“The Body That Remembered”

For the first twenty years of my life, hunger was not an accident — it was enforced. My mother decided I was too fat, too round, too much. So she rationed food like punishment, measuring worth by the number on a scale. There were days when I didn’t eat at all. My stomach would ache and twist, but worse than the hunger was the shame. I learned to associate fullness with failure and deprivation with love. My body learned, too. It learned that food was not safety — it was danger. Looking back on pictures from back then, I was not fat... I was emaciated. I was tall, curvy, broad, big boobs, big butt, but not fat. I was anorexic. I was skin and bones. The only fat that remained were in my "assets".

When I finally escaped her house at twenty, freedom tasted like everything I’d been denied. For three years, I binged. I ate to fill the holes her words had carved into me. I ate because I could, because no one was watching, because the child in me still feared there would be nothing tomorrow. But the hunger never left. It had become part of me — not just in my mind, but in my cells, in the way my body held on to every ounce of fat as if preparing for the next famine.

At twenty-three, I tried to fix it. I tried to control what had once controlled me. I swung from one extreme to another — restriction instead of rebellion. I counted every calorie, punished every craving, forced my body to obey. But it fought back. It remembered. It clung to fat like a life raft, terrified of another starvation it couldn’t explain but could never forget.

It took me years to realize I wasn’t fighting my body — I was fighting its memory. Trauma had written itself into my metabolism. My body was not broken. It was protecting me.

So I learned to “trick” it, not out of cruelty, but compassion. Three months of dieting at a lower calorie deficit. Three months of maintaining at a healthy calorie intake. Both calculated by my height and weight at the time. Then again. And again. And again. Small spurts at a time. Slowly, my body began to trust me. It stopped hoarding. It stopped panicking. It began to understand that food wasn’t a threat — it was fuel. That I would never starve it again.

I am now 31. Over the past five years, I went from 325 pounds to 207 and I'm still losing. But the real victory isn’t the number. It's the peace. My body and I have finally called a truce.

People often ask how I did it. They expect me to say exercise, macros, or extreme dieting. But the truth is: I healed by teaching my body that it was safe to exist.

Because trauma doesn’t just live in your head.

It lives in your flesh, your hormones, your hunger.

And healing doesn’t mean forgetting — it means proving, over and over again, that you’re safe now.