Was born with hirschsprung's disease but wasn't diagnosed until I was 17. I spent my whole childhood/majority of teen years not going to the bathroom for 7+ months at a time.

As a result I never ate because it felt like I would die...I was malnourished, physically deformed (distention), anemic, and under weight. After being diagnosed I was cleaned out and given a colostomy bag. Sooo, for the first time in like ever I could eat without being sick. On top of that the doctors made me drink weight gaining shakes. A year went past and they corrected my intestines and removed my colostomy, but the weight unfortunately added up fairly quickly and I've been fat since!

I was always big and most of my family was obese. Various addictions run in my family and the big gain in weight was the combination of my food binging and boozing.

There was a period in my life where I'd easily drink 10-15 pints of beer at the bar and consume a large pizza afterwards. This was a near daily occurance.

Getting a handle on the drinking behaviors was a key step to changing my eating habits.

A combination of stress, depression and uhh a love for fried, greasy, sweet, sugary, high calorie foods.

I was starved as a child. Starved for food and affection. My mom became sick with cancer when I was 6 and was in the hospital often, my dad would leave me alone for hours without food in the house. I ate mustard and ketchup on crackers.
When I went into foster care I was forced to keep a rape and constant molestation a secret.
When I ran away at 12 I was kidnapped and held for 4 days by two men and forced into prostitution, and constantly beaten. I had 2 meals during this time. when I was on the streets i often ate out of garbage cans at public parks.

I grew up with a skewed view of food, sex, comfort and love. Food was withheld until I performed a certain way, food was a reward for being "good". Food was a struggle to get.

No one ever talked with me about my mothers death or being molested by my father. Or the other rapes in foster care or in New York. I felt invisible and had horrible rage issues which as I got older got worse. I lashed out at everyone. I got into a relationship with a drunk/drug user and I used drugs too. Mostly to just numb the pain and escape the rage for awhile. To forget things.
I hated myself, I hated my relationship, I was thin as I would walk everywhere. I rode my bike when I could not walk. I usually would only eat one meal a day. I avoided food.
After I stopped doing drugs, I turned to food. My relationship sucked. My BF started calling me fat and horrible names and cheating on me. I swore I would never do drugs again and I turned to food. I remember feeling really bad one day after a terrible fight with him and him screaming at me for getting fat ( I was about 160) and I was in the kitchen when he stormed out. I thought "FAT? Alright you s.o.b I'll show you fat' And I started smearing butter on saltine crackers and shoving them in my mouth crying so hard I almost choked.

I had 2 children by this time and was in the circle of violence with him.
Food became my "safe" drug and I just kept on from there, holding in my rage, turning it all on myself and stuffing all those feelings down with food. All the anger at all the people in my life, all the loneliness, all the guilt I had because I should have been a better mom...it all got stuffed down. And as I got fatter, people stopped interacting with me, I became invisible. And I liked it that way. Love hurt. I wanted to crawl into myself and hide and getting fat was a way of escaping. People stopped expecting things out of me. Men left me alone and I did not have to perform for anyone.

My life is so much better now. Filled with love and spirituality. Along the way I have discovered I am insulin resistant and I am low carbing. And I have been in therapy dealing with my past.

(I know this is way too much and I almost deleted it. But this is the first time I have ever seen my words typed out about all this. Maybe my words can help someone else with any of these issues. And I have taken a vow of honesty.)

I take after my mom and dad... Dad eats like a starving wolverine, but hikes and chops wood and is super fit. Mom doesn't eat much, and hates exercising so they're both regular sized folks, a bit of middle-age spread but nothing serious. I got the best of both worlds LOL Eat like a starving wolverine and sit on my a$$ for 20 years, and boom there it is LOL

Wow. Oh wow. You are such an amazing human being for getting through this and working on dealing with what happened to you. Keep moving forward- there are amazing things ahead for you.

What contributed to my obesity? Aliens. They came down from space and one morning I woke up and I was FAT!


