Cheri Erdman was only 5 years old when she began to diet. At the urging of her kindergarten teacher, her parents sent the gifted child for 13 months to a camp for children with “special nutritional needs.”
The next 33 years of Erdman’s life was a continual cycle of dieting and regaining weight.
Losing, gaining, relosing and regaining a total of 400 pounds and seeing her weight seesaw between 135 to 235 pounds during this time period, Erdman tried most diets she encountered, but they did not help her.
Tired and sapped of energy by constant food deprivation, Erdman nonetheless continued her education to the point of working on a doctorate.
At this stage in her life, happily married and with a supporting circle of friends, Erdman, at 38, said “no more dieting.”
“I looked around and saw that my life was good,” said Erdman, a professor and counselor at the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn. “I had just had it feeling bad about my body when everything else was so good.
“When I was a child in the ’50s, I first realized that society doesn’t treat fat women well. I think my kindergarten teacher thought that my having a high IQ and being overweight were two strikes against me in that time period.
“Today there are still so many reasons that overweight women have so much negative energy directed at them,” she said.
“You have to consider that this is still a misogynistic culture. If you keep women obsessing about their appearance, it keeps them away from controlling anything else. But I had never let my weight get in the way of my life. I guess I was living the life of a non-fat person in a fat body.
“I think keeping people insecure about themselves also may be economically healthy for the U.S., which has a diet industry worth about $30 billion. If you are working off fear and selling hope, it keeps people coming back for more.
“We in the U.S. are very consumption-oriented, but we feel guilty about it. If we see what we think of as conspicuous consumption embodied in a fat person, we feel it’s OK to not treat them well.
“But when I was thinner, my outward life did not change. I always had friends around me, men around me.
“I think this `lose weight at any cost’ is not a healthy message. I am a very healthy person. My last checkup at the doctor’s was great. I swim four or five times a week, play racquetball, walk and bike.
“None of this causes me to lose weight. The only way I could do that is if I ate less than 500 calories a day, which I am not willing to do. But I exercise because it’s fun and it keeps me healthy. You can be large and be fit.”
Erdman`s eventual acceptance of her size led her to the topic of her doctoral dissertation, a phenomenological study of healthy larger women who accept themselves.
“I was in the process of my own acceptance, and I thought there must be other large people out there who like themselves,” she said. “I felt that I was able do this kind of qualitative research because I was able to draw on my own experiences.
“I wanted to only interview women who actually are large rather than women who only think they are because these women have different problems, though there are many similarities psychologically.
“My interviews showed me that these larger women really had come to feel good about themselves. It was a slow and gradual process, and support is very important, but eventually they learned that it’s OK to be in an out group. In fact, these women also tend to have more sympathy for other out groups and acceptance for diversity.”
Realizing that many large women have not managed to achieve Erdman`s level of self-confidence got her thinking about ways she might share her experiences and her message with others. The result was the formation of a class at the College of DuPage she christened “Nothing to Lose: Self Esteem for the Larger Woman.”
The classes are a combination of Erdman’s self-esteem message and an exercise class that physiologist Jane Benson designed for large women.
“The classes are small, which is how I like it, and at first, the women are pretty ambivalent. They’re saying `I can never accept myself at this weight, but nothing has worked, so what have you got?’
“I try to expose them to my point of view and then say `take what you can use from that.’ I am not against weight loss, I am just against dieting to get there, and I am certainly not an advocate of letting yourself go. I just think that you can turn your attention to other parts of your life.
“The second part of the class is exercising with Jane, who was the one who really encouraged me to do this in the first place.
“The women start out walking and work up to low-impact aerobics. This is important because there are so few exercise classes for large-sized women.
“I know that exercise was the one gift my last diet gave me, so I try to encourage these women to keep moving. A lot of them go on to mainstream exercise classes after having built up their confidence with Jane.”
In addition to teaching, Erdman and some of the women she initially interviewed have formed a support group for “women of size,” named Abundia, for the Germanic goddess of abundance, Habundia.
“We are all therapists in Abundia, and we are all fat,” Erdman said. “We’ve recently become involved in more activism, but we are primarily a support group.”
Abundia speakers give presentations on promoting and implementing “non-dieting, size-acceptance philosophies” and building self-esteem. Members of the group have spoken to a number of audiences, including a conference for women with eating disorders. The women of Abundia are also sponsoring their second weekend retreat for large women Friday through June 11 at a private lake in Watervliet, Mich. The retreat will include workshops on stress reduction, body image and self-esteem in addition to nature walks and other outdoor activities. (For information or registration, contact Barbara Spalding, 312-935-1050.)
Abundia recently joined with another size-acceptance group to celebrate the “Death of Dieting.” The Association for the Health Enrichment of Large People held International No Diet Day! in May, an affair partially sponsored by Abundia.
This event, described as “an evening of humor, information and stories of personal triumphs from people who have stopped dieting,” encouraged visitors to bring along a diet “relic,” such as a scale or calorie counter, in exchange for door prizes.
Erdman firmly supports the “death of dieting” and hopes that such activities will show more women and men of all sizes that being large (or abundant, the word preferred by the women of Abundia over what they consider the negative labels of “obese” or “overweight”) is an acceptable way to be.
Erdman’s endeavor to share her message has produced a book slated to be in bookstores at the beginning of August. “Nothing To Lose: A Guide To Sane Living in a Larger Body” (Harper San Francisco, $18) is Erdman’s attempt to reach out to the 30 million large women in America.
“I think the time is right for this,” Erdman said. “Women have just had it. Right now, women are still valued more for their appearance. This also encompasses things like aging, but as far as weight goes, a woman can’t stray very far from a certain weight and not be made to feel bad about it.
“Men don’t have this same problem. Their identities tend to be focused elsewhere, on their jobs or money, for example. A woman can be successful in every other aspect of her life and still feel like she has to focus on her weight.”
Fighting these stereotypes has been a driving force in Erdman’s life, though she minimizes her role as champion to the woman of size.
“I don’t think I am that exceptional,” she said. “I’ve lived this issue my whole life, and I have learned to change my mind about my body. I’m not a lazy person. I am very disciplined. I mean, if being fat is so bad, then how do you explain me?”
