Weight Manipulation

Weight Manipulation

Hello and welcome to Raped 25 Years. At this time, I invite you to take a short walk in my journey of healing. Don’t forget to stay for the gem of positivity.

One of the varied trauma related responses I have shown, is weight manipulation. In this post, I’m going to talk about the way in which I manipulated my weight as a pre-teen and teenager.

I was in Grade Six at school, and by then I had size 36 B (14 B metric) breasts. My teacher had a habit of looking down my top when he was leaning over my desk. I was uncomfortable with this, but said nothing. 

In the second term, just two weeks in, I walked into the girls’ bathrooms to wash my hands. My teacher was in there with another girl in my class. He was raping her. When he saw me, he grabbed hold of me, and cruelly raped me too. Both I and this girl told no one what had happened or what he had done. 

After that rape, I stopped eating. How could I eat when I already felt so dirty? When I did eat, I couldn’t keep the food down. I started to lose a bit of weight, then more and more. The more weight I lost, the cleaner I felt. So I tried to lose more. The only “problem” was, I ended up being so weak that I couldn’t go to school. How wonderful! I didn’t have to face the teacher.

I moved on at the end of the year to junior high school (Grade Seven). I felt able to start eating my dinners at home, but I allowed myself nothing else. You see, the fear of another rape attack was always high on my mind. I became  hyper vigilant; always fearfully aware of all males, teachers and students alike. 

And so I survived ….. Until the next year, when my Grade Eight English class teacher raped me at the end of term two. My first thought was, “I’m too fat. If I’d been thinner, I’d have been invisible. Then the rape would never have happened”.

As you can see, even as a preteen and young teenager, my thoughts automatically went to weight my body size  being my problem. That  weight was somehow to blame for the sexual assaults, not the actual perpetrators. Although I wasn’t actually diagnosed with an eating disorder, it opened up the path for my later weight manipulation too.

As an adult, working at my supposed “dream job”, my thinking went the same way as with the teachers’ abuse in the painful violation of my body. But unlike my school days, in my job I was actually diagnosed anorexic. My thought processes had gone to my weight being the problem.

Even to this very day, my thoughts automatically link any trauma issue with my weight. “If I were thinner, it wouldn’t have happened” or “I need to be invisible”. Sound familiar to you, the reader?

Weight manipulation is a common coping behaviour of sexual abuse and assaults. Rape can result in an unhealthy relationship with food. There are those survivors who lose weight in an act of trying to be invisible, to prevent the cruel violation of their body happening ever again. 

There are also those sexual assault survivors who gain weight to the point of morbid obesity. This is in the vain hope that, by making themselves less sexually attractive, they will not have to fear further rape. In both cases, neither method worked for me. All it has done is trapped me in the pain and suffering of my traumatic past.

Are you like me? Are you caught in a seemingly endless cycle of weight manipulation methods? I believe that there is hope,  that hope is in self healing, and I’m willing to fight for it. Nobody else can do the healing for me. It’s my right to be rid of the vicious trauma cycle of weight manipulation. And it’s your right too.

This time, the gem of positivity is a quote from Racquell Wallen: 

“At the end of your life, people don’t remember your weight but what you were like as a person”.

That quote means a lot to me. It’s not whether I’m fat or thin that people will remember me for. It’s the kind of person that I am. And I want to be remembered for being a rape survivor. Don’t you?

Thank you for joining me on this short walk. Please feel free to leave a comment on how you want to be remembered. And until next time, breathe - and believe.