I saw this on the success stories thread, and thought it was a great idea! It got me to thinking...what really really motivated me to lose the weight? I mean, I know we have ALL wanted to lose the weight, but what REALLY got you off your butt, and got TO IT? I just thought that it would be fun to share this with everyone, and I'll go ahead and start!

I've tried to lose the weight before, but it's always failed. I always gave up. I met Andrew, and he didn't care how I looked, so I didn't really give it much thought, you know? But over the past few months prior to starting my diet and exercise, I just really got tired of looking at this fat person in the mirror. Even more so than in the past. But I didn't really DO anything about it...still. Then, came the day where I got a job at a Nursing Home that required you to wear scrubs. I went scrub shopping, and was DEVASTATED that I couldn't even FIT into any of them! So I had to buy some that were made by someone on Ebay. I was beyond humiliated at that scrub store, I'll tell you what! I decided right then and there, that I was DEFINATELY going to do something about this, because I was tired of having to be humilated in stores, and order online, because I was too fat to fit into something like a scrub top! I also really started to think about how once I get married, I don't want to be ashamed to look at the photos. I hate having my picture taken, and I know I wish I had memories of places I've gone, and things I've done. I was tired of coming to tears every time I looked at a picture of myself, and I am determined to make myself proud, as hard as that is! I know I won't give up. This is the hardest I've ever tried, and I hope I don't fail.

I was tired of being the fat one in the family! I started each day with my weight on my mind it controlled my life! I was sick and tired of being sick and tired!! So from that moment I decided to change it all!

I love threads like this. I just wish I had a better answer to give. It wasn't just one thing for me. I really need to tell how I got so fat in the first place.

I've always been overweight. In high school I wore an 18...but sizes have gotten looser since then so I probably would have been what's a 16 now. I went to college and gained more. I tried all the usual fad diets...fasting 3 days a week, living on grapefruit and spinich, etc. Nothing worked, although I was still about an 18. In Law school I gained a bit. Wore a 20 when I got out. Once out of school I gained up to about a 22. Lost 40 on WW. Got married, had a child, gained it back. Got divorced. Lost about 40 on WW. Gained it back. Lost 40 again! Got down to a 18 again. Gained it back. Then I met my husband. He's a big guy who loves to eat. Between the two of us, we ate our way up the scale. We love food. Every date involved food. Every holiday, every celebration, every night out involved food. Jim loves me. He loved me at a 20, at a 22 and at a 24. I knew and still know he loves me and I just loved him back and didn't worry about anything else. I put on about 17 lbs a year until I plateaued at about 314 for a couple years. I had heart problems. I had High BP. I couldn't do much without distress...feeling like someone was sitting on my chest. Didn't do anything about it.

Then one day I went to the Dr. I weighed 328! I expected 314! I was SO upset! How stupid is it to be upset over 14 lbs when you weigh over 300? But it just really upset me that I'd gained 14 lbs without knowing I was gaining. The next day my husband went to the Dr. He weighed 280. He thought he weighed 270. He came home and looked at me and said, "We have to lose weight." I said, "Okay." Then I went and got my old WW materials and that same night we started.

There was nothing traumatic. There was nothing life-threatening. It just suddenly was the right time. It had to be done. Nothing else could happen but losing weight. I couldn't have done it without my husband though. If he hadn't said, "It's time." I don't think I would have done anything about it then either. But it was time. We just knew we had to change our lifestyle and so we did and we know that we can eat this way for the rest of our lives.

Which hopefully will be a lot longer than they would have been.

My turning point... I'll start by saying that when i was a very little girl, i wasn't fat. However, i hit puberty at a extermely young age. This doctor, and i use the term doctor VERY loosely, gave me a very strong medicine to take 3x daily to slow it down. I gained a insane amount of weight, as it turned out, he prescribed a very stong steriod!!! After that my weight has been up and down and up and down and now really up!

I know that i didn't have the gret HS experiance that some had, but i honestly can't complain. I had boyfriends, lots of friends, was always invited to partys... I was sorta the class clown ...the funny fat girl lol ...but i never got teased!

My boyfriend now is really great...and really supportive. But it comes to a time when you think to yourself... is this what i really want for myself? My BF and I are really seriouse.. so you start to think about wanting a family. It's one thing to cheat myself out of life by being extermely overweight.... by it's selfish to cheat your kids out of it or your loved ones. Also, like many others...i am so tired of going shopping at fat stores...huffing and puffing in the dressing rooms, only to have NOTHING FIT!

I want to just feel happy and comfortable in my skin... not because of what other people think...but because of how I FEEL!

