Last week's meeting of the Building Community Resilience collaborative provided an opportunity for one of our nation's leading experts on obesity to call attention to ACEs and trauma. Read more from Dr. Bill Dietz at this Huffington Post blog. Here's the beginning of that blog post:
A meeting held last week in Washington, DC, prompted me to reflect on a conversation I had several decades ago with a teenage patient with obesity. Her words have taken on a new meaning for me. “I eat because I want to keep people away from me,” she said, as we talked in her room in the Clinical Research Center one evening. She had been a victim of sexual abuse as a young child, and was now a participant in a study that was the basis of my doctoral work. We were discussing what she thought made her develop obesity and why she found it so difficult to control her weight.
The adverse childhood experience of abuse had a very powerful impact on the development of her obesity and her motivation to remain, as she suggested, protected by her excess weight. Research has shown that 8 percent of obesity and 17 percent of severe obesity in adults can be attributed to abuse in childhood – physical, verbal, or sexual.
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