I got up to 300 pounds. It didn't come without those "Aha" moments, but those moments are not always matched with commitment, and thus, results. In other words, I was horrified at what was happening to me at times, but I still felt powerless... will-less... or in some way unable to enact the changes for consistent weight loss...

For me the weight gain came when I lost my sister suddenly when I was pregnant in Oct03 and I had my 2nd baby boy that Nov03 and then he died from SIDS that Mar04. I gained about 100lbs

Honestly, it varies from person to person why they gain weight. Could be medical, could be emotional, could be in a lot of cases, plain carelessness or inattention to their own health as other priorities (i.e. work or family) take over.

Interesting thread! I didn't really have an "aha" moment, until I was pregnant, I was always on the bigger side, 160-180 lbs normally, and always trying to get to a lower "normal" weight, but at the same time I was very very active so I didn't experience any weight related issues (other that not breaking that 10 k in an hr no matter how hard I trained- but that's another story). But then 2 pregnancies changed everything. The first one I went up to 250 lbs, even that was tolerable it was the second one that did me in. The last weight I checked in at was 279 lbs the month I had my second son. Now I know it was pregnancy and all, but I truly believe that what I experienced was akin to morbid obesity. I couldn't walk across a parking lot without pain and getting winded, I was perpetually sweating and chafing in various areas (I started wearing deodorant under my breasts and belly for crying out loud), and the scariest thing, when I lay down on my back, all the fat around my chin and face pressed on my throat and made it hard to breathe, and that is when I made the sleep-apnea and obesity connection. That was my "aha" moment. That was when I realized that I did not want to live my life this way. Even having just a taste of it scared me and it also opened a window of understanding, I now have the greatest empathy for people who are struggling with morbid obesity, and especially trying to start moving/exercising more. I could barely walk by the end, doing anything remotely resembling exercise was a major ordeal. I know what a herculean effort it is to take that first step both literally and figuratively. So I say kudos to us all for taking those first steps towards a healthier and happier life

Another one who's had a lifelong struggle with their weight but for many years my high weight would have been around 190 which I would lose 30-35 lbs of and regain. My first pregnancy in my late 20s was the first time I saw over 200lbs and then the weight gain does came quite swiftly, particularly the last 3 months. As a full-time working mother I never found the time to make the commitment to lose the extra lbs that came about after my first pregancy. I'd lose a few, gain a few and dieted myself up to about 230lbs before I fell pregnant again. I weighed around 250lbs following the birth of my DD.

I must say that despite being such a weight and I was mid 30s by then, I did not have any particular medical problems and was still moderately active so there was still no ah ha moment. I reached 290lbs before that happened and was approaching 40. I was getting minor discomfort, particularly in warmer months, and my knees were beginning to object. In 2003/04 I managed to get my butt in gear and lose 60lbs and then plateau'd. I maintained around there for a while and in September 2004 I ended up having to undergo emergency surgery to save the sight in one eye. I came through the surgery and recovery fine but the whole event just threw me off kilter emotionally and I slipped back to my old ways. It took me nearly 3 years to regain the 60lbs before I decided again I needed to get this under control.

So yes I do think our thresholds are different and I do believe there there are times in our lives when things other than our own health and well-being need to take priority.

Kitty

When I'm out, and I see people that are teetering on the obese side (not so many, considering most asians are tiny), I also wonder how can they not feel it, and why won't they do anything about it? I think there's a difference in the body language of someone who is taking charge of their weight and making a change and someone who just can't be bothered. It's in their walk.

But when I'm walking home from the train station, and I see some people who are overweight going for jogs and working in the outdoor gym, I mentally cheer them on. Like, "Yeah, go, go, go! You can do it!" I'm hoping some positive vibes help bring them a little further.

I think my problem may have been my perception of myself. At my highest I weighed 257. I still bought nice clothes and in my head I never thought I looked heavy. I avoided the camera and when I saw the occasional photo of myself I was shocked at how I really looked and would attempt to diet but the weight would come back when I returned to bad habits.