My turning point was when I realized that all I thought about was food!When I was in class I was thinking about what I was going to eat for lunch and dinner. I was totally out of control! I couldn't by snacks because they would be gone in TWO days! I knew I needed to change my ways when I was constantly out of breath just by walking around campus and walking up stairs.
Another turning point that made me realize that I was getting too big was that my TOM would skip a couple of months, but that was a year ago and it is now back to normal. I was also afraid of getting diabetes or having any other complications related to being overweight.

This will be long - my apologies in advance. I've always been overweight. There are many points in my life that should have been "it" - but none of them ever really hit me. I was a size 24/26 my senior year of high school. I'd never gone out on a date, didn't have many friends, and spent most of my time online. I was, to be very blunt, a lazy slob.

I stayed that way until April '04. I weighed myself at the YMCA and was horrified to see that I was 320lbs. I started busting my butt, cooking my own meals, and the weight started coming off. Towards the end of my exercise spree, I was down to almost 299lbs. And then, for whatever reason, I gave up on it a month later. Fast forward to July of '04. I had just gotten back from taking care of my grandma in California. I'd been home a grand total of 4 days before my life literally changed in a matter of minutes.

I was driving to the employment office because I was trying to find a job local to where my parents lived. I'd gotten about 2 blocks from their house when a man in a very large truck hit me. My 'new' car was totalled - it was very apparent even from the beginning. I'd smashed my head on the airbag and had a knot about the size of a small apple on the left top part of my forehead. And, more importantly, I couldn't feel my right leg. I knew something was terribly wrong - and I was right.

I had to be cut out of my vehicle. My right ankle was completely shattered, and for a while, they thought I was going to lose my foot. It took them a long time, a lot of maneuvering, and a lot of pain for them to get a pulse back in it. It took six people to get me out of my car. I didn't fit on the stretcher, so I felt like I was falling off then entire time. And then I got to the hospital, and it took several people to switch me to the bed. They weighed me, and I was at 350lbs. Holy sh*t! I couldn't believe it. If I hadn't already been in tears, that would have pushed me over the edge.

I had to be transferred to another hospital because the hospital there didn't handle surgeries. It's a small town, and you know everyone (in fact, my aunt was the ER nurse who took care of me). So, the people I'd grown up with got to see me at my worst, and they now knew exactly how much I weighed!

When I got to the other hospital, the transferring was again a big problem. I couldn't wash myself or get up to go to the bathroom because I couldn't use crutches and I wasn't strong enough to support myself with a walker. I had surgery early the next morning, and the day after that, I finally had to get up with a walker. It nearly killed me. The next 6 months were much of the same - I had to rely on a lot of people to help me out because I couldn't help myself. When I was finally putting some weight on my foot, with a surgical boot, I felt better, but I was quickly slammed back into reality. I went to 'walk' to my bed to go to bed, and I somehow misstepped and fell, flat on my back. My mom, who has degenerative arthritis in her back, and my dad, who lost the use of his arm and is very weak, were the only two people there. How the heck was I supposed to get up? They talked about calling my cousin, who was an EMT and a fireman, but I refused. I did NOT want that humiliation. My dad also considered rigging a crane of some sort, like a pulley system or something, and I refused yet again. How did I let myself get to this point?!

With a lot of pain, a lot of time, and a lot of determination, I picked myself up, literally and figuratively. From that point on, I pushed myself to get better and to get stronger. I walked about a month before my doctor wanted me to. I got rid of my wheelchair way before that, and the walker followed shortly afterwards. When I was finally cleared to go back to work and school, I decided to do something about my weight. I didn't actually start trying until about 3 months later, because I had to move, get my job back, and start working my way up to being on my feet all the time. But, in March of '05, I started and have not stopped since. I've had lapses, but nothing major - and I'm down 54lbs from where I was before. Now that I'm married and want to start having kids, I'm even more determined to get to where I need to be.

My turning point was two fold. The first was that my mobility really started to deteriorate. I live up two flights of stairs, and every day it got harder to get up them until now I have to take the stairs one at a time. My knees hurt really badly if I climb them normally (this is just starting to feel like it is reversing). Also, I would go grocery shopping or do some other outing and I could barely make it through. I would be exhausted, my feet would hurt and my back would be start to spasm. I started to realize that if I didn’t do something to get fit, it wouldn’t be that long before I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

The other part of the physical side was that I started to be uncomfortable all the time. It is one thing to be in pain when you are moving and walking, but just sitting or lying in bed was starting to hurt too. I could actually cut off the circulation in my legs if I didn’t sit on something soft enough (wooden chairs became hazardous) and it became more and more difficult to find a position lying down that didn’t hurt something. It was such a weird revelation to me that you have to be at a certain level of fitness in order to be comfortable all the time.

