Elizabeth started gaining weight in high school and laughs that “my big hips come from my dad’s side because my mom is extremely small.” Elizabeth, who has never met her father, regularly braves the dating scene, but says she meets plenty of overweight women who are hesitant: some sisters “hold on to extra weight as physical and psychological protection against a hostile world.” “. Her idea is this: If I’m already fat, I don’t have to worry about going out and trying to find a man, because I already know that most men want thin women. A lot of women think, ‘Oh my gosh, if I lose weight, someone might actually be attracted to me and I might be in a relationship and risk being rejected for some other reason.
Beyond the immediate problem of using her weight to avoid intimacy, another tragedy lurks for some women. They turn to food to relieve painful memories of childhood sexual abuse. Sadly, young women and girls who have been abused, often by a relative or close family friend, someone they knew and trusted, grow up harboring secrecy and shame, trying to bury it through various forms of addiction.
Yvette, an alcohol and drug counselor with a master’s degree in psychology, has battled the demons of addiction for much of her adult life. When she was a child, she lived next door to three older boys who abused Yvette for years. She believes the nightmare contributed to her endless battle with her weight.
Before her gastric bypass, Virginia, a single mother of four, spent years in therapy trying to come to terms with the fact that her biological father forced her to have sex with him during her teenage years. Even after the weight loss surgery, memories of her still haunt Virginia to the point that to this day she can’t even pronounce her father’s name.
Elizabeth says that she, too, was abused as a child, but does not make the connection between childhood sexual abuse and obesity. “Yes, I was abused by a family member when I was a child,” Elizabeth reveals. “But that’s not why I’m overweight. I’m overweight because it’s in my genes to be fat, because I was skinny as a kid.”
Robin Stone’s book, No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse, is described as “an honest and illuminating look at the devastating effects of sexual abuse.” It lists eating disorders as one of the most common “psychological, emotional, and behavioral effects of sexual abuse.”
Sexual abuse experts say some incest victims overeat to escape inner turmoil and downplay their femininity, avoiding unwanted attention to their bodies by wearing baggy clothing or gaining too much weight.
According to literature published by Survivors of Incest Anonymous, “If we perceive obesity as unattractive and if we believe we were abused because we were attractive, we may overeat in a misguided attempt to defend ourselves from further sexual assault.” Some large black women mistakenly believe that their size can protect them from physical assault, including rape. This is not true. Any woman can be vulnerable to a date rape or other type of attack.
In his twenty-five years of treating obesity, Dr. Michael Myers, a weight-loss specialist in Los Alamitos, California, finds that 40 percent of his patients have been victims of childhood sexual abuse. “There is some experimental evidence to suggest that increases in so-called ‘stress hormones’, such as cortisol, resulting from extreme psychological stress may induce fat cell proliferation and predispose victims of sexual abuse to the development of obesity.” .
Myers began writing about this phenomenon decades ago, and more recently, other sociologists and psychologists have published similar findings addressing the link between sexual abuse and obesity. “For years it has been known that sexual abuse of women is associated with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa,” says Dr. Myers. “But now many of the doctors who treat obesity believe that there is also a strong correlation between sexual abuse and the development of obesity in adults.”
In a sense, obesity protects a person from their sexuality since in Western culture, obese people are generally not perceived as sexually desirable. Dr. Myers finds that survivors of sexual abuse have low self-esteem and severe problems with depression, often feeling that it was their fault that they were sexually abused, “an emotional but totally illogical belief.”
Dr. Susan Fellows, a sociology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, believes that if sexual abuse is left untreated, it can result in self-destructiveness in the form of “diseases,” such as drug and alcohol addiction, overeating and suicide. . Dr. Fellows has studied eating disorders and believes that people who try to deal with childhood trauma through therapy and try to turn their lives around are often sabotaged by their families and loved ones. This doesn’t always happen on purpose, but any change in one family member “rocks the boat” for others. “For example,” she says, “for a man to say that he would rather her partner die than for her to lose weight is obviously an emotional and mental abuser … the speaker is afraid of losing some kind of power in the relationship.”
Dr. Fellows believes that “it is important that treatment for sexual abuse and obesity include the recovery of the entire family or at least a few important people.” Eating disorders that result in obesity are like drug abuse. They are public health problems, not moral failings. The solutions to both problems, according to Dr. Fellows, are health education and the cultivation of self-esteem.
Help is available for women suffering from overeating and other disorders related to child sexual abuse. The Veterans Administration (VA) lists child sexual abuse (CSA) as a condition that can lead to “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). Veterans and their families are eligible to receive treatment through educational classes available through a local VA facility. Counseling through Sexaholics Anonymous and Incest Survivors Anonymous is free; and groups, like the National Rape, Abuse and Incest Network, offer crisis intervention around the clock online and in person.