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Not necessarily unwanted male attention but condemnation for being too large, taking up too much space, not being attractive according to the rigid standards that surround all women in our culture. The problem, though, is that big bodies draw attention, too. Whenever she started to lose weight she’d get scared, feel too exposed, and quickly get big again. Felitti first interviewed, Gay got big fast. Gay’s book tells the painful story of what it’s like to live with a body made “unruly” in its search for comfort, some way to relieve the overwhelming anxiety and guilt caused by the assault. A lot of people were suffering and comforting themselves in ways that led to poorer health, and that the world judges harshly – smoking, drinking, taking drugs and overeating.
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Two-thirds of the adults in the ACE study had experienced at least one childhood trauma – sexual or physical abuse, addiction in the family, loss of a parent – and 87 percent of those had experienced two or more.įelitti and Anda found a strong correlation between people’s ACE scores – the number of adverse experiences in childhood – and every chronic health condition in the United States. Anda wept when he first looked at the collected data. The people who participated in the study were a representative sample of middle-class Americans across races, professions and education levels.ĭr. More than 17,000 patients in the Kaiser Permanente system answered extensive questions about their health and their experiences as children. Robert Anda, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, on the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE, study. Being small, and potentially attractive, was too dangerous.įelitti went on to work with Dr. People would lose 100 pounds and drop out of the program. It turned out that almost all the patients who left the clinic had been sexually abused as children. He was shocked when the woman said, “40 pounds.” She’d been 4 years old when her father raped her. Instead of asking how old the patient was when she first had sex, he asked how much she weighed.
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It didn’t make sense.įelitti interviewed patients who’d left the program, asking a series of questions about their weight and lifestyle histories, and one day he made a mistake. Felitti was the chief of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, and for five years in a row half the patients in his obesity clinic dropped out, patients who were losing weight. Vincent Felitti uncovered the link between child sexual abuse and obesity by accident. Which is the response many girls have to being sexually assaulted.ĭr. So she swallowed her secret and got big, big enough that she felt safe from male attention. They loved her but she was a good Catholic girl, and good girls didn’t get raped. She barely had words for what happened to her, and the words she could muster she couldn’t say to anyone, not even her parents. Her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, tells the brutally raw story of how she got so fat and why.Īt 12 she was gang raped.