My body knew before I did. This is the first story in a series about the ways a body keeps the score.

My body knew before I did.

Before the marriage, I was full of energy. Full of cheer.

I was in my early twenties, new to America, and curious about everything. A whole country was waiting to be discovered, and I wanted to experience it. I was building my education, my career, and my life, and the building itself made me happy.

Some days stretched across fifteen hours of work and full-time study, yet there was always more of me left. I could go to the gym, do strength training, swim, and spend time with friends. A friend might invite me to dinner, and I would go happily. A long lunch could turn into an afternoon of conversation and laughter, and somehow my work would still get finished. Festivals, celebrations, and cultural gatherings filled my community’s calendar, and I loved showing up for them. Weekends gave me time to shop for myself, find something for my family, meet someone, explore somewhere, or make one more plan.

Life kept offering itself to me, and I kept saying yes.

I had reached the point where I believed I was ready for marriage. My master’s degree was only a few months behind me, and for the first time in years, I felt I had room to welcome another person into the life I had built.

So I said one more yes.

I got married.

Within six months of marriage, I was full of stress. Full of anxiety. Full of devotion to one person who consumed almost every drop of it.

I gained more than forty pounds. My parents were alarmed. My brother was alarmed. The people who had known my energy watched my body change faster than any of us could explain.

The weight gathered slowly, without my knowledge and almost entirely without my attention. It gathered through hundreds of meals eaten under pressure, hundreds of nights without enough sleep, hundreds of swallowed emotions, and hundreds of moments spent managing another person’s moods. My body was keeping count while my attention was somewhere else.

More precisely, my attention belonged to someone else.

In those first months, I was trying to become a good wife according to the definition I had inherited. I cooked. I adjusted. I watched his reactions and studied what pleased him, what disappointed him, and what might provoke another scene. I learned when to speak, when to become quiet, and when agreeing would cost me less than resisting.

My attention gradually left my own body and moved toward his.

What does he want?

Will this upset him?

Is he angry?

Will he be disappointed?

How will this become my fault?

Marriage was my first relationship. I had no earlier experience against which to measure what was happening. Everything was new to me, and much of it was shocking, yet I kept trying to understand it as marriage.

The claiming began before he even arrived in America. He expected me to remain connected to him through Messenger during the day, including while I was working. When I stepped away from the screen, he would ask me to call, and the call had to happen then.

This was before free calling applications made international conversations easy. Every minute cost money, and I paid for those minutes from my own pocket.

I was paying, minute by minute, for my own surveillance.

He would keep me on the phone or on video for hours, tracking my time from across an ocean. My job was to finish work, return home, and become available to him. In his mind, marrying me was like winning a jackpot. I was the prize, and the prize now belonged to him.

Time with my parents began shrinking. Time with my brother shrank. Friendships became quieter. When I asked for a little time of my own, the request became an emotional event about how deeply he would miss me. His longing always appeared more important than my need for space.

By the time he arrived in the United States, my world had already begun organizing itself around him. The surveillance moved from the screen into our shared life, and the claiming became more complete.

I had little time to sleep and almost no time to think about myself. I moved mechanically through my days, responding to whatever came next because responding was all I had the capacity to do.

“Let’s go get a burger,” he would say.

“Okay, fine,” I would answer.

The “fine” rarely came from hunger. An hour earlier, he might have created a conflict over something else, and I would already have spent my energy explaining, calming, and trying to restore peace. By the time he suggested the burger, I had no strength left to make another point or defend another need. Agreeing gave him the small victory of getting what he wanted. It gave me something too: the temporary illusion that the conflict was over and peace had returned.

Thinking about a meal required energy. Choosing what would nourish me required attention. Mine had already been spent surviving the moment before it.

That loss of attention matters because I had watched my weight for most of my life. For my wedding, I had worked my way back to my best after years of immigration struggle: almost the same weight I had landed in America with, the weight my body had once maintained naturally through my college years, without my thinking about it at all. I cared about my health and how I felt in my body. I never made a conscious decision to abandon any of that.

The forty pounds arrived without one clear decision to go there. The bandwidth to choose had disappeared, and every surrendered decision became part of the pattern forming around me.

Sleep disappeared in much the same way.

After I had worked through a long day, he would be ready to watch a movie of his choosing, with me beside him. My presence was taken for granted. The final hours of my day belonged to him by default, and the arrangement never required words. I was expected to stay awake until he finished wanting things. Dozing off was a failure of duty. I was supposed to run like a robot with unlimited energy, making sure he received everything he wanted from the day, with my basic needs nowhere in the equation.

