Religion and the Struggle with Weight

Over the past year or so, I have been becoming more aware of how my religious background has played into my weight struggle.

It’s really twisted.

First, though, I want to be clear that I don’t want to bash anyone. My struggle is mine and it is deeply intertwined with my own interpretation of what I was taught to believe while I was growing up.

I guess I have to start even earlier, though, because the religious teachings were also interpreted by a young mind that had already experienced what no child that age ever should: I was sexually molested by a group of young men over the course of four years, that finally ended when I was raped by one of them, at the tender age of six.

Clarifying again — It was NOT a family member or anyone I knew. It wasn’t anyone of the religious belief system under which I was raised. Nobody even knew it happened except the ones directly involved, and I had no way to explain it or tell anyone. It was far beyond the scope of my naive and innocent understanding.

….but

it really goes back even further than that, to an unknown diagnosis that didn’t come to light until I was in my fifties: I am autistic.

I also grew up a Caucasian minority female in a Latin American country where most everyone else’s skin was a beautiful tawny brown, they all had brown or black hair and brown eyes, but my skin was super pale – as white as could be. I had streaky blonde hair and my eyes changed color between green and blue. I stuck out like a beacon. (Or a target).

And the time frame was in the days when gaslighting and victim-blaming were the norm rather than the exception, and not even remotely understood to be as devastatingly harmful as they were, and it was a generation when people assumed children would forget trauma if it was swept under the rug.

There are many, many deep and sensitive layers at play in this whole twisted mess that has become enmeshed with my weight. Picking it apart is much like having to use a straight pin to tediously disentangle a drawerful of long and delicate – but incredibly jumbled up – necklaces.

Autism. Sexual Abuse. C-PTSD, and all the tiny but super clingy tendrils and tentacles that branch out from those things … topped off by a very conservative evangelical Christian missionary upbringing, with an extended family heritage made up of generations of missionaries, preachers, and religious teachers.

So … there’s the thumbnail history that fed (pardon the inadvertently appropriate pun) into my personal present-day weight issues.

It is late and this is already long.

To be continued ….