The other piece of my turning point was realizing that I have the ability and capacity to do this. I had tried and failed so many times, that I had lost the belief in myself that I was capable of sustaining a long term commitment to something that took a lot of work. Then I was coming up to the point of graduating from college – a journey that has taken over 10 years and an enormous amount of work, money and sacrifice. I started to realize that if I could go to work all day, spend 3 hours in a class room and then go to the library for another couple of hours, then I could find the time when I was not in school to exercise for at least a few minutes every day. Like school, this might take me a long time (actually healthy living will be for the rest of my life) but even if losing the weight takes years, in several years I will still be older – I have to make the choice now about whether when those years have passed I will be healthier.

What finally got me off my butt was my upcomming wedding. I don't usually hate getting my picture taken too much as long as its a pose that is somewhat flattering to me, but I don't want to look horrible in my wedding photos and regret it when I look back on them. Josh doesn't care how I look, either. I was only 165 when I met him (down from 200 due to a required P.E. class my freshman year in high school) and have since ballooned all the way up to 295. Josh never cared, but I want to be healthy and not regret my wedding photos (plus it will be much easier to find a dress if I were smaller than a 26/28). I have a little over a year and so far my diet and exercise plan seems to be working! I've lost 12 pounds in only a month. I am hoping to get back down to at least 200 by the wedding and 165 overall, if not more.

Why do men do this? LOL I went on a Carribean Cruise with my fiance's family in June of 2003. Yes, I was fat, but I found a bathing suit I actually didn't mind wearing (it was a swimdress and the skirt covered my thighs, LOL, and of course it's a one piece). And of course Josh doesn't care about my weight so I think to **** with it, I'm going to concentrate on having fun. Well, I am lying down on a lounge chair by the beach, and my fiance takes my camera out of my bag and takes a picture of me lying there! OMG! I looked up just as he was snapping it. When I got it back, you can see like three rolls of fat because I was lying down. Someone took a picture of me in the same bathing suit where I was posing and STANDING and it didn't turn out so bad. I actually like the picture. But Josh tried to tell me that the one of me lying down was a good picture! I was like are you crazy? I have rolls in that picture that I didn't even know I had! LOL

I had always been overweight and always wanted to do something about it. I have been on and off diets since I was 13 yrs old and weighed in at a hefty 217lbs on a 5' 2" frame. No matter what I did, though, I always seemed to lose heart and eventually resigned myself to a lifetime of gaining.
Then, in Aug. 2004, I just started losing. I don't know what clicked. I must have just started eating a little less. Once i saw that it was possible for the scales to actually shift downward, I became more vigilant about what I ate and sure 'nuf I have been able to continue losing.
Thank you God.

I have been thick most of my life. My turning point happened last year. First, I have always had better than 20/20 vision. One day, I couldn't see anything farther than 5 feet. My friends and family told me it was probably diabetes (because it happened so suddenly). I kept telling them they were crazy, but I must admit it scared me a little because I have a history of diabetes on both sides of the family. I decided to eat a little better. About a month later, I went in for a physical. My blood work came back with gluclose and cholesterol levels in the low 400's (mind you, high is considered 200). Well, any of my friends can tell you that I am a real scaredy cat and the thought of having to stick myself numerous times a day scared the crap out of my. In addition, I HATE taking pills and knew I didn't want to take medication for the rest of my life. I have lost 70 pounds and still have a long way to go, I think I can make it and not be afflicted with these diseases.

I have been overweight my whole life. I literally have just been going up the ladder to 330 pounds. I have never really lost weight just gained it. I hovered around 200-210 for at least 3years. Then in less than a year I gained 120 pounds. Mostly because of depression...and a good bit of health problems..thyroid...etc. But I recently have had my turning point. I just looked at my life..and most of all my unhappiness was because of my weight. Literally was the root of all evil! lol But I really got mad...for a minute...because its like I am doing this to myself. Losing weight would change so many things in my life. So basically enough is enough! Even if I only lose a pound at least I am going forwards not backwards. I know I will slip up every now and then. But the other road for me only leads to pain. Its time to live and be happy!

Hello!
I have been lurking for a little over 6 months! I have lost and regained about 25 pounds during this time while moving to a new city and starting a new job.

According to my family I started gaining weight at the age of 5. I was a chubby kid and hit puberty early (age 10). I was fat but did not feel fat until a few years ago. I have never really dieted but have lost significant amounts of weight three times when I began to walk or exercise. I may have weighed myself five times in the last ten years so I am not sure what my highest weight was or what I have lost in the past. When I lost weight be fore it was not my focus. I was working out to reduce stress or walking to get around town. Now I know I am fat. I can feel it in my knees, and see it in the mirrored elevator at work. I am not interested in being thin but I would like to have my face back and enjoy curves rather than rolls!