I was carrying the income for us during those months. I was working, earning, studying, and trying to build stability for our future. Yet somehow, after giving everything else, I still owed him more.

He remained the priority because I believed I was dragging both of us toward a better future. I kept telling myself that the strain belonged to the beginning of our life together and that someday all this effort would become worthwhile.

I was building our future while being erased from my own present.

He consumed my present, almost like a parasite. My meals, my sleep, my feelings, my changing moods, and the signals coming from my body all ran unattended because I was at his service. His physical location made little difference. Whether he stood beside me or sat across an ocean, he had Messenger, email, text messages, video calls, and my phone number. There was always another way to enter my day, claim my attention, and confirm where I was.

My mother watched what was happening and compared my life to a Hindi film version of Sleeping with the Enemy.

She was right.

People watching a story like that often wonder how an intelligent woman could allow another person to gain such complete control over her life.

I asked myself that question for years after the divorce.

How had I allowed it? How had I failed to see what was happening? How had a woman who was capable, educated, and independent slowly surrendered so much of her life?

The answer came much later.

Complete control rarely arrives as one unmistakable event. It gathers through hundreds of smaller moments. It forms through the easier choices made by a person who has already spent her energy working, providing, explaining, calming, adjusting, and trying to preserve peace. By the time the pattern becomes visible, she may have very little attention left with which to see it.

For a while, I called it marriage. I called it adjustment. I called it a compromise. I told myself every new marriage required time.

My body used fewer words.

It began expanding.

Food became part of the emotional atmosphere of our home. He was new to the country and eager to experience its pizzas, burgers, fried food, and fast meals. I kept searching menus for something healthier, trying to preserve one small part of the way I had once cared for myself.

Yet by the time many of those meals arrived, I had already spent the day explaining, calming, adjusting, and trying to preserve peace. I was attempting to make a healthy choice inside a life that had become unhealthy in ways I could not yet name.

My body was receiving far more than food. It was receiving tension. It was receiving fear. It was receiving the daily instruction to adapt.

The first signs arrived quietly. Joint pain appeared. Muscle stiffness settled into places that had once felt free. Looking back, I can see the beginnings of physical patterns that would follow me for years. My body introduced them one signal at a time.

And I did what so many women have been taught to do.

I blamed my body.

My body became the problem I tried to solve because it was the evidence I could see. I could see the pounds. I could see the clothes fitting differently. I could see the young woman in the mirror changing.

The marriage remained harder to name.

The body speaks first

Years later, I finally found language for what my body had already understood.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk gave this truth a title when he wrote The Body Keeps the Score. Trauma and sustained stress live in the body long before the mind is ready to tell the story. The body records what the voice cannot yet say.

My forty pounds were a record.

They were also part of a biological story shaped by prolonged stress.

When I spent my days scanning his moods, anticipating his reactions, and managing an atmosphere I could never fully control, my nervous system remained oriented toward threat. Researchers describe this sustained state of watchfulness as hypervigilance.

Isolation followed the same design. Researchers who study coercive control describe constant monitoring, demands for availability, and separation from family and friends as core patterns of this kind of relationship. Cut off from my own people, I was losing the mirrors that could have helped me name what was happening.

Sleep belonged in this picture too. Shortened and disrupted sleep removed one more layer of my body’s protection.

Here is what the research suggests happens next.

Sustained stress engages the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, one of the body’s central stress-response systems, and can alter patterns of cortisol activity. These responses vary from one person to another. Research nevertheless connects prolonged stress and glucocorticoid activity with changes in appetite, stronger preferences for foods high in fat and sugar, energy regulation, and the accumulation of abdominal fat.

These pathways are complex, and each body responds in its own way. In my own life, chronic vigilance, disrupted sleep, reduced attention to my needs, emotional eating, and the food patterns surrounding me became interconnected parts of the same environment.

The connection between harmful relationships and weight is also visible in the research, although it is more complex than a simple line of cause and effect.

One longitudinal study followed young women over five years. Women who reported both physical and sexual intimate partner violence showed greater BMI gain than women who reported no violence, although that overall difference was not statistically conclusive. The clearest finding appeared among women living with both intimate partner violence and depressive mood: they experienced an additional increase in BMI over the five-year period. The researchers concluded that trauma-informed approaches to weight-gain prevention may be warranted.

