The Weight We Carry: What Happens When Your Body Remembers What You're Trying to Forget

There's a kind of weight that doesn't show up on a scale. It lives in the tightness between your shoulder blades. It settles in your belly when you're anxious. It shows up in the way you reach for something—food, usually—when what you're really hungry for is something else entirely.

If you've struggled with your weight, with food, with feeling like your body is somehow working against you—I need you to hear this: there's probably a reason. And it's not the one you've been told.

Your body has been carrying stories. Some of them you remember clearly. Others live just beneath your awareness, shaping how you move through the world in ways you're only beginning to understand.

Your Body Learned What It Needed to Learn

When difficult things happen to us early in life—when we're hurt, scared, left alone, or overwhelmed in ways our young systems couldn't process—our bodies do something remarkable. They figure out how to cope. They develop strategies. They find what works to help us get through.

For a lot of us, food became part of that survival toolkit.

Not because we were weak. Not because we lacked willpower. But because our bodies—brilliant as they are—learned that empty calories could fill up empty spaces. That eating could quiet the chaos inside, even if just for a moment. That the simple act of feeding ourselves gave us some sense of control when everything else felt so out of control.

The research is clear on this: there's a well-documented connection between early trauma and how we relate to food and weight later on. But what matters isn't just the science. What matters is understanding what this means for your life, your struggles, your deep wish to feel at peace in your own body.

When Food Becomes the Answer to a Question You Can't Name

A lot of people who've been through early trauma end up in complicated relationships with food. Researchers call it "food addiction," but honestly, that term misses something important. What's really happening is that food became your medicine. Your comfort. Your way of coping when nothing else worked.

When you're young and hurting, you don't have the language for what's happening inside you. You don't have sophisticated tools for managing overwhelming feelings. But you might discover—maybe by accident, maybe by instinct—that certain foods make things feel a little better. That sweet things or rich things or specific combinations light up something in your brain that says, even briefly, "okay, we're okay."

That gets wired in deep. Your body remembers what brought relief. So when stress hits, when old feelings surface, when something triggers that familiar sense of not-okayness, you reach for what worked before. You're not failing. You're trying to take care of yourself with the tools you developed a long time ago, when you were just trying to survive.

Here's what I want you to understand: you were doing the best you could with what you had. Your body was trying to help you get through.

When Your Feelings Feel Too Big

Along with the food piece, there's often something else going on: a hard time dealing with emotions. When we grew up in environments where our feelings weren't safe—where being angry or sad or scared got us in trouble, where no one could help us make sense of what we were experiencing—we had to figure out other ways to manage the emotional overwhelm.

Eating became a way to push feelings down. To interrupt the intensity. To create some distance between yourself and emotions that felt like they might drown you.

This is what lives underneath when people talk about "emotion dysregulation." But really, it's simpler than that: it's a nervous system doing its best without having learned how to safely feel what it's feeling.

Maybe you recognize this in yourself. The way certain emotions immediately send you to the kitchen. How eating can feel like hitting pause on something too painful to sit with. The way your body learned to use food not just for physical hunger, but for emotional survival.

That's not a personal failing. That's your system doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you functioning when things felt unbearable.

Not All Wounds Look the Same

Here's something else worth understanding: the specific ways we were hurt shape the specific ways we cope now. Physical abuse, emotional neglect, sexual trauma—they each leave different imprints on how we relate to food and our bodies.

Some people eat to fill an emotional emptiness. Others restrict to maintain control. Some develop binge eating patterns that feel like both punishment and relief rolled into one. Your particular pattern makes sense when you understand your particular history.

This isn't about diagnosing yourself or adding another label. It's about developing compassion for the intricate ways your body has been trying to take care of you all along.

It's Rarely Just About Weight

Early trauma usually doesn't travel alone. It often brings anxiety that won't turn off, depression that makes everything harder, hypervigilance that keeps you constantly scanning for danger, a feeling that you're not safe even when you actually are.

These struggles get tangled up with weight in complicated ways. They make weight loss feel nearly impossible—not because you're not trying, but because your nervous system is using weight, using food, using eating patterns as part of how it manages distress.

That's why traditional diets fail so many of us. They treat the body like a simple machine—calories in, calories out—without understanding that our bodies are carrying emotional histories. That our relationship with food is wrapped up with our relationship to safety, to comfort, to survival itself.

So What Now?

If your weight is connected to old wounds, if your eating patterns are survival strategies, if your body has been doing what it needed to do to get you through—what do you do with that information?

First, you start by seeing it clearly. Really seeing what's been happening beneath the surface. Not with judgment, but with the kind of understanding you'd offer a friend who's been struggling alone for way too long.

Your body has been trying to protect you. Your eating patterns, whatever they are, came from real needs. The weight you're carrying might be serving purposes you're only now beginning to understand—creating distance from others, taking up space, providing protection, holding feelings you haven't known how to express.

Second, you work on the wounds themselves. Not by forcing your body to change, not by trying another diet, but by learning to create actual safety in your nervous system. By building new ways to be with difficult emotions. By slowly developing the capacity to feel what you've been eating to avoid feeling.

This takes time. It requires patience. It asks you to get curious about your patterns instead of fighting them. It invites you to build a different kind of relationship with yourself—one based on understanding rather than control.

Third, remember that your worth isn't determined by your weight. Your body's size doesn't reflect your strength or your value. Even as you explore these patterns, even as you work toward more peace with food and your body, you're worthy exactly as you are right now.

Coming Home

What we're really talking about is finding your way back to your body. Not as something you need to fix or control, but as something that's been trying to help you all along.

Your body has been speaking to you. The weight you carry holds stories. The patterns you've developed contain information. And while you might choose to shift your relationship with food, with movement, with your body over time, that choice can come from respect instead of desperation.

Here's what I want you to know: your body learned to do what it needed to do to get you through. That's not a character flaw. That's survival. And now you're here, ready to understand it, maybe ready to find some new ways forward. That takes real courage.

This isn't about fixing yourself, because you're not a problem to be solved. It's about learning to listen differently to what your body has been trying to tell you all along. And doing that with someone who understands trauma, who gets that weight isn't just about food—that takes time, patience, and a different kind of approach than what most of us have tried before.

The weight we carry tells a story. And you deserve to have that story heard with compassion—not judgment, not another diet plan, not one more voice telling you to just try harder. You deserve to find your way back to yourself, whatever that looks like for you.

This piece is adapted from my upcoming book, The Weight We Carry, which explores the deep connections between trauma, our bodies, and healing. The book is expected to be released next year.

If this resonated with you, I invite you to explore more of these conversations on the blog. Each post offers a different lens on understanding the stories our bodies hold and finding pathways to healing that honor where you've been.

Ready to begin your own journey of understanding? Whether you're just starting to make these connections or you've been working on this for a while, I'd love to support you.