As I got older the reality of my family history finally sunk in. (High blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems). I knew if I wanted to be around to see my kids have kids and enjoy retirement with my husband I needed to take action. What's been different for me this time is I'm not "dieting". I have changed my eating to a plan that I can live with for the rest of my life. I'm watching portions and eating more fruits and vegetables. I plan ahead for splurges. I am doing some form of exercise everyday. I have never felt like I couldn't have anything these last several months. I am in a better mindset to decide if something is worth eating. As a result of my efforts, in addition to seeing the scale the lowest it has been in almost 20 years, I have seen great improvements in bloodwork, I'm sleeping better, I no longer have heartburn, walking a flight of stairs no longer leaves me winded, the list goes on!

Thanks for starting this thread OP. I think it is causing people to really look at where they are and how they got there.

I gained a ton of weight keeping my mom's cancer secret from my brothers and dad. I had begun gaining weight before, but not really bad until then. I just stuffed it down with food. Then I was the only one taking care of her and more food, then she died at 53 with the perfect body full of cancer...Now I'm here 2 years later not willing to die at 35 of a heart attack because I can't say no to a cheeseburger and fries. I ate and ate and ate to get this big because I couldn't express what I was feeling so I stuffed down my emotions.

Unlike many of the other posters, I was not overweight my whole life. I was a skinny little kid, and a normal sized teenager and college kid.

Weight loss wasn't something I ever considered until my mid-20s, when I had put on 35 pounds, most of it I think from drinking beer after work every night. I went to Weight Watchers and promptly lost those 35 pounds, but I skipped the maintenance part of the program--big mistake!

After that my weight went up slowly from year to year. No pregnancies, so I didn't have that as an excuse. By my mid-30s I had gained those 35 pounds back. That's only 4 pounds per year gain, so it was easy to overlook or just not know about.

I would follow a pattern of deciding I needed to lose weight, "being careful" with food for awhile, and trying to up my exercise. I would lose some number of pounds, and then life would intervene and I'd stop doing what I was doing. Every time, my weight would be a little higher when the light bulb would go on again.

I was almost 200 pounds when my mom died in 2005. I had to buy new clothes in bigger sizes to go to her memorial gathering. Although I had come to the conclusion before that that I seriously needed to lose weight, this was the turning point for me. But again, I had gained only a few pounds per year, average, since my mid-30s. Easy to overlook, justify, ignore, deny.

I've now realized that eating "like everyone else does" is not an option for me if I want to stay at a good weight. I do have to pay attention to how much I eat, and what I eat. I do have to make sure I stay physically active. I believe this is what everyone should be doing, overweight or not. That's the lifestyle change so many talk about.

Jay

I too was a skinny kid and was around 150lbs (both being a miracle since down in New Orleans we celebrate every single change with a party which = lots of food!) when I got pregnant with my first child....I took being pregnant as a free ride to eat whatever I wanted and wound up gaining 80lbs with that pregnancy. Started on WW when he was 2, lost 40 pounds and had to stop officially doing it when I got pregnant with my 2nd. At that point my life was so crazy and my husband traveling for up to 8 months out of the year started just wearing me down and making me depressed.

Then Hurricane Katrina happened and that just opened the flood gates for my depression big time....along came child #3 too. I ate everything and in secret. I felt like I was drowning and no one was there to help. After a lot of meditation & thinking back on how I was letting my life just be flushed down the toilet, I was determined to find myself again. I wasn't only the wife, mother and person everyone came to to make their world right....my whole identity seemed like it was gone and three months into my self discovery the whole thing just clicked after attending a convention. I saw pictures of myself with no disillusions. After that I made the commitment to myself to do this weight loss for me.

So yeah I don't wonder why when I see people with a lot of weight to lose. Everyone has their personal demons....they just come in many forms.