Another study of nearly 1,200 women found that healthcare-provider-identified obesity was more common among women reporting physical or nonphysical intimate partner violence than among women reporting no violence at all. After demographic factors were considered, physical abuse remained associated with 1.67 times greater odds of obesity, and nonphysical abuse, the humiliation, the fear, the control, remained associated with 1.46 times greater odds. A partner never has to raise a hand for the body to begin keeping the record.

These studies stop short of proving that abuse alone causes weight gain. They show something important nonetheless: fear, humiliation, monitoring, and control can belong in a woman’s health story, right alongside physical violence.

The weight is one signal among many. A 2024 report from the National Academies of Sciences reviewed decades of research and documented the health problems that cluster in women who have lived through partner abuse: chronic pain in the back and neck, cardiovascular conditions, digestive disorders, sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. A systematic review of fifteen studies found increased digestive symptoms across physical, sexual, and psychological abuse alike.

I have lived several of the signals on that list. Anxiety found me. Post-traumatic stress followed me. My digestion carried the strain at times. Each of these will have its own story in the blogs ahead, because my body kept more than one record, and every record deserves its own telling.

One more finding stays with me. Researchers studying chronic pain in survivors found that the pain persisted long after the women left their abusive partners, and reached beyond the usual places into swollen and painful joints. My joint pain and muscle stiffness, arriving in those first heavy months, had thousands of companions in the data.

Read those findings slowly.

Research has documented measurable changes in the health of many women who have lived through harmful relationships. Bodies respond differently, and weight alone can never tell another woman’s entire story.

In the timeline of my own life, however, the forty pounds were data.

They were testimony.

My weight told the opening chapter. It was the first visible signal that my body was carrying an environment my mind had yet to learn how to name.

When food becomes regulation

There is a second layer, and it deserves compassion rather than judgment.

Researchers describe emotional eating as turning to food to soothe feelings rather than to answer physical hunger. Comforting food can engage the brain’s reward pathways and offer brief relief. For a nervous system living in tension, eating may become one of the most immediately available forms of soothing. Studies of women under chronic stress consistently link higher stress with more emotional eating.

I understand this in my cells, and I can tell you the exact moment I first saw it.

After my separation, I went to a silent retreat. Food was served twice a day. The rest was silence. We stayed silent even while eating, each of us alone with our plate and whatever was moving through us.

In that silence, with nothing to manage and no one to watch, I noticed myself overeating. I heard my own thought arrive, clear as a bell: why did I eat this much, as if I am never going to have it again?

That was the first time I truly saw my own eating. Years of chronic stress had taught my body to receive food like scarcity, like comfort, like the only safe thing. The marriage was over. The pattern was still living in me, quietly processing emotions I had never been given room to feel.

Awareness began there. At a silent table where no one spoke, my relationship with food finally became visible to me, and from that day I started watching my eating habits with new eyes.

When your entire day is spent managing someone else’s moods, food can become the one moment that belongs to you. The one comfort that asks nothing of you. The one thing you are allowed to receive.

For me, the eating was a symptom of the environment I was living in.

This distinction changes everything, because it moves the question from “What is wrong with my body?” to “What is my body responding to?”

This happens in workplaces too

I write often for leaders, and I want to say this part directly, because in my work as an executive leadership coach I see the same pattern wearing a professional face.

Toxic workplaces can activate some of the same stress pathways I experienced inside my marriage.

A boss whose moods you manage. A culture where you watch every word. A job where you feel constantly evaluated and never safe. The nervous system can respond to these conditions much the way it responds to a controlling partner: vigilance, exhaustion, and a slow leaving of your own body.

Research suggests that workplace strain may become part of the same health picture. In a study of 2,782 employees, high job strain was associated with higher BMI and greater odds of overweight or obesity in the initial analysis, although the relationship weakened after health-related behaviors were considered.

Another study of 953 employed adults helps explain why those behaviors matter. Heavier workloads and exhaustion were associated with emotional eating, uncontrolled eating, and consuming a greater percentage of calories from fat. Exhaustion was also associated with lower levels of physical activity.

A draining workplace produces a different experience for every person, and it would be too simple to claim that job stress directly causes weight gain. Chronic strain can, however, steadily reduce the energy available for nourishment, movement, rest, and thoughtful decisions, exactly as it did in my marriage.

