Childhood trauma can have profound effects on health, including weight

Published 1:30 am Saturday, June 1, 2024

In the 1980s, a study was conducted to investigate obesity treatment. A researcher tried fasting under medical supervision, and not surprisingly, many adults lost vast amounts of weight quickly. But something happened that didn’t make sense to him. Those patients who lost large amounts of weight experienced deep depression, panic, or rage, and ended up regaining the weight they had lost.

Instead of lecturing, he asked them, “What happened when you lost the weight?” He wanted to know how they felt. Then, he took his inquiry a step further and asked the subjects when they started to gain weight in their earlier life and what had been going on at that time.

What he found shocked him. Many of these adults started gaining weight after a trauma, including sexual abuse, and most of these individuals had never disclosed their stories until they were questioned about the circumstances surrounding their weight gain.

These insights were further validated in research called the 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?

The findings were remarkable. People who experienced six categories of childhood trauma were five times more likely to become depressed as adults. Additionally, these adults were more likely to develop serious health problems. In fact, adults who had six or more of these events died, on average, 20 years earlier than adults who had none of these experiences.

Here’s a sampling of the questions:

• 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?

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

• Did you often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes and had no one to protect you?

• Were your parents ever separated or divorced?

The good news is that 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 less likely to come back to see their health provider for health problems. Simply disclosing these experiences in a nonjudgmental setting can be enormously healing.

Paul Schoenfeld is a clinical psychologist at Optum Care Washington, formerly The Everett Clinic.