How Trauma Can Affect Weight Gain and Obesity

Trauma—especially in childhood or infidelity or betrayal as an adult—can affect how the body stores weight and how people cope with food.

My clients often discover the connection between trauma, emotional eating; and short and long-term weight struggles. Let’s take a look at what might be happening and how to fix it, once and for all.

Trauma and Weight: What’s the Link?

People who have lived through trauma, including emotional abuse, neglect, or betrayal, often develop patterns that affect eating and weight. These experiences can lead to emotional eating, stress responses in the body, and higher risks for obesity. The body may hold onto weight as a survival response.

Emotional Eating Is a Common Response to Pain

When the brain is overwhelmed, many people eat to soothe themselves. This isn’t about willpower or motivation to stick with it. It’s the nervous system trying to regulate and comfort you. Food may have been a way to cope when you didn’t feel safe as a child or as a way to dissociate from overwhelming emotions when dealing with an experience, like infidelity or betrayal trauma.

Trauma Changes the Body’s Metabolism

Chronic stress can affect hormones like cortisol and insulin. This can change how the body stores fat and uses energy. Even without changes in eating habits, you might gain and hold on to weight more easily if you’ve experienced trauma and are dealing with intrusive thoughts, feeling triggered AF.

Why Standard Diets Don’t Always Work

If you’ve been struggling with weight since childhood or a traumatic experience, you probably have addressed trauma in your weight loss plans.

Weight loss focus on calories in and calories out, not on the reasons that you feel compelled to eat when you know you shouldn’t or why you used to love working out and why you just don’t have the drive anymore.

If you feel like you’ve tried everything but still feel stuck, treating the trauma can free up space to transform their body with more ease and flow because you get at the root cause. The thing that’s actually causing the weight issues because if you could have done it by exercise and counting calories, you probably would have done it by now.

Support That Works.

When you start to understand the link between trauma and eating, and begin to resolve the trauma, you can provide your mind and body what it actually needs and break the cycle.

With Accelerated Hypnotherapy, the goal in is not just weight loss but healing the stress response that drives the issues you’re having with it.

One of the signs that you might need to work at the subconscious level, is that in addition to your weight issues, you are starting to feel a certain way about them, frustrated, hopeless, shame, guilt, powerlessness, numb, emotional eating to dissociate from something that is going on just slightly below the surface and trying to eat to make sure it stays buried down there.

If your weight issues have an emotional element to them, the emotional element and the trauma needs to resolved at the subconscious level. No amount change of calories in or out will resolve the trauma, which might be what is actually affecting your weight issues.

Breaking Free From WEIGHT ISSUES and Trauma

If you’ve struggled with weight and have experienced trauma, big T or little t – if it was overwhelming to you, then it might be what is affecting things.

If this is the way you wound up being, it’s because your body adapted to protect you. With the right support, you can heal your trauma, find hope. Create new possibilities for a different relationship with food, your body, and your past.

Let’s connect.