Empaths: are you holding weight on your body for self-protection?

First, I want to acknowledge that the topic of body size is a very tender one. It’s a tender subject for me as well, as I’ve vacillated at different times in my life from being an daily athlete to gaining 65 pounds.

There have been times in my life when I literally was starving myself to try to achieve some ‘teenage ideal’ swinging all the way over to binging on a whole bag of Doritos and a 2-liter of Dr. Pepper in a setting.

I remember going to a doctor about chronic back pain and having him jiggle the fat around my middle, telling me the only problem I had was being overweight. I was humiliated. Another doctor said I needed to lose enough weight to fit into a body mass index chart. For my height, I was ‘supposed’ to weight 120 pounds, which I hadn’t seen since age 12.

This has been a long journey for me, but along the way, I’ve made some important personal realizations.

The amount of fat we carry on our bodies and finding our healthy setpoint is something I believe, cannot be determined by a chart. So many factors come into play for each person: genetics, hormones, different body types, our ability to afford high quality food as well as the choices we make about what we eat, the level of stress in our lives, whether we struggle with a chronic illness, our…