I ask myself this a lot. I know why, but I feel like by not admitting it, I haven't accepted it and I have to. I have to understand what got me here so I can learn from it.
Carbs are my weakness. I love them. I never thought I was the type of person that loved food. I always liked food, but now that it's all I think about because i'm trying to lose weight, I've realized that I actually do LOVE it. I wouldn't say I'm an emotional eater, but I do tend to eat more when I'm bored, or just because something in my head says, "it's been a few hours, time to eat!" I have to learn how to stop thinking that. How do you undo 20 years of that?
Anyway, how do you think you guys got to this point? I hope this thread isn't too depressing, I know thinking about how I got here makes me a little depressed. I thought I was stronger than this.
I think this is an extremely important question to ask yourself. Only we realize how we got to our weight can we be prepared to combat it. We have to know the triggers and what we might come up against while trying to lose weight and once we do, how to not put it back on.
I too love carbs and still think about them all the time. I know it's a trigger food that if put in front of me I have a tendency to eat way too much of. To combat it, I either avoid being around a LOT of them, (ie, if there's only 1 slice of pizza there, there's no way I can eat 4) or plan the rest of my day around them calorie wise. I know when I'm at goal weight, I'll STILL have to watch and probably will for the rest of my life.
Specifically though for me, I got to my highest weight by choosing to ignore it. I didn't weigh myself ever and didn't FEEL big, it's only when I would look at pictures of myself that I would truly see how far it had gone. In the future, I'll always be committed to weighing myself at least once a week and staying within a weight range.
i think everytime looking in the mirror there was that overwhelming feeling of where or how would i even begin to lose all this weight. So it was simpler to just not look in the mirror and deny to myself that i'm that big and then continue stuffing my face with all the crappiest foods and telling myself let me eat to my fill today for the last time because tomorrow i will begin my weightloss programme. But tomorrow never came for years and years. I'm now only 2 months into my journey and now that i'm trying to lose, it kills me how i let myself get this big. The effort it takes to lose a pound is sooo much yet to gain one is so damn easy *sigh*
Last edited by cherrygarcia; 06-27-2012 at 05:09 AM.
How did I get here? Whoppers. The burgers, not the candy.
I had untreated sleep apnea when I was a kid (it was diagnosed once I started having seizures but my parents didn't think it was a big deal) and so I always struggled with keeping weight off. I was never that big, but I would eat to stay awake and was generally chubby because of it. Though for a few years in high school when I stopped eating, I got down to a size 6. When I was 18 I started asking my parents the hard questions: Why didn't you let me get medical treatment, where's my savings account from the money I earned, why did you encourage me to starve myself, etc. Got kicked out of the house.
Anyway, I was broke and so my boyfriend and I would eat really bad food because it was the cheapest. Ramen, corn dogs, frozen pizzas and Burger King. I ate Whoppers nearly daily. The meal was $3.33 back then, all you could drink soda, and it filled me up for most of the day. Was able to hang out in the air conditioning or heat, it was quiet as long as it wasn't dinner or lunch rush so I could study, etc. I gained about 100 pounds over maybe 10 months. I'm positive the emotional issues from the parental issues were part of the problem, too, as eating made me feel better.
Of course, the weight makes the sleep apnea worse, plus I am severely anemic and have PCOS, so it's horrible trying to lose that weight now. Had I tried a decade ago when the weight was "new" maybe I would have been able to do it easier than now. Who knows. Gotta keep trying now. I'm at least feeling better even if I'm not necessarily thinner, so that's a big win in my book.
stranded, I can relate to you so much. My family has lived on a fixed income ever since my mother got sick when I was 11. So it has always been cheaper to eat off the dollar menu at mcdonalds for the day when you only had a couple bucks. People don't understand that, so I usually just say yup, i'm lazy that's why i'm fat. I'm glad in a way that i can actually relate to someone else in the same boat. Usually it's pregnancy weight or stress for people. With me, it's a lifestyle I just couldn't control and here i am, trying to undo the damage my mother didn't intend, but inevitably helped create.
I was a chubby kid, and probably my metabolism was off forever; had strange unexplained pancreatic trouble at age 4. By age 7 my mother was taking me to a nutritionist and I started dieting. Up and down, up and down during teenage years, which landed me in the hospital having my gall bladder out at 16. Shortly thereafter an endocrinologist diagnosed me as almost completely lacking cortisol and therefore put me on cortisone, which I was on for about 5 years, during which I gained a hundred pounds. Thank heaven I found a doctor who realized that was a misdiagnosis, or I'd probably be dead by now. But so I graduated high school at 190, graduated college at around 290. By then I had learned to define myself by my (sedentary) work. Although I'm always trying, at least half-heartedly, to do something about this weight, and in 1999-2000 I lost about 60 pounds, for the most part I have put my weight and health on the back burner throughout my adult life.
I feel like it out to be a useful exercise to rehearse all this, but I feel there's something I'm still not seeing...
Last edited by Vortex_VVV; 06-27-2012 at 07:44 PM.
I think the diet rollercoaster got me to my highest weight. In the mid-90's I discovered "fat acceptance" and the theory that dieting tended to cause weight gain, not weight loss. I stopped dieting, ate healthy food and let my weight be a non-issue.
Miraculously my weight-gain stopped. Too bad I didn't find that trick at 14 and 225 lbs instead of at nearly 30 and 375 lbs.
I also didn't realize that a lot of "healthy foods" weren't healthy for me. I only learned within the last seven years that carbs, even "healthy" ones like whole grains and fruit, tend to fuel the "rabid hunger" I've lived with all of my life.
