Are you overweight? Childhood trauma affects our health as adults

Published 1:30 am Sunday, July 22, 2018

In the 1980s, Kaiser Permanente commissioned a study to investigate the treatment of obesity. A researcher, Dr. Vincent Felitti, was asked to consider all possible approaches.

Obesity is associated with many serious chronic health problems. If Felitti could find a solution to this health problem, a great deal of suffering could be avoided.

He decided to try a simple approach — fasting under medical supervision. Not surprisingly, many adults lost vast amounts of weight quickly. But something happened that didn’t make sense to him. Many of these patients, having shed in some cases hundreds of pounds, fell into a deep depression, panic or rage for inexplicable reasons. These subjects left the program, gorged themselves, and gained back the weight they lost.

Instead of lecturing, he asked them: “What happened when you lost the weight?” He wanted to know how they felt. And then he took his inquiry a step further and asked the patients when they started to gain weight in the first place. What had been going on at that time?

What he found shocked him. Many of these adults started gaining weight after a trauma, such as sexual abuse. Women who had been raped or molested gained weight as a way of protecting themselves from unwanted male attention. Many of these stories had never been shared, until these people were asked what was going on in their lives when they started putting on weight.

These insights were further validated in an adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study of 17,000 people who were seeking health care. These adults completed a 10-item questionnaire that asked them about their childhoods — had they been abused, neglected or experienced traumatic events as a child?

What they found was remarkable. If you answered yes to six types of childhood trauma, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had seven categories of adverse events, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt suicide as an adult. Furthermore, these adults were more likely to develop serious health problems.

Indeed, adults who experienced six or more of these events, died on average 20 years earlier than adults who had none of these experiences.

Here are the 10 questions

1. Did a parent or other adult in the household often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? Or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?

2. Did a parent or other adult in the household often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? Or ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?

3. Did an adult or person at least five years older than you ever touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? Or try to or actually have oral, anal or vaginal sex with you?

4. Did you often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? Or your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other or support each other?

5. Did you often feel that you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes and had no one to protect you? Or your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it?

6. Were your parents ever separated or divorced?

7. Was your mother or stepmother often pushed, grabbed, slapped or had something thrown at her? Or sometimes or often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist or hit with something hard? Or ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife?

8. Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic or who used street drugs?

9. Was a household member depressed or mentally ill or did a household member attempt suicide?

10. Did a household member go to prison?

The good news: Disclosing these experiences and getting counseling can help adults cope better and improve their health. In the original study, when patients disclosed these experiences to a health provider or to a therapist, they were 35-50 percent less likely to come back to see their health provider for health problems.

Simply disclosing these experiences in a non-judgmental setting can be enormously healing.

Paul Schoenfeld is director of The Everett Clinic’s Center for Behavioral Health. His Family Talk Blog can be found at www.everettclinic.com/family-talk-blog.