No sewing. ...FWIW I have a high pain tolerance and a self-injury habit from way back...and could not sew myself shut if I wanted to, I'd black out, I think.
But I get the impulse. You wanted to keep them out of your body. But what they did is not your body's fault. It's all theirs.
Hmm... I wonder if buying a female chastity belt and wearing it would make you feel safer? Or just chafed...

I am currently on 250 milligrams of Zoloft, 60 of Buspirone, 100 of topamax (dopeymax )...extracurricular 5-htp as well.
Add all the asthma and allergy drugs and the supplements...and I have a small suitcase of pharmaceuticals...NONE OF THEM ANY FUN, dangit!

Sex drive still here, still get lonely a lot. O.o

I also have food issues. My biggest issue is overeating. I also gained more than 100 pounds and have worked hard to get some of it off. I have also been on the other extreme - starvation. I was not anorexic but I was a non-purging bulimic for many many years. Because I had a phobia about throwing up I couldn't purge so instead I followed a binge starve cycle. I would binge for a week and then starve for a week or more. I think the longest starve cycle was a month. I have made a mess of my poor body.

#1 - a true loving relationship where both people respect the other and care about each other is a wonderful goal.

#2 - Men may pursue you but you are growing and understanding more about yourself now than ever before. If it takes you a year to get all the weight off that is another year of healing that you will have done. And along the way you will learn how to take care of yourself and how to respect yourself enough to tell the men who only want sex from you to 'shove off!'. You deserve a two way relationship now. One with mutual respect.

#3 - This would be an easy fix wouldn't it? But it's just more avoidance. And I know you already know that.

#4 - I understand this all too well. All my life I was invisible to those who I wanted to love me and yet...I also wanted to disintegrate. The love/hate relationship (mostly hate) I have had with my body is, now that I look back, really sad.

#5 - This is so sad. I am so sorry you felt that you had to go to such painful extremes to keep people away from you. To keep yourself safe. That inner child who tried to do this is still within you hurting terribly. She doesn't understand what has happened and what continues to happen. When she finally understands and gets out all her tears and anger, you will no longer feel the need to create your own chastity belt.

#6 - As a child you found the one thing that only you could control - in a world where you could not control anything - not even what was done to you. These abused children are still inside of you and are still using the same coping mechanisms that were put in place years ago. It is all they know. These inner children are still hurting and as long as they hurt they (you) will want to turn to your coping mechanism, food. It was my experience (I'm sure it is different for everyone) that as long as I was still repressing all the emotions from my past I was going to continue to eat. Eating helps to push them down further and also to fill me up. I wanted to be filled up with love but food was all I had. So food served two purposes - to help push down emotions and help fill me up with a good feeling. As I have processed all the horrible emotions that I repressed for 34 years I have 'needed' food less and less. I do still have my moments when I want to turn to food instead of feeling the feelings and sometimes I give in. Sometimes I don't.

If your weight is causing health problems for you I understand you don't have the luxury of waiting until you process all the emotions you need to process. Keep talking to your inner children and explain to them about healthy eating and that we eat for nutrition and not to help with emotions. To help with emotions we cry and get angry..etc. It is a process for sure and one I'm sure you want to speed up but I have not found a way to speed it along. I got in the habit of telling myself "Ok. I processed that bit of information/emotion, now I don't have to process it again and I am that much closer to the finish line". It helped me see that I was making progress and that there actually was a finish line.

Take care

P.S. A big part of the healing process for me, was learning to love myself completely.

