The Connection Between Trauma and Weight

Lizzy Swick Nutrition: The Connection Between Trauma and Weight

Women are no strangers to trauma. An estimated half of all women experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.

Whether a traumatic event occurs in childhood or later in life, the impact can be far-reaching. Your relationship with food and with your body is a common area where trauma shows up, and you may not even realize it.

Emotional eating, binge-eating, body shame, unhealthy food restrictions, and stress-induced weight gain are just a few possible symptoms of underlying trauma.

Acknowledging the connection between trauma, food, and weight is the first step in the journey to repairing your relationship with food and yourself. Keep reading to learn:

  • How trauma shapes your food and health choices
  • Why food is a common coping mechanism
  • The role of diet culture and body shame
  • Strategies to find healing after trauma

How Trauma Impacts Weight and Health

Everyone experiences trauma in their life. Yes, everyone.

Trauma can come in many forms, but it’s often sorted into two categories:

1 – big T trauma

2 – little t trauma

Big T trauma is the kind that people think about when they hear the word trauma. These are significant life-threatening events like:

  • Natural disasters
  • Car accidents
  • The death of a parent
  • Abuse
  • Violent crime

Little t trauma is more subtle. While the situation may not be life-threatening or even consciously understood as traumatic, the stress felt in the body is very real. These types of trauma include:

  • Bullying
  • Emotional neglect
  • Being an energetic mismatch with your parent or caregiver
  • Having a parent with a mental health or substance abuse issue
  • Postpartum depression
  • Losing a job
  • Grief and loss

The effects of big T trauma are often easy to identify. But little t trauma can fly under the radar and often go unacknowledged by your peers or support group and interestingly, even to yourself. Meaning, you could live years or decades with the effects of trauma and have zero clue that these “idiopathic” symptoms are actually the result of repressed emotional trauma.

Regardless of the type of trauma you may have experienced in your life, the impact on health can be significant. This is especially true when the trauma occurred in childhood and remains unaddressed. Children who experience trauma are at greater risk of negative impacts in the future.

Health Effects

Individuals who experience trauma may have lingering activation of their body’s stress response. (1,2, 3) This can lead to:

  • PTSD
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Hypertension
  • Inflammation
  • Mood disorders
  • Chronic Pain

The often-unacknowledged side effect of trauma is how it influences health habits, which in turn influence future health conditions.

Childhood trauma and adverse childhood events (ACE’s)  are associated with an increased risk of overweight or obesity in adulthood. (4) A maladaptive relationship with food is a big part of the reason.

Emotional eating is one common coping mechanism in people with past trauma. If you struggle to manage your food intake or lose weight, there may be deeper issues at play. And let’s preface this from the start: none of this is your fault. And. It is your responsibility.  Let’s learn more about the complexity of this topic.

Emotional Eating and Coping With Food

Emotions and eating have a complicated relationship. Emotional eating is when you use food to deal with what you’re feeling instead of to satisfy hunger. You may or may not even realize that’s what’s happening.

If you’ve ever struggled to resist food cravings or found yourself too deep into a bag of chips or chocolate at the end of a difficult day, you’re not alone. Likewise, if you become hypervigilant about restricting certain food groups, fearful of food you previously enjoyed or become obsessed with controlling everything you eat, this is also a form of maladaptive coping skills.

If this feels familiar, you are not alone. Many women I speak with feel stuck and out of control in their relationship with food. Whether through over or undereating, when food is used to control or distract yourself from experiencing stress and difficult emotions, it’s a problem.  As Lisa Schlosberg says, “you can’t solve an emotional problem with a physical solution.”  As long as food is a proxy for tolerating discomfort and accepting what is out of your control, your weight, health and mental health are at risk.

Why is food a proxy for comfort in the first place? When you feel stressed, eating food you enjoy stimulates the release of dopamine, a feel-good hormone, in the brain.

It makes sense that when you’re feeling grief, anger, dread, shame or anxiety, you’d reach for something that makes you feel good. And for women with a history of trauma, it may be a primary way you learned to cope. (5)

However, food can only temporarily numb your emotions. It doesn’t do anything to address the underlying cause of tolerating or accepting difficult feelings. Emotional eating can trap you in a cycle of binge eating followed by feelings of guilt and shame. It’s easy to lose sight of the root cause and instead blame yourself for a supposed lack of self-control.

But self-control isn’t the problem. You’re not “failing” if you’re stuck in a cycle of eating when you’re feeling stressed or upset. You’re coping.

Everyone needs ways to cope! But coping with food won’t serve you long-term. You learned this method because at one point it was all you had and knew. But you are older now, wiser, more experienced in life and if you’ve made it this far, you’re reading this because you’re fed up and you know you deserve more, deserve better. 

This isn’t to scare you, but it must be said that while it is not your fault you learned to use food to cope, with compassion, patience (and medication where appropriate), you must take responsibility to unlearn it.  Eating in a constant surplus leads to poor health outcomes as a consequence of weight gain. (6)

It turns out, the deeper issue of trauma may be the missing link between how you eat and your struggles with weight.

Diet Culture’s Role in Body Shame

Too often, a woman’s struggle with the effects of unacknowledged trauma, emotional eating, and weight gain results in body shame and poor self-image.

And the diet culture we’re immersed in adds additional guilt on women who don’t fit the idealized body size. Women are told they need to try harder, have more self-control, get smaller, and keep smiling while doing it.

