Obesity: surprising correlations found
In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight.
Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.
But then, some of the patients who’d lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they’d lost it. Felitti couldn’t figure out why.
“You know, I remember thinking, ‘Well, my God, this is the second incest case I’ve seen in [then] 23 years of practice,’ ” Felitti says. “And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored.”
More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.
Felitti wondered if he’d discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.
This interesting and moving article [1] describes a study on the impact of childhood trauma on health in adulthood. It deals with violence, neglect, and sexual abuse (referred to in the article as Adverse Childhood Experiences). If you work through the questions presented in the article, you might have an eye-opening experience yourself!
According to the findings [2], adults who had four or more “yeses” to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more “yeses” were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.
And this doesn’t surprise us, who know how our brains and bodies are shaped and molded in childhood. What META-health teaches us is that what later creates “poor health” were originally coping strategies for this traumatic experience. If we fail to release the emotional and physical energy that was stored and “encapsulated” during the stressful moment, and if resistance and concealment suppress it, yet this strategy is never replaced by an adequate one since it was essentially programmed into us, then a huge mountain of energy accumulates in our subconscious and in our bodies.
The biological programs designed to overcome momentary stress and even trauma become, over time, meaningless and “negative” reaction patterns that promote poorer health.
Example: Diabetes
In diabetes, insulin and glucagon levels are affected. This is due to biological strategies for avoiding conflict, a reaction of resistance. Often, feelings of humiliation, fear, and disgust are involved, similar to those experienced in sexual abuse or in a conflict between attraction and repulsion.
What the body then does is suppress the hormones that regulate energy supply—intending to reserve this energy for the moment of fight or flight. But this very moment of action may never come. After a while, it’s as if one had stockpiled supplies for disaster, cramming the basement full, but the bombing never happened, and eventually, one lost the key to the basement. It’s never emptied. This is how one can imagine diabetes or obesity developing: two different strategies for a similar issue, where one has experienced complete inadequacy.
In META-Health, we can trace symptoms back to where and when this reaction was once beneficial, and release the energy there. Then the path is clear to apply a new and better, conscious strategy based on resources and positive life experiences.
META-health gives us the knowledge and tools to reshape the past and support the present: the broad spectrum of holistic help to fill our lives with meaning and self-determination, pillars of Salutogenesis.
References:
[1]http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/03/02/377569413/can-family-secrets-make-you-sick
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9635069?dopt=Abstract
Picture source: Constantin Jurcut
