Trigger Warning
This article includes the following subject matter. Please practice self-care.
- Child Sexual and Physical Abuse, Family neglect
- Domestic Violence, Male violence
- Medical Practitioner bias and ignorance
* The name in this story has been changed to protect the person’s privacy.
Hi, my name is *Lilith. And if you would kindly indulge me with some moments of your time, I would like to share with you my story of living with obesity.
Growing up, I was an average sized girl, very active and enjoyed being outdoors. After all it was the 70’s and we had bikes, friends and parents who encouraged us to ‘get out of the house and go play on the streets’ sort of thing.
Being the youngest girl in a large family of siblings, I always had someone to play with.
It wasn’t until that ‘play’ became abuse at a very young age, that I started to slowly put weight on. At first, food became the distraction from the wave after wave of uncomfortable, uneasy emotions and shame that my young mind struggled with on a daily basis. A means to squash all that negativity and anger I had about the abuse, my abuser, those complicit and the situation that had been forced on me.
I began to notice that with my weight gain, that my abuser struggled to easily pull me into his preferred secluded spots within the home as he used to be able to do and it was then that I think, subconsciously, I saw the extra weight as a solution or a means to stop or delay further abuse. I began to steadily stack on the weight.
The extra weight caused a lot of physical issues for me as a young girl including repeatedly falling over (as I was also pigeon toed and had fallen arches) and lots of accidents with knee scrapes. My relationship with the school nurse and iodine blossomed during primary school. Once the abuse stopped, I began to lose the protective weight.
As I grew older and began to fill out my school uniform, I became the target of a lot of unwanted and disgusting older male attention.
High School and having to deal with school bullies was traumatic in itself but add to this the long walk to and from school every day, being leered at and cat called by complete strangers, always men, took it to a whole new level. As a young woman, walking alone on my way to school in my school uniform, it always shocked me that these men, possibly fathers or brothers of my school peers, felt that it was acceptable for them to act like this.
My body did what it had to do to again to protect myself and I began to put on weight again as a means to cease or deter this unwanted and vile male attention. Food became my gateway to self-protection and survival yet again as a teenager.
Whenever there was need to see a doctor during these times, they (always male GP’s) would comment on my excess weight to my mother, as something that needed to be addressed. They never asked ‘what has happened to you to cause this weight gain’ but always ignorantly pronounced that it had to do with my bad eating habits and availability of junk food. The ongoing abuse I had endured from my older brother and the repeated negative and unwanted attention I was receiving from strange men never came into their realm of thinking.
Fast forward a few decades and I am married to a professional abuser. Professional in that he has a professional career and is well thought of by his coworkers who see only this side of him and an abuser because behind closed doors, he is a vile and abusive monster to his family and children.
As the relationship continues into the second decade and with the physical and sexual abuse escalating, I go into survival mode and my body does what it knows to do best to protect myself. I gain weight. But this time, I gain so much weight that for the first time in my life I become morbidly obese.
And the more weight I gain, the less attractive I become to my abuser and the safer I feel.
From the beginning to the end of the relationship, I had gained over 60kgs in weight. Sure, I had trouble walking, breathing and struggled to do even mundane tasks, but I was alive. I wasn’t thriving but I was surviving.
And again, the male GP’s I saw as an adult would comment disparagingly on my weight at every session and how I needed to ‘manage it’ and ‘get it under control’. They would focus on my size almost exclusively to everything else, often times even ignoring the reason I came to see them.
When I escaped my abuser and left the relationship, without even trying, 35kgs of weight fell off me within a matter of a couple months. It was like my body was saying to me ‘you no longer need this armour to protect you, the threat is now gone. You can breathe’.
Now as a Domestic Violence (DV) victim-survivor advocate, I am involved in the education of Australian medical practitioners in recognising how DV presents in their clinical settings. And I always take great pains to educate them on the fact that people don’t choose obesity for no reason. Yes, it may be the result of bad food relationships, a coping mechanism to deal with mental health challenges and stress but it’s also, just as likely, to be a protective mechanism employed by Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence victims against physical and sexual abuse.
And in this case, it could be saving lives, not limiting them.
*Lilith
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Service –
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week
for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic
violence and/or sexual assault.