A typical morning for me, 13 years ago, would go something like this.
I would wake up alone, the debris from last night’s TV ‘treats’ littering the bedroom: the family-size bag of chips, the pot of dips and empty wine bottle – the solitary glass.
Immediately, the dread, anxiety and self-loathing started to kick in, shortening my breath, making my heart hammer and my hands and feet tingle. I’d shower, dress and do my make-up, careful not to catch a glimpse of my size 14, 210lb body and puffy, blotchy face in the mirror.
Some mornings, when everything got too much, I would sit on the bathroom floor, digging the sharp corner of the toothpaste tube into the tops of my thighs until I drew blood: the pain distracting me from the far more painful reality running on a loop in my head – that I was a fat, worthless, 40-year-old single mother who had made a total mess of her life.
Long after the end of my 12-year abusive marriage to a man with narcissistic tendencies, I was still suffering the aftershocks of the trauma. Though he hadn’t been physically abusive, my ex had lied, cheated and gaslit me. When he eventually walked out, he left me homeless – his debts of around $95,000 caused our house to be repossessed – and living off welfare programs.
At one point I was literally down to my last dollar, with no idea how I could feed the children, then aged ten and six.
What I hadn’t realized back then was that these scars weren’t just affecting me emotionally but physically, too.
The reason I couldn’t shift the 70lbs I’d gained during our unhappy marriage, no matter how much I dieted and exercised? I was still carrying the pain and panic of those years.
Caroline lost 70lbs without fat jabs and is the same weight as she was on her wedding day
The 53-year-old says she couldn't shift the weight she'd gained during her unhappy marriage because she was still carrying the pain and panic of those years
Only when I finally began to unpack trauma, specifically the role of cortisol – the ‘fight or flight’ stress hormone that flooded my bloodstream 24/7 for more than a decade – and its effect on my body, could I start to tackle this last hurdle on my road back to full recovery.
Now 53, I am the exact same weight I was on our wedding day: 147lbs, having lost that 70lbs – not through weight-loss drugs but through cutting loose from the mental and physical baggage. And you can too.
The link between cortisol and weight gain and retention is well-documented. Your body thinks you’re under threat and needs all the energy it can get to protect itself, making you constantly hungry and craving high-calorie foods.
This is why you so often gain weight during an unhappy marriage – but unless you deal with your demons post-divorce, you remain in this state of fight or flight. And it’s impossible to shed the pounds until you do.
I’d met my first husband in the late 1990s when we were both cabin crew. Two years older than me, and already with a divorce behind him (red flag number one), he showered me with attention and gifts.
Getting my name tattooed on his body after only three months of dating (an almighty red flag), seemed a bit extreme but I was flattered.
I look back on our 1999 wedding photos and see a 26-year-old woman full of hope. It was only when I was pregnant with our son, William, in 2003 that my husband’s mood swings started to escalate. Nothing I did or said was right, and he’d pick over every word looking for evidence to support his victimhood.
Just the slightest infringement – a phone call at the ‘wrong’ time (he was frequently overseas or on a different time zone) or the ‘wrong’ subject would lead to a massive row. Why was I bringing this up now? What was wrong with me? Why did I keep going on and on?
It left me constantly on edge and full of self-blame.
When the baby was born, he couldn’t cope with not being the focus of my attention. I remember sitting beside him one evening, exhausted from breastfeeding around the clock, reassuring him it was natural for the baby to focus on me more than him.
His miserable, disappointed face told me I’d let him down... again.
As is often the case, I had piled on weight during the pregnancy; being exhausted with my nerves stretched on tenterhooks didn’t help.
Fast food and snacks became my comfort. I lived in baggy grey sweats, hating what I saw in the mirror.
My husband lost all interest in me. We slept in separate rooms.
I had given up work to concentrate on motherhood, at my husband’s instigation: he wanted to look after me (another control tactic), he said. But unknown to me, he was sinking us into debt with no obvious signs as to where the money was going.
While we lived in a lovely four-bedroom detached house, there were no grand holidays and flashy cars, yet somehow we had around $95,000 worth of debt – the full extent of which only became clear after the marriage ended.
Yet I still believed in my family and wanted my marriage to work.
We even decided to try for another baby – which led to a succession of four, unexplained, heartbreaking miscarriages before I became pregnant with Madeleine in 2008.
I was six months pregnant, however, when I discovered that he was cheating.
Suffering from terrible morning sickness, I had left my husband and son eating lunch. He had recently returned from a trip away and his mobile phone was in his jacket pocket in another room.
When it rang, I thought I was doing him a favor by not disturbing his meal. On the phone I heard a voice message from an American woman – he’d had a few trips to Chicago recently – asking how her lovely ‘English guy’ was.
When I confronted him, he went mad at me for interfering and acting like a ‘mad woman’. It was obviously a mistake, he insisted. A wrong number. A random coincidence.
He was so good at it, he actually had me doubting myself. It was only when he said he had nothing to hide and thrust his wallet at me and I found a business card for a Chicago motel that the truth came out.
I rang the motel and found out there had been a reservation in his name – one that had been recently cancelled. ‘Are you still going to deny this?’ I asked him.
He was cornered but even then managed to steer the conversation around to him being the victim. He had felt so helpless when I was going through the miscarriages, he said, that he had turned to another woman for support.
Somehow, the conversation ended with me, the six months pregnant, wronged wife, comforting him and we agreed to go for marriage counselling. Of course, he put on a great show, heavily implying (through clouds of fake compassion) that all our relationship problems were caused by me, not him.
Luckily, the therapist saw through his charms. On one solo visit, the therapist told me to look up ‘narcissistic sociopath’.