When I was in high school, I weighed around 200-210 and honestly believed that I was the fattest person in the world and that everyone who ever laid eyes on me was struggling not to vomit at my disgusting appearance. Then I got a wordrobe makeover when I went off to college and lo and behold, guys seemed to like me all the sudden. I was getting all kinds of male (and female) attention, and my eating habits were changed by the fact that I was eating in the cafeteria and nowhere else (so never after 7pm), and dropped almost twenty pounds in an astonishingly short time. I maintained 175 through my first year of college, then got a summer job at Burger King, where the onion rings are heaped all over the place and the chicken nuggets are equally plentiful. I started my second year at college at 210 again. After graduation, I had a rough summer trying to find a job in my field and ended up moving from Indiana to North Carolina, far away from my mother and her watchful eyes, reproaching me silently when she could see me making bad food choices. That new freedom from what I saw as criticism, combined with an unprecedented increase in wages, and some serious laziness, joined forces to steer me into the drive-thru every day (occasionally twice a day) for four years. I snapped out of it when I went for my first annual physical last Autumn and the (also a tad oversized) doctor-lady told me that I weighed 276, and pointed out that 276 is startlingly easy to round up to 300, a number my brain found itself suddenly unable to process. She also told me I was playing with fire, and that regardless of how exemplary my overall health is otherwise now (blood sugar = perfect, blood pressure = perfect, low-stress, etc etc), I cannot reasonable expect it to continue this way as I progress into my late twenties. Basically she said, "Rosanne, you WILL be diabetic in five years if you don't fix this NOW."

Yeah.

This is a really good post and definitely worth the time to think about.

Several things came into play. For me, I had stopped valuing myself as any thing other than a caretaker, a mother, a wife. I wasn't ready to embrace health and beauty and BALANCE. It was easier for me to turn my back on those things and say things like, "I don't care about that stuff"..."I don't like to shop because I don't like today's styles"...."I am big-boned and the weight charts can't be right for me"..blah, blah, blah...etc...Deep down I had low self-esteem and didn't feel worthy of having the health, beauty and balance. Much of this was because of the dysfunctional and abusive home I grew up in and always being treated as if I wasn't worth those things.

Physically, my late night eating contributed greatly to my weight gain. I would eat somewhat normally during the day but when all were asleep in my house and the lights went down I would make my plate. I could easily consume another 1500-2000 calories before going to sleep. So, I gained and gained and I gained. I also didn't exercise and was very lethargic because of my nutrition and because of my sleeping patterns. My nutrition, exercise and sleeping are all closely intertwined. I really must have the optimum of all three to feel well.

I used to weigh 250 about 3 years ago. The weight gain was very slow, certainly not unnoticeable (is that even possible?) but I think I was more accepting of it than if I put on a ton of weight very, very quickly. My biggest problem was simply ignoring the problem. I didn't care to make the effort to eat healthy and exercise, I didn't want to give up my favorite greasy, heavy foods, I loved them too much and simply wasn't willing to give up my food lifestyle even though I was unhappy with how I felt and looked. There was certainly a little denial too. I wasn't overly depressed about myself, I wasn't sickened when I looked in the mirror, I would still go shopping and find a great top and think "hey I look pretty good in this!" I would look in the mirror in the morning and do my hair and think I looked alright. My "turning point" was my sister's wedding in which I was a bridesmaid. I looked at all the wedding photos afterward and I was so ashamed. I couldn't believe how "ugly" I looked and I felt guilty as if I'd ruined all of her wedding photos (weird, I know). That was when I decided to lose some weight and I made my goal 100 lbs! I was sooooo overwhelmed! I've since lost 55 lbs. (not necessarily in a linear fashion but I'm still 55 less than I was back then!) and altered my goal a little so I have only 35 lbs. left to lose and that doesn't seem nearly so daunting. I'm feeling more positive about my weight loss again (I stopped altogether for about a year) and ready to finally get where I want to be!

I was a competitive athlete from junior high through college and then a recreational athlete after college. I was always really strong and really fit. Even after college I would go for 15-mile walks on the weekend, just to be out and moving around.

