I can explain my weight gain pretty simply:

1. I blame most of my weight gain on the American lifestyle. We enjoy our fast food, junk food, convenient lives where everything is quick, on-demand, and easy. We can have pizza delivered to our door while watching an on-demand movie, munching on chips, candy, cookies, etc., and we wash it all down with our favorite soda.

2. Exercise is boring and inconvenient. I'm an avid racquetball player. One of the reasons I got on IP was that I started to lose racquetball matches because I couldn't move my fat a** around the court fast enough. I thought if I just exercised more, I'd get into better shape. But finding time to hit the gym, with everything else that goes on in my life, is an added stress.

3. I love food. I love trying new things, going to high-end resaurants, eating socially, etc. There's nothing wrong with this except that I also enjoy big portions.

4. Fat people eat more. It takes a lot of energy to move that much weight around, so I had to eat a lot just to keep myself going. When you eat the wrong foods, you fuel yourself inefficiently and add more weight.

This is not the first time in my life that I'm lost a lot of weight. When I was 20, I moved to Sweden. Their diet and their lifestyle is much different than ours. Few people have cars, mass transit is very efficient, and refrigerators are small. When I arrived, I was pushing 320 lbs. Within a year, I was down to 215. The difference was that my diet wasn't fast, fatty food. I ate a lot of whole grain breads, a lot of fish, a fair amount of vegetables, and I was very active. I didn't have a car, so I took buses and trains on long trips, and walked or took my bike for shorter ones. It was a good 15 minute walk to the grocery store, and because the food wasn't loaded with preservatives and because I had a small fridge, I shopped at least 4 times/wk. I bought fresh veggies, fat-free milk and yogurt, fruit. I also enjoyed an occasional soda or some ice cream, but without the added HFCS that goes into everything here in the U.S.

When I got back to the states, I fell back into old habits. As a college kid, I discovered fast food again (Big Macs in Sweden cost about $8, and that's simply too much to pay for that quality of food). I also discovered Ben & Jerry's. Taco Bell was cheap. And going to class without a cold bottle of Mountain Dew was simply unacceptable. One of the first things I bought was a car, and cars and drive-thru windows just go together...

To eat well here demands more effort and attention. It takes time and planning. It takes the ability to say no to social invitations, or to accept them but still choose wisely. With IP, you learn valuable lessons about eating along the way. You lose your inhibitions and show up at a party with a jar of pickles instead of a bag of chips. You make strange requests at restaurants and carry your own salt and salad dressing around. And, if you're lucky, you figure out that vegetables taste really good on their own, without a coating of fat. And you learn what it means to fuel your body instead of feed your hunger.

Oh yeah, one more thing... PRESERVATIVES and my body just don't seem to get along

Perfect way to describe the IP transition... sums it up to a T.

THis is a good question and I think it will help me to put it "on paper". I was always thin and never worried about my weight and never exercised. I had my first chld and never lost the last ten pounds that I had gained during pregnancy. However, I am tall and really carry my weight well. Then I had my second son who was born with down syndrome. I had no idea. I had had all the tests and nothing indicated down syndrome. I initially lost 50 lbs in about three weeks due to just no eating. I had just moved, was building a house, my favorite aunt had died, had quit my job, was staying at home with my children which I had never wanted to do, and now I had a baby with special needs. I started eating.....and eating..... After three years pulled myself together had another baby and lost weight. Then my uncle was dx with ALS....watching him die and traveling back and forth...I just ate and ate and ate. Then my mother had a subdoral hematoma and lived for a year and a half...she passed away two months ago....all she did was hit her head on a car door and now she is dead. She was the best....and all last year I ate and ate and ate. My one sister and I eat...my other two sisters don't eat. They now need to gain weight and wher and I need to lose it.
I am an emotional eater AND I love food! I love the fact that it is an inexpensive high! I need to get back to eating to live instead of living to eat!

Should also add I was afraid to try and lose weight and then fail...or worse, to me, lose the weight and gain it all back. My sister in law is a yo yo dieter and she has lost and gained so many times it scares me. Plus I am CHEAP!!! So I did not want to spend money and fail! All comes down to fear for me!

Great thread! It's really interesting to see all of the reasons we got to a point in our lives that we never wanted to be at.

For myself, it is a combo of things. I grew up a chubby girl in an otherwise fit family, and my mom had no idea how to handle that. I remember being dragged around to many different doctors because my mom basically wanted them to tell me I needed to lose weight. But more often than not, they didn't (I was an otherwise happy, active kid). She would feed me only healthy stuff, but it sucked because she still gave my thinner siblings whatever the heck they wanted. My dad always felt it was wrong to do this, and he would occassionally sneak me little treats that I wasn't normally allowed to have. I remember feeling truly left out, and it was a cause for me to eat secretively as a child (I would sneak things and just BINGE because I wasn't allowed them). Of course she found out about that and her protective mothering instincts went into overdrive. She took me to a nutritionist at age 12 (not that it was a total loss, I learned an awful lot from that lady!), but I never took it off. I very much hesitate to say that my mom caused my weight gain, but as a result I have had a very weird relationship with food my whole life.

I also think I gained a lot in gradeschool because I wanted people to stay away from me. I suppose I just assumed subconsciously that if I was fat, nobody would bother me. I used my weight as a defense mechanism and a shield to protect myself from lots of what I just assumed was pain from the outside world. HAHA, not that it ever worked!!

Add on top of that, I am a total die-hard foodie! I love cooking, feeding people, eating, tasting, exploring food. I am an artist in the kitchen; my parents are still pushing me to go to culinary school, and actually, I am thinking of opening my own at-home catering business. I love the possibilities of taste, texture and emotion that food represents. I believe now that if we are more in tune with food in relation to our bodies we can more thoughtfully take care of ourselves.

Where do I start???

I had been chubby in HS (about 160 and 5 feet tall), then when I turned 19, I dropped 40 lbs without trying!! I had two children in my mid 20s and stayed at 167 for about 2 years after my second child was born. Then with a divorce and re-marriage, I gain weight steadily, had another child and here I am today... I believe whole-heartedly, that IP is going to change my life! I never want to be the "fat mom" at school anymore or ever again!

interesting discussion. worth bumping for the new peeps

Food tastes good and I want that good feeling.
I eat for emotional reasons.
I grew up thinking soda was water/milk and continued that thought process.
I've had 3 surgeries on my ankle that have taken me away from my favorite form of exercise (dance) for several years and even put me in a wheelchair for almost 6 months.
I have PCOS and on top of the 3 girls I've given birth to, I've had at least 4 other miscarriages.
I've had adrenal fatigue for almost 5 years.
I had such a poor self esteem in high school and as a young adult that I thought simply because I weighed more than other people, I was fat---in reality I was less than 20% body fat and dancing 7 nights a week for an average of 3 hours a night.
I've yoyo'd on diet after diet, one of which included phen/phan.


I feel almost bad listing these things because they just feel like excuses now. Even before I started IP, I knew if I wanted to make changes I had to change my attitude. It has been quite a journey, believe me, but those things were the past and I am choosing to live in the present. I'm doing a treatment for the adrenal fatigue now and have seen significant progress, so other than my love of food, that's really the only thing I can control right now and that is just discipline. So, I choose to take my meds, make choices in what I eat that will make me healthy, and realize there are so many things other than food that fill me up.