How Trauma Affects Weight: The Brain-Body Connection

Betrayal Trauma doesn’t just f*&# with your heart —it affects your brain, your body. It can change your weight.

And it’s not about willpower or motivation. It’s about the betrayal you experienced in the past that is still stuck in your body. You might not even be consciously aware of it, it might even have happened in childhood by a caretaker, or at a time when were most vulnerable. If you’ve had persistent issues with your weight, even if you’re doing the right things, it might be the trauma.

After a betrayal, your brain and body get rewired, especially areas like the amygdala and the emotional areas of the brain, which handle stress and survival.

When trauma hits, it throws your ability to react and respond adequately—either hyper (anxious and triggered AF) or hypo (numb, hopeless). This messes with eating, sleeping, stress hormones, and how you feel about your body.

Trauma and Weight Gain: Why It Happens

Betrayal trauma can make you gain weight. But it’s not just stress eating or calories in and out. There’s something going on below the surface.

Your body’s stress system is on high alert because your trauma still occurs to you as if it is happening in the here and now. It pumps out cortisol because you’re stuck in survival mode. This hormone tells your body to store fat, especially around your belly, and crave high-calorie foods.

Because the trauma lives in your body, just slightly below the surface, you may be eating to soothe feelings you can’t name, the anxiety, the fear, hopelessness and feeling like you’re losing a sense of yourself and the way your body used to be.

Also if you’re hyperaroused, you’re too wired to cook healthy or exercise. It’s a cycle that is running between overwhelm and hopelessness. It’s not a lack of motivation, it’s not a choice. It’s how you’re experiencing the effects of trauma.

Trauma and Weight Loss: The Other Side

Some folks lose weight after trauma. And it’s not always healthy. If you’re in hypoarousal—feeling numb, hopeless and disconnected—you might forget to eat or lose your appetite. The part of your brain that controls hunger and gives your body signals that it’s hungre, can shut down under the overwhelm of living with betrayal.

Trauma can also make you feel unsafe in your body, leading to restrictive eating or over-exercising to try to “control” something. It’s your brain trying to cope, but these maladaptive patterns of eating or exercise can create issues of their own, in additional to the trauma. This is called an iatrogenic effect, where what you’re doing to help, unintentionally makes things worse.

How Trauma Changes Your Relationship with Food

Trauma rewires how you see food. The right brain, where emotions and sensory memories live, holds all the raw feelings of the betrayal in the present tense.

So, food might become comfort, a distraction, or something to avoid.

if you’ve got PTSD, you might binge to try to deal with feelings of being constantly overwhelmed and triggered or skip meals when dissociated and feeling hopeless.

It’s not about discipline—it’s your subconscious reacting to pain that you’re holding in the body. And in this way, it might start to make sense.

Hypnotherapy for Trauma and Weight: A Path Forward

Accelerated Hypnotherapy can help you connect with your subconscious, where the trauma is hiding out, and works with your brain to process those stuck memories.

By calming the amygdala and syncing it with your prefrontal cortex, hypnotherapy can ease hyperarousal or lift hypoarousal, helping you regulate eating without force. Many of my clients, notice shifts in their eating, subtle shifts that make a huge difference.

Hypnotherapy gives your brain a safe space where it can shift how you see food because you no longer need to cope. It can restore balance and a sense of control. Sessions over a few weeks can make trauma feel less heavy, so weight changes come naturally.

Why This Matters for You

What’s been happening with your weight isn’t your fault, if you’ve experienced betrayal or there are parts of your childhood that you have dissociated from and can’t remember.

Your brain is just trying to protect you, and it can make you feel like you’re stuck.

This new understanding can help you be kinder to yourself. Therapies like Accelerated Hypnotherapy or OEI therapy get to what is below the weight issues, and resolve the trauma.

They help you reconnect with a renewed sense of yourself, safety and hope, so you can eat and live without trauma running the show.

Take a step toward getting your body back.