Images from advertising and social media are particularly damaging. Research shows that social media plays a significant role in shaping body image. (7) The more time you spend on absorbing messages from the media about the ideal body, the more likely you are to feel dissatisfied with your body. (8)

Messages from the media about the ideal diet and how you should have control over your eating are also pervasive.

Fad diets rarely provide long-term results, yet most women are constantly trying the next new thing in dieting to lose weight as quickly as possible. (9) But a new way of eating won’t solve the underlying reason for WHY food is such a struggle in the first place.

There is a better way. Finding freedom from emotional eating and addressing underlying trauma creates the conditions for you to successfully heal your relationship with food.  How you do food is how you do life.  If you’re rushing to eat your meal, chances are you’re rushing through something else like emails, important conversations, chores or work projects. If you’re mindlessly eating a bag of chips, is it possible you’re mindlessly scrolling social media or thinking about your grocery list while your kid is telling you about his day?  I see it all the time, when you begin to deal with the trauma head-on and let food be nourishment, not therapy, it has a ripple effect in many other areas of your life as well.  Your relationship with others will improve because you’re healing the most important relationship in your life – the one you have with yourself.

Finding Food Freedom After Trauma

Whether you’ve experienced big T or little t trauma (and we all have something!), freedom comes from acknowledging how trauma impacts emotional eating and weight struggles.

Guilt and shame are not the answer.

Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes and you’re not to blame for what happened to you. But you are responsible for choosing a better way forward and taking charge of your own healing.

Here at LSN, we believe deeply in the power of addressing the root cause of your relationship with food. As dietitians we help you address the physical elements that are within your control such as food, meal planning, meal prep, supplements and lifestyle changes. But before we can get to any of that it is imperative we address the mindset that frames these so that you’re approaching weight management and health from a place of freedom and empowerment.

Otherwise, all you will learn from us is how to follow a set of rules and guidelines. And let’s tell the truth – you’ve been there, done that. If following someone else’s rules was enough, you wouldn’t be reading this.  But if you’re being honest, you know it’s not really about the food.  It’s about your relationship with food and what you’re empowering it to do for you.  Food will never be able to comfort you like your own acceptance of yourself can.

I’m so proud to be teamed up with Lisa Schlosberg from Out Of The Cave, a trauma-informed approach that works beautifully with how I practice medical nutrition therapy.  Traditional nutrition therapy is focused on what food to eat, when and how much. But trauma-informed medical nutrition therapy focuses on the internal factors that influence your food choices and guides you towards trusting what amount and when to eat by first creating safety from within.

When you work with an LSN registered dietitian, you’ll learn a range of techniques to help you acknowledge and reframe the unhelpful patterns that have you trapped in emotional eating. These include:

  • Transforming all or nothing mindsets
  • Cultivating self-compassion, acceptance and patience for the process
  • Improving perfectionism, being “good,” people pleasing, boundaries and time management
  • Holding you accountable to the promises you’re making to yourself
  • Building a positive mindset for weight loss

Healing Weight Struggles From the Root

If you’re tired of struggling with guilt, shame, and the endless wheel of dieting and weight gain, it’s time to look deeper. Reach out to Lizzy at [email protected] with subject line FREEDOM to receive a complimentary session with Lizzy today!

References:

1) Wamser RA, Walker HE, Sager J. Physical Health Outcomes of Trauma Exposure Across the Lifespan. J Interpers Violence. 2023 Dec;38(23-24):12025-12045. doi: 10.1177/08862605231190670. Epub 2023 Aug 11. PMID: 37565310.

2) Olff M, Hein I, Amstadter AB, et al. The impact of trauma and how to intervene: a narrative review of psychotraumatology over the past 15 years. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2025;16(1):2458406. doi:10.1080/20008066.2025.2458406

3) McFarlane AC. The long-term costs of traumatic stress: intertwined physical and psychological consequences. World Psychiatry. 2010;9(1):3-10. doi:10.1002/j.2051-5545.2010.tb00254.x

4) Offer S, Alexander E, Barbara K, Hemmingsson E, Flint SW, Lawrence BJ. The association between childhood trauma and overweight and obesity in young adults: the mediating role of food addiction. Eat Weight Disord. 2022;27(8):3257-3266. doi:10.1007/s40519-022-01454-y

5) van Strien T. Causes of Emotional Eating and Matched Treatment of Obesity. Curr Diab Rep. 2018;18(6):35. Published 2018 Apr 25. doi:10.1007/s11892-018-1000-x

6) Dakanalis A, Mentzelou M, Papadopoulou SK, et al. The Association of Emotional Eating with Overweight/Obesity, Depression, Anxiety/Stress, and Dietary Patterns: A Review of the Current Clinical Evidence. Nutrients. 2023;15(5):1173. Published 2023 Feb 26. doi:10.3390/nu15051173

7) Powell, Elisabeth, et al. “Attachment security and social comparisons as predictors of Pinterest users’ body image concerns.” Computers in Human Behavior 83 (2018): 221-229.

8) Cohen R, Newton-John T, Slater A. The relationship between Facebook and Instagram appearance-focused activities and body image concerns in young women. Body Image. 2017 Dec;23:183-187. doi: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.10.002. Epub 2017 Oct 19. PMID: 29055773.

9) Freire R. Scientific evidence of diets for weight loss: Different macronutrient composition, intermittent fasting, and popular diets. Nutrition. 2020 Jan;69:110549. doi: 10.1016/j.nut.2019.07.001. Epub 2019 Jul 4. PMID: 31525701.