I also discovered that birth control actually helped control monthly TOM hunger. Even at 12 I remember telling the doctor that I didn't think I'd hae a weight problem if it weren't for TOM, because I'd be so hungry "that week" that I would have to starve myself the rest of the month just to break even.
Even at 12, my doctor said we could try birth control to see if it helped, but he warned that weight gain was a side effect of most birth control (scaring me away from birth control for decades, until my PMDD got so bad I was at a point I didn't care whether I gained weight).
I get extremely angry when people imply (and so many people do) that I'm succeeding now because I somehow finally decided to do it. The fact is that I'm working much less at this "success+" than I did most of my life to fail
I'm only succeeding now, because I've learned that most of what I was taught about weight loss was just plain wrong. My failure was in believing the common wisdom and the mainstream science of the times.
If I were to follow the "expert opinions" most commonly put forth even today, I still would be failing. I had to learn that some of the "fanatic" theories (low-carb and paleo) were rigiht afterall (at least for some of us).
I'm only 20 and weigh 400lb. I can hardly get my head around how that happened. I think I just love love LOVE eating, always have. During my teens wasn't the happiest (whose is?!) and that is when I gained a very big amount of weight. Food makes me happier, I got into habits of buying lots of food, and actually developed some bad binge eating habits, at my worst bingeing just about every day. Of course I hate/hated exercise because, well, I think most big people do, for reasons of confidence and the physical discomfort, so I avoided it!!
As I have become an adult and found so much more happiness, I have stopped such rapid gaining but losing is still very hard to do.
My weight issues didnt start until I became a stay at home mom. I think boredom eating was a huge part but also lack of serious exercise. I am eating better now and still not exercising daily and I know I need to. I have lost 90lbs twice. this time I only gained back 40 of it.
I think how I got there was many layers of many things. High carb foods preference, junk food laziness, ignoring weight gains, emotionally triggered binges, using food as a drug and the worst one...apathy.
But what kept me there, at high weight levels, was even more mind boggling. I actually believe each and every single day that I was soon to stop the behaviour, get it together and finally lose all the weight, forever! I woke up every morning for over 30 years believing it. Each and every binge was ended with: this it, I will never do this again! If it wasn't so sad, I would laugh my head off at the unbelievable amount of gall I had to persist in this mindset. The blind optimism didn't serve me at all, it merely kept me locked in the same cycle.
I have to remind myself to stop thinking this is a temporary problem and the solution is just a matter of starting a diet. It's a major overhaul in how I think and react to life's curve balls and the way food gets entangled in the mess of my thinking.
I try to stay aware of how I think, how I feel, what my body really looks like, how food affects me, where I tend to ignore the truth of the matter. I have never worked it this much before, but it is certainly taking much longer than a diet would have alone. Sigh.
I'd like to lay part of the blame at modern life.
Women have always had emotional issues but women haven't always been so fat.
So I put part of the blame at:
- time saving, labor saving housekeeping - much less work to vacuum a carpet than to move furniture, roll up the carpet, hang it over the clothes line and beat the dust out of it.
- cars - I walked to school as a kid. I drove my children as we had predators, even in our staid middle class neighborhood, trying to snatch children off the street.
- manufactured food - it is FULL of additives designed to stimulate appetite. The other day I discovered a shredded wheat type cereal that it stuffed with a frosting like filler!!!
- fast food - no explanation necessary
- stress and anxiety - you've got to have it all, do it all and do it faster
- societal schizophrenia - look like this slender, air brushed model, no! eat this delicious spread of food, no! here's a skinny, athletic ideal in her underwear, no! cotton candy at this restaurant whenever you want it AND a chocolate waterfall, no! let's look at America's Next Top Model and let's enjoy a Whopper and fries and creamy milkshake!
I had some emotional issues as a child. My brother was and is a drug addict so my parents spent a LOT of time on him.. and the emotional abuse he put me though... I ate. I snuck food at night and I ate. And now I just love food.. that is how I got here.. I am addicted to fast food.. I LOVE pizza..
But I'm trying to do better by me.. I joined a gym and am loosing weight.. Slowly but surly.. I am loosing weight. I don't want to be the fat girl anymore.. I want to go to family functions and be the skinny one (or healthy). I want to be able to go to a cookout and get in the pool without feeling like all eyes are on me. I want to be able to walk down the street without feeling like I'm dying.. BUT most of all I want to go to a amusement park and fit in the rides.. That is my ultimate goal when I get down to a healthy size to go to a amusement park and RIDE all the RIDES!
I understand that trying to gain insight into "how did we get here" might be helpful. For some it was mental, physical or worse abuse that led to poor self esteem and comfort eating. The high expectations on working women, or carers of elderly parents and the relatively low cost and avaliability of cheap food.
The reality is we ARE here and the most important journey is where we are going not where we have been.
You start your journey then you get sick, or a parent dies or you get fired from your job, all these things can be used by that voice in your head that says" you might as well eat...you are NEVER gonna be anything other than morbidly obese so why bother"
Well I have news for all those voices in our heads, you can find the off switch!!!!!!
You can train yourself to ignore that voice and listen to the one that says you are worth nurturing with good food and gentle exercise.
I had a childhood like one of those so called misery memoirs and it has taken me until 45 with 2 lovley children and a fabulous husband to be able to get to this point.
You can do it.
I missed out the fact that in addition to the voice in my head I also have my mother's voice saying I would pretty much never amount to anything and in her latter years telling me I should be ashamed of my weight, no man would ever want me and that she wishes she had never had kids. She passed away 4 years ago aged 64 and I never plucked up the courage to tell her how much her words affected me.
Last edited by mountain walker; 07-03-2012 at 07:12 AM.
Reason: ommission
How did we get here?
