A reader commented (yay my first comment thank you ) about my first post and said that she too had had some issues with sexual abuse which she felt contributed to her weight gain. I feel my past has greatly effected my relationship with food and my self esteem, so thought maybe it was a good idea to delve a little deeper into the history, for the readers. Also hopefully it is a bit cathartic.

 Everyone loves a good train wreck, so here goes!

When I was young my mother always told me that I was fat, ugly and worthless. If you are told that enough times from a young age, you start to believe it. It gets pretty engrained in there too. The sad thing about it, is as a child I wasn´t even THAT fat. I look back on those days and think that maybe with a more supportive mother I would never have become what I became.

I have previously stated that at the age of 15 I was raped. I was a virgin, and had never even been kissed. As crazy as this sounds, I was too horrified to tell anyone (and still haven´t til this day, dear readers, you are the first to hear of this!) and so kept it bottled up inside of me. Although now I have accepted that it wasn´t my fault, that I was just a kid, and that no one had the right to do that to me, at the time I just didn´t see it like that.

I felt as though I was too ugly to have been raped. I didn´t want to tell anyone because I thought they would immediately think “she must be lying, no one would rape a fat ugly girl like you”. I didn´t feel worthy enough to have been raped. That´s low self esteem for you! So I kept it inside, and started eating and becoming depressed.

In order to try and regain some self esteem I had sex with random people, about 12 of them in total over the space of 2 years. Through this time I was putting on the 20kilos which I attribute to the messed up emotions from rape number one. One night I was having sex with a random person I met in a bar, and he finished and said to me, “do you mind if my mate has a go?” and I said that it was fine. So that night I had sex with two strangers. That really hurts to remember. I wish I could go back and hug the 17 year old me who just wanted to be loved and feel okay with herself, and to tell her she didn´t need to do this.

 Naturally, this only made my self esteem worse.

After I was raped a second time, more of the same emotions ran through my head. Now that I was 20kgs heavier than I was 2years ago, I thought that no one is going to believe that anyone would ever rape me, when there were so many other pretty thin girls they could have raped instead. My depression got worse. I didn´t feel as though my life had a purpose. I was fat, and ugly, and no one wanted me.  I felt as though not even my family loved me. What hope was there that one day I would find someone to love me if even my family couldn´t bring themselves to care about me?

At this point I got so depressed I stopped the random sex, and developed a fear of men. I got very very depressed, and tried to commit suicide through an alcohol and pill overdose. I threw up the pills in my coma and woke up about a day later. No one had noticed. I didn´t bother telling anyone.

I went to the doctor, and for once in my life was honest with her. I told her about the suicide attempt, and she put me on prozac. I told her I had no idea why I was so depressed. I turned down counselling as I didn´t want to admit to a counsellor that I knew what the root of all my problems were, and then to have to lay them out on the table. I was certain that even the counsellor would be sitting there, smiling encouragingly, but thinking “this fat beast must be lying, who in their right mind would rape THAT”.

After the prozac things started to look a bit better I guess. I still am not able to talk about the rapes, and still haven´t told anyone. I know that this, and my mothers constant put-downs are what has caused me to over eat my entire life. I know that I need to deal with these issues if I ever want to lead a healthy happy life. I guess I am just too scared to. No one has ever bothered to care about me before, so why would they now?

So that is how I ended up with a BMI of over 45 at the age of 21. That´s a little bit more insight into the mental space that I am coming from. Hopefully through telling strangers this it will help a little.