Then one year I gained 100 pounds in under 18 months without changing my diet or exercise. I just gained. As I gained I got less and less happy, especially as my doctors were at a loss to figure out what had happened.

Then I moved from a decent job in a big city, with plenty of parks and public transportation to get me moving, to a horrible job in a remote area with few things accessible without a car. I had finally stopped gaining dramatically, but now I was depressed -- overweight, new (awful) job, new state, no money, free food (the job had a cafeteria) = more weight, less caring. I kept seeing doctors, trying to figure out what had happened. One -- a short, fat woman -- told me I was just eating too much and should be eating between 800 and 1200 calories a day. I'm 5'11". That wasn't going to happen. I finally found a good doctor who was testing all the possibilities (PCOS, thyroid, Cushing's, etc.) and then moved to another city. Phooey.

Before I left, though, I was diagnosed with PCOS -- homones were off, I had the perfect string of pearls, etc. -- and thus got treated for it in the new city. The Metformin helped, and I was able to eat normally and lose weight. Hooray! Then I met my future husband and lost even more weight -- hooray!

Then I went off the Metformin -- I don't even remember why at this point -- and boom, back up the scales went. I changed jobs again and moved to a new state, where I went to see a new endocrinologist. He was not a nice man. He dismissed all the previous tests that showed that I had PCOS and told me that I didn't have it. He said that I'd had what he called a metabolic shift, and from now on, for the rest of my life, I'd have to wake up every morning and ask whether I wanted to be fat or not. This didn't go over well with me! But I needed health insurance, and they refused to insure me because of my PCOS diagnosis, so I acquiesced and had him write a letter to them telling them that I didn't have it.

And then I got mad, and then I got stuck.

I gained more weight, reaching my max about a year and a half ago. It took me a while to process what he'd said and the reality that he was wrong in one way -- this wasn't anything that I had chosen -- but right in another -- there was nothing I could do about it, it wasn't going to go back to normal, and I WOULD have to make the decision every day whether I wanted to be fat or not.

I made one more last-ditch effort last January with another doctor to see whether there was a medical reason for my gain. There was one hormone that was "off" -- the levels were too high -- but my doctor wanted another doctor to see me, and because he's a specialist in the field, his screening procedures are pretty rigorous, and then last Valentine's Day, I broke my leg. So. I was unable to even walk for 6 months of 2008, which SUCKED. Luckily, my body decided to give me a break, and I only gained 8 pounds over the year. However, I was really unhappy with being where I was, physically.

The weight had come on so quickly, so I just expected it to somehow go away quickly. And I kept expecting it for 1, 2, 3, 4...9 years at this point. Even now, eating 1650 calories a day and burning 3500 calories a week, I'm losing maybe a little under 7 pounds a month.

But I had to accept that although I didn't cause the problem, I had to solve the problem. And here I am. It sucks, and I'm still a little pissed off about it, but it was this or lose the rest of my self-respect, my husband, and, frankly, the ability to move. It was NOT fun trying to go up and down stairs on crutches with a very badly broken leg swinging around. It was even less fun to hear people muse that perhaps my weight had to do with my breaking my leg.

I still get pissed off that I have to struggle SO HARD to lose even a modicum of weight, when I didn't get to even have any "fun" in putting most of it on (100 just...appeared...in 18 months; 40 was through depression, frustration, food, and lack of movement over the next 9 years), but that's the truth of the matter, and there's NOTHING I or anyone else, or the miracles of science for that matter, can do about it.

Geez, now I'm all pissy! I try not to dwell on my past specifically because I get mad about it, and the last time I got mad about it, I sat around and ate pizza because if my stupid body was going to decide to be fat without any input from me, I might as well enjoy the ride! So...no more anger, just determination...breathe in...breathe out...breathe in...

(ETA: Whoa. Sorry for the screed!)

Walrus, you need a hug. (((((Walrus)))))