Hylierandom and LuckyEmpath have stated a lot of good info.
IMO - you should try to lose weight, not so that you are more attractive, but focus instead on your health issues. Being overweight is a major health issue in America and impacts your overall physical, mental and emotional health in such negative ways. I agree that you need to love yourself enough to be able to do what is best for you; yes, you may attract some unwanted attention, but if you can get past the panic associated with men who are sexually attracted to you, you may also feel a boost to your image in that you ARE considered attractive to others.
I know you have struggled with this issue for sometime, and through that struggle you have formed a "catch-22" cycle - take care of myself and risk feeling threatened, then overeating and starting back where you are now. I really think that such cycles as this are often unconscious ways for us to maintain the status-quo of our lives; unfortunately, many of us need to change that status in order to heal.
Are you ready for such a risk? I have seen you grow and become so very strong on this site since I have been here. I have read your posts of times when you were SO LOW and then read as you regained your strength and power. Your journey has led you here....I think you really already know the next step, but you may not be ready to take it.
And yes, progress is very "onion-like" - one layer, one step at a time. It sounds like you have uncovered a new layer here and the first step toward addressing these layers is to become comfortable with what you have found - then you can act on it.
You will be in my thoughts - it's hard to break such "comfortable" cycles - again, such cycles, even when they are frustrating, are often in place in order to keep us from moving past them, thus not taking risks or feeling threatened.
Take care -
All my best
Refuse2quit

I don't have any answers for you because I have so many of the same issues and haven't resolved them, but I do want to express solidarity or whatever. For me, I think if I was able to feel secure in my ability to set boundaries I wouldn't need to be fat. But what I think undermined all sense of boundaries was my own sexual response to abuse. This makes me feel that I have no boundaries within myself, never mind between myself and other people. It makes me feel incredibly vulnerable. Even married and middle aged, I don't feel safe - maybe because it's the inner kids feeling, not the adult woman. I feel that my sexual response can be commanded by others and that is terrifying. In my psychology, it robs me of rights, autonomy, dignity, boundaries.

I hope this isn't unhelpful. I think I share a lot of your fears, but what you could have been feeling to be desperate enough to try to sew yourself up - that boggles my mind. Poor, poor girl! Thank God you made it through.

I wrote a poem about food that you might "enjoy". I think I'll post it.

Thank you all so much for not being afraid to read this and giving such thoughtful responses. It is a very difficult subject for me to write or talk about. I have only slightly scratched the surface in therapy. Opening up that part of myself to a male is so hard but for me it will make it more real. I have been known to BS my way through months if not years of therapy because I could say things easily. I might have been saying things but I wasnt feeling things.
I think I am almost ready to commit to a change for me. My process it to take things out, look at them and figure out where to start. I have realized that I spend a lot of time in therapy trying to protect myself from him. I have finally told him how I am afraid of men I am attracted to and how I am afraid that someday he will turn on me and deliberately try to hurt and humiliate me. I think I am ready ( or close to it) to move forward and work with him instead of taking counter measures to protect myself.
I think I do need to go talk to my little 8 year old. I do need to look at the old pictures. The one where I was shy but happy ( or reasonably so) to the one taken 2 year later where I am bloated and scared looking. I think I do need to go down into that place and pull up the little girl that needs to feel safe, loved and worthwhile. I also need to know that I am more than my body and that I can learn how to know a good man from a bad one and how to set boundaries and to have expectations of being treated well.
I keep telling myself that right now my health is the issue. I do not have to pursue any relationships when I am more comfortable with my body.
Change IS hard. Moving out of my comfort IS hard. Staying in it is killing me and making it damn near impossible to do the things I used to enjoy. I dunnomaybe promising myself a self defense class when I am physically able to do it
As far as the self mutilationI havent tried the surgery since that day. I just need to find some balance. Just balance. I want to enjoy being a woman. I want to enjoy being healthy. I dont want to hate me anymore.

I do love the onion analogy because it is so accurate. My therapist used a tree analogy. She described a huge tree with many limbs. At the beginning of therapy we were working from the furthest most limb and working our way back to the trunk of the tree. On each limb were child parts as well as other soul fragments that had left because it was not safe. The last child I worked with was my 8 year old because she was the first child to be sexually abused. She was at the trunk of the tree and when I felt her I felt true innocence. I finally felt that I was, at some point, an innocent child. It brought tears to my eyes as I felt this innocence because I honestly didn't think I was every unknowing of horror. Healing my 8 year old happened much faster too because she didn't have the history of abuse all the older children had.

Keep talking to your 8 year old Cecil, she is listening. And love her too. Picture that beautiful little girl and give her a huge hug and let her know she is loved and is lovable. And she is very deserving of love...just like you are.

Take care