It opened my eyes for the first time.
A narcissist is only happy when you are feeding their ego, and living with one means you constantly shift and mold yourself into what you think they want you to be, suppressing your own emotions.
Your typical narcissist will be a deeply insecure individual who projects their pain outwardly through various abusive behaviors.
Every paper I read advised me to leave but I felt trapped – we had children together, I had no income and the constant stress of our relationship had left me feeling weak and depressed – and over-eating more than ever.
Where could I go? And, as my husband was ever keen to remind me, who else would want me?
My marriage eventually imploded in 2010, when the children were two and six. We were supposed to be going on a family camping trip but he went AWOL for three hours on the morning we were due to leave.
When he returned, without explanation, I knew better than to turn it into another big drama, so we headed off on holiday. Throughout the trip, he kept mysteriously vanishing for hours.
On our return, I gave him an ultimatum: he either stayed or he went. For once, there was no gaslighting or blaming; he went. It took him just ten minutes to pack up his things and leave.
He insisted there was no one else – but of course there was. I found out in the crassest way imaginable when I received an intimate text, by mistake, which was meant for her.
After all those years of unhappiness, I was a wreck. I had post-traumatic stress disorder, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (a build-up of extra fat in the liver linked to metabolic risk factors); a heart condition, anxiety and depression. I was prescribed a series of six counselling sessions through my doctor but only made it through three.
My husband told me the house ‘was mine’ but I had no means of paying the mortgage, and couldn’t afford the lawyer's fees to sell it, and what with all the debt – some of it in my name – it ended up being repossessed.
I moved into a small rental, where I scratched a living picking up work as a podiatrist – my trade before I decided I wanted to see the world – and through welfare.
Caroline now eats a healthy and clean diet made up of higher protein foods and holds zero anger towards her ex-husband
Child support payments from my ex were sporadic and, as a debtor, I had no credit. I’d had to ask my dad to be a guarantor on our rented home – another humiliation. The children and I would pick up coins on the street when I was down to my last dollar.
But, gradually, I began to claw myself back, chipping away at my debt slowly and eventually paying it off after around three years.
On top of my podiatry clients I started my own little business selling healthcare products, which slowly but surely earned me a decent living.
Still, it struck me that there was a huge lack of professionals who properly understood the impact of narcissism from a victim’s point of view, so I decided to use the money I was making to retrain as a therapist.
In 2024, I founded the Mental Wellbeing Company. My weekly podcast, No Visible Bruises, has had more than six million downloads and my best-selling book, How to Heal After Narcissistic Abuse, was published in 2024.
I met my husband Simon, a 56-year-old mortgage broker, online and we married in 2018. The children grew into well-rounded, happy individuals, who have no contact with their father (their choice).
William is training to be a family law attorney and Madeleine has just completed her A-levels and is off to university to study psychology. Yet for all my successes, one thing remained beyond my grasp: my weight. Every diet ended in failure. No matter how much exercise I did, how ‘good and careful’ I was, the weight wouldn’t shift.
In every podcast, Instagram and Zoom meeting, that same puffy, inflamed ‘cortisol’ face would be staring back at me. I stuck to the same size 12-14 wardrobe of grey and black baggy sweats.
Simon and I were on holiday in Las Vegas in 2023 when I was 50, and I was so uncomfortable in the heat, I decided I’d had enough.
Through my work, I had got to know a nutritionist and with her guidance, I began reading more into trauma and its effects on weight.
Being in this constant state of alert had left me with acute metabolic dysfunction. The body keeps the score, even when we are functioning and coping on the outside.
When a woman is living in a constant state of fear, her nervous system becomes dysregulated because it is in survival mode, which becomes the body’s priority. Everything else, including the immune, the digestive and endocrine systems, begin to compensate or shut down.
Fight or flight, even years after the threat had abated, was still my default setting. The slightest prompt could send me spiraling – including exercise, which would flood my bloodstream with yet more cortisol, making me hungrier and more likely to store calories.
So, I had to work on two things: change how I ate but also regulate my nervous system and find other ways to deal with distress rather than automatically reaching for food.
I did this by understanding my nervous system, noticing my triggers and patterns, learning to recognize the difference between genuine hunger and wanting food because I was distressed.
My research led me to what is known as a fat ‘adaptation’ diet, whereby you reduce your calories drastically for a few weeks at a time, which teaches your body to burn calories from your fat reserves rather than the food you are eating.
I started at 600 calories, then 700 and so on, allowing your metabolism to adapt and reset each time.
The diet encourages you to cut down on carbohydrates and increase healthy fats because these are a ‘better’ source of energy than carbs.
In a 600-calorie day, I would fast until lunchtime, then have something nutritious, like a chicken and avocado salad for lunch, and salmon and vegetables for dinner.
I would advise anyone contemplating this to get professional, medical support. It wasn’t easy. My diet was made up of higher protein foods like eggs, chicken, fish and Greek yoghurt alongside vegetables. Even then, my body was so proficient at storing calories ‘just in case’ of that perceived threat that had stalked me for so long that I would actually put on weight until my metabolism stabilized.
I persevered and it worked. Today, I am the exact same weight I was in that wedding photo in 1999 – and have zero diagnoses: no more IBS and all my other conditions have gone.
I now eat a healthy and clean diet at around 1,800 calories a day and I have a rebounder and reformer Pilates machine at home. I hold zero anger towards my ex-husband because, while I will never excuse the abuse he made me endure, now I can at least explain it.
Sometimes you need to listen to your body, understand it and treat it not just on an intellectual level but at a deep nervous system level.
Mine had put up with so much, for so long, but now I’ve found a way to be me again.
- As told to Julia Lawrence
