Read With Caution: What is the Root of Your Weight Gain?

There are a couple of things I want to preface this post with before you go on and read it. First never was it my intention for this to be where this blog went, however I do believe that it is extremely pertinent and something that needs to be discussed. I am currently taking a screenplay writing course and my teacher always says that we shouldn’t know exactly where our piece is going it will just end up there and this is what happened with today’s post. Second of all I also want it to be known that in no way am I looking for sympathy or anything of that nature. This may be a hard post for some of you to read and I understand that, but also know that it is an extremely hard one for me to write.

The last few days I have been reading books and studies on weight loss and one of the things that is constantly asked is to find the root of the problem. Where did your fixation with food come from? When did you become compelled to be inactive and really quit taking care of yourself? I’ve been soul searching and this isn’t the only thing that I found, but it certainly is a source. Once I came to this particular realization it was as if the signs were everywhere and after the second time it was more than a coincidence. I am about to open up to everyone who reads this in ways I didn’t even imagine, but I think it is the right thing to do.

Thursday night after watching Grey’s Anatomy there was a heart wrenching episode of Private Practice (which I don’t normally watch). The brief synopsis of the episode is that the chief at the hospital is raped and beat in her office, but she hides the rape from her colleagues and the police. On Oprah yesterday she had 200 men in her studio audience all of which were victims of molestation. For more on this check out this link:  http://www.oprah.com/showinfo/A-Two-Day-Oprah-Show-Event-200-Men-Who-Were-Molested-Come-Forward_1. The statistics were alarming. One in every six males are victims of molestation and one in every four women are. The personal stories were heartbreaking from the victims. I then thought that now was time for me to tell my stories.

I will not get into the specifics of what happened to me because it doesn’t matter. The only thing that I will say is that it happened on different occasions with different people and that I was a victim. Now what you’re probably wondering is what does this have to do with weight. I’ll tell you…it’s simple really. I always considered myself a pretty girl when I was younger and one that got a lot of attention, but with attention came unwanted occurrences. To protect myself I thought one of the best things to do was to become unappealing to the opposite sex, thus weight gain. Food was also a comfort as well as having the power to throw it back up. The problem with this is that once you don’t get attention you start hating yourself, but you don’t want to revert back to horrors of what could happen. It is a vicous cycle.

The world we live in is a scary place and there is so much pressure to be pretty and be wanted, but being these things should not come with a toll that takes away from ones childhood. I have spoken with some people in the past and I know a guy who suffered with an eating disorder because he thought that if he were to become physically unappealing to his predator than the abuse would stop, lucky for him he and his family moved away, but then he wanted attention from women to prove to himself that he was not homosexual as a result of the abuse, so he became an anorexic. Victims of this kind of abuse do whatever they can to get away from it.

I wanted power back. Power over my body and one of the ways I knew to get that was through food. I don’t believe this is so now and lucky for me I am at a much better point in my life, but things like this cause situational depression and when your body is not producing endorphins it has negative effects on the body both mentally and physically. This results in weight gain among other things.

If anyone else feels compelled to share their stories please do so. I also understand that it is a very hard and very personal thing so if you would like to do so more privately please feel free to e-mail me at cassandra.d.brubaker-1@ou.edu . Again I would like to make it clear that I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for me, but I think that since this is the first time that I have been able to see this as one of the issues I am now at a point of overcoming this issue and getting the results in my life that I want. Don’t keep things bottled up and remember that whatever has happened to you is not your fault. Statistically every two minutes someone in America becomes a victim of sexual assault. No one deserves to go through this alone, help is out there! A site worth looking into is http://www.rainn.org/ or if you prefer to speak to someone you can call 1-800-656-HOPE. I promise not all posts will be this heavy, but I felt that this was worth mentioning.