary medium of exchange, the best tool for that that we’ve currently got, and Seeds adds a dimension to it that can mean the accessibility of additional abundance if and when SEEDS go up in value - that would mean reaching billions.
This is the dream that Seeds is moving toward.
…and my eating disorder recovery has shined a brighter light on the ways in which I’ve been depleted, as a woman, and also as a kid who grew up in the scapegoat role in a narcissistic family structure, which is something I didn’t even know was a thing until a therapist told me this was what my family was when I was in my late 20s, and I looked it up, and agreed that we were a textbook case.
I’ve seen and felt that depletion, often, through the vehicle of money. 1% of venture capital investment goes to woman-founded organizations like Seeds, which made things much harder for me as its founder, and for Seeds as an organization.
This depletion showed itself in other weird, more insidious ways. It would rear its head when I hired an engineer who undermined my authority as the maker of this thing, even as I did my best to treat that person generously and well (though I’ve for sure made a ton of mistakes). It’s showing up numerically, in that the Seeds mutual aid pool is relatively depleted as I write this as well.
I think a lot about that idea that the stuff a founder - or an artist, or a musician - has not yet healed shows up in their work. When that work is meant to grow to touch a lot of people, a lot of people may also be affected by that unhealed thing. That’s a big part of the reason Big Tech is so terrible, though I would argue that another big reason for that is capitalism, and the root reason behind it all is this imbalance of wounded masculine energy, which dominates things. It’s force-feeding us AI “tools” as we speak.
When the feminine is unhealed, when a female person is unhealed in this area, we allow that energy to deplete us whether we’re aware of it or no. That doesn’t mean it's our “fault,” but now I understand that what it does mean is that it’s each of our respective responsibilities to do the work to set boundaries around it for ourselves, so that all of this out-of-whack, damaging patterning stops harming us once and for all.
…and so I have this sense that, once I heal this body - once this body is well fed for long enough that it trusts me to feed it consistently again, once it knows its safe to release this extra weight, and once I’ve lived in this fat body long enough that my internalized fatphobia - another side effect of capitalism and unhealthy masculine energy, which tells women we’re supposed to look a certain way, and makes money off of us feeling bad when virtually no one reaches that “ideal” - is largely released, I’m finally going to be able to truly ground on earth through this body.
And there won’t be anything I feel I can’t do. And I want that same confidence - that faith! - for you. 💗
I’ve been sharing from time to time about this ED recovery journey on my YouTube channel, if you feel like checking it out. I also talk a lot about the concept of transcending capitalism there as well, and about Vipassana meditation.
As ever, if you can help someone in need through Seeds, it’s so appreciated, and we’ll send you an equal or greater value in SEEDS in thanks (there’s an extra bonus to thank folks for recurring gifts). If you need to ask for help through Seeds, please do! That’s what it’s for.
Doing my best to channel love and healing - metta! Which means lovingkindness in Pali, the language of the Buddha - for us all.
xoxo, Rachel