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How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity

By Maia Szalavitz Tuesday, Jan. 05, 2010

Dr. Vincent Felitti, founder of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine and director of its obesity-treatment program, was seeing some good results. His patients were losing 50, 80, even hundreds of pounds. He might have considered the program a success, if not for the fact that the participants who were doing the best — those who were both the most obese and losing the most weight — kept dropping out.

Felitti was baffled. Why, invariably, did so many patients quit just as they approached their healthy goal weight? Ella, for instance, a middle-aged woman who entered the program in the mid-1980s morbidly obese at 295 lb., had managed to whittle her frame by 150 lb. over six months. "Instead of being happy, she was having anxiety attacks and was terrified," Felitti says. (See "The Year in Health 2009: From A to Z.")

He asked Ella what she thought was going on. "Finally, the story comes out," he says. "She had been molested as a child, both within her family and outside it. She tried to escape by marrying at 15, at her mother's urging. It was a disastrous marriage — her husband was crazy jealous. They divorced in two years. She remarried. Her new husband was also jealous. He was convinced that when she was out hanging the laundry, she was sexually posturing to attract the neighbors." (A)
continue: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951240,00.html?xid=rss-topstories