If you have gained weight in a job that is draining you, your body may be telling you the same thing mine was telling me.

You are adjusting too much.

You are being watched.

You are losing access to yourself.

The body is the first witness

Here is the reframe I want to offer you, the one that took me years to reach.

When a woman has been trained to doubt her own experience, her body becomes the first witness. Mine was testifying before I was ready to speak.

Looking back, the weight felt like insulation, a visible form of invisible pressure. I cannot say that my body consciously built a wall. Yet that is how the experience felt from inside it: as though my body were creating the distance I had not yet learned to create with words.

I had entered marriage believing devotion would create closeness. Instead, every pound carried a message I could not yet read.

I am tired.

I am tense.

I am carrying more than my share.

Your body may be carrying messages too. In weight. In sleep that never restores. In skin that reacts. In pain that settles somewhere and stays. These signals deserve to be read as information, and the most important question is rarely about the body itself.

The most important question is: what is my body responding to?

How to begin listening

If any of this feels familiar, here is where I would gently invite you to begin.

Ask when the change started. Bodies keep timelines. If the weight, the insomnia, or the anxiety arrived alongside a relationship, a job, or an environment, honor that timing as evidence. Your body noticed something.

Notice where your attention lives. Track one ordinary day. How many of your thoughts are spent anticipating, managing, or bracing for another person? Attention is life force. When most of it flows toward someone else’s moods, your own body is running on what remains.

Move the blame from the body to the environment. Your body is responding intelligently to conditions that are hard to survive. Treat it as an ally holding evidence, and direct your honest attention toward the conditions themselves.

Tell one true version out loud. Choose one safe person, a friend, a sibling, a therapist, and describe your daily reality without softening it. Naming is the beginning of every return.

Bring in support that understands trauma. A trauma-informed therapist can help you understand the patterns your mind and body developed while trying to survive. Medical and nutritional support may also matter, especially when weight, sleep, pain, digestion, or energy changes significantly. Healing can involve caring for the body and understanding the environment that shaped its responses.

The real me was still there

Somewhere beneath the forty pounds, the real me was still there, waiting for the day I would finally learn how to listen.

She waited a long time.

The listening did come, and when it came, everything my body had recorded became a map back to myself.

That journey is the story I am writing now, one scene at a time. This was the first sign. My body had already started keeping its own record. It grew heavier because the life was heavy.

Today I read my body the way I once read his moods. With full attention. With respect. With the understanding that it has always been on my side.

Your body is on your side too.

It knew before you did.

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If any of this lives close to your own life, you are welcome in the Oneness Leadership Circle. It is a small, vetted space where people carrying too much come to be heard by others who understand, with no judgment and no performance, only support and the company of people who have walked through their own hard seasons.

The Circle is currently closed for new members. You can join the waitlist at onenessleadership.com, and I will hold a place for you when it opens.

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Sources

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• Mason, S. M., et al. (2017). Intimate Partner Violence and 5-Year Weight Change in Young Women: A Longitudinal Study. Journal of Women’s Health.
• Davies, R., Lehman, E., Perry, A., & McCall-Hosenfeld, J. S. (2016). Association of intimate partner violence and health-care provider-identified obesity. Women & Health, 56(5), 561–575.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2024). Essential Health Care Services Addressing Intimate Partner Violence. Appendix B: Health Effects of IPV Across the Lifespan.
• Banjar, O., et al. (2022). The Association between Intimate Partner Violence and Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders and Symptoms among Adult Women: Systematic Review. Journal of Family Violence.
• Wuest, J., et al. (2008). Chronic Pain in Women Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence. The Journal of Pain.
• Cotter, E. W., & Kelly, N. R. (2018). Stress-related eating, mindfulness, and obesity. Health Psychology, 37(6), 516–525.
• Fernandez, D., et al. (2010). Association of Workplace Chronic and Acute Stressors with Employee Weight Status. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (University of Rochester Medical Center).
• Gonçalves, I. d. S. A., et al. (2024). Interrelation of stress, eating behavior, and body adiposity in women with obesity: Do emotions matter? Nutrients, 16(23), 4133.
• Padilla, H. M., Wilson, M., Vandenberg, R. J., Davis, M., & Clark, M. A. (2021). Health behavior among working adults: Workload and exhaustion are associated with nutrition and physical activity behaviors that lead to weight gain. Journal of Health Psychology, 26(6), 892–904. First published online May 30, 2019.