“Eating soothes anxiety about feeling vulnerable, and food is something that is legal and easily available,” Pender Greene says. Psychotherapist Mary Pender Greene suggests that for those who experience the trauma of sexual violence, food can offer solace. “It is their confusion and uncertainty about their inner perceptions that leads them to focus on food.” “People who have been sexually abused may turn to food to relieve a wide range of different states of tension that have nothing to do with hunger,” says Mary Anne Cohen, LCSW, the director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders in her book French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace With Emotional Eating. The connection between sexual abuse and responses such as overeating, binge eating or other eating disorders is complex. Indeed, individuals who survive sexual assault, such as Gay, often develop eating disorders, according to mental health experts. “I definitely thought if I’m bigger, I’ll be safer because I’ll be able to fight those boys better,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. Gay says she used her weight as a shield. The trigger that caused her to pack on the pounds was the trauma of being gang raped when she was 12 years old, an incident she recounts in her most recent book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Now 42 years old, Gay is 150 pounds lighter.
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For the author of Bad Feminist, the New York Times best-selling essay collection, the number-the heaviest weight she ever carried-was hard to believe. When she was in her late 20s, writer Roxane Gay weighed 577 pounds.