Okay, just kidding. Here's my story:

Childhood: Being told to "clean my plate" and being rewarded with food for doing something well. Not having access to sweets, thus sweets became something to be coveted instead of viewed objectively.

Teens: Lowest teen weight: 140. People said I was too thin and told me to eat more. So I did. I ate. My boyfriend (now my husband) made it easy. Fast food and bad eating habits. 200 pounds upon graduating from high school.

Early 20s: Ate, ate, ate. NO exercise to speak of. Ate lots of very rich foods, lots of fast food, lots of restaurant food. Binged on junk food, since I was never allowed to have it before. Ballooned to 275. Has no idea what portion control was, since I was always told to "clean my plate".

mid 20s: lost all the weight (or nearly all of it).

mid 20s-now (33): gained 160 pounds for a final weight of 294. WHY? I had no idea how to balance work and life. After losing all the weight I got a big promotion and started working 50+ hours a week. All exercise ceased and I went back to my fast-food ways. Got pregnant weighing 275, lost some weight afterward, gained it back due to overeating and lack of exercise.

I am now a stay-at-home-mom and so worried about what will happen when I go back to work next month, considering that work-life balance is not something I handle very well.

Being underweight at birth and fed by a panicking first-time mother in case I pined and died.
Being replaced by a baby brother, to whom they gave my feeding bottle.
Being made to clear a plate; being stuffed with food as a sign of love, comfort, sorrow, any known emotion but at the same time being taught that being fat was somewhere between distasteful and disgraceful.

Despite twice losing significant amounts of weight, not taking responsibility for keeping it off, because the world was scarier thinner.

Despite realizing that however much my childhood affected me it wasn't done on purpose and it was a long time ago.

Eating too much.

I'm very much an emotional eater. It doesn't matter what the emotion is, whether happy, sad, bored, lonely (whatever) I use food to comfort myself. It's always the wrong type of foods and too much of it!

Being paraded by my mother in my underwear as a moderately overweight 8 year old infront of a panel of doctors, who said I needed to go on a diet. The spiral of diet versus binge eating began then, and until now hasn't stopped.
I toppped 300 lbs at my highest and have been to 154lbs.
I blame my mother for my ridiculous view of my body. If I had been left alone I would have been relatively normal and would not have obsessed about food, my weight and attached the value that I do now to my size.
Wow, what a confrontational thread !

"I was starved as a child"

Oh my goodness - what a realization here. I was starved as a child. I WAS STARVED AS A CHILD.

I always looked at it as occurrences that happened later, but I think this may be the very bottom line. Wait, that's not true, I did have an incident when I was 10 that definitely contributed to my weight - but STILL the bottom line may very well be that - I was starved as a child.

I have a fast food addiction. I actually like to cook but I'm lazy and would rather get in the car and go get something to eat. Sad but true. I've also fallen into the pattern of treating myself with food. Hubby gets promoted at work? Let's go out to eat to celebrate!! Hubby doesn't get promoted at work? Let's go out to eat to console ourselves. It's a bad, bad habit to get into. Add in two pregnancies where I discovered maternity jeans that stretch to kingdom come and all bets were off. I gained 60 pounds with my first child, and 40 with the second. I never lost any of it. And so that's where I am now. I think it was Maya Angelou who said "When you know better, you do better." That's where I'm at now. In hind sight I see my mistakes and I'm trying to change now. I don't want this pattern to repeat with my girls.

Depression & a horrible relationship. Looking back, I feel as though my ex-spouse kept me fat. He'd prevent me from eating healthy and working out. I was so depressed I didn't know any better at the time.

For me - it was a combination of college and ignorance. I gained 100 lbs in 5 years. I graduated from high school at 150 and went away to college. There were buffets for every meal. Then I learned to drink, so then came the fourth meal at 2 am. And I have always had a hearty appetite.

I always thought in order to be thin or in order to lose weight, I had to starve myself. I wish I had known better in college before I gained all 100 lbs.

At least I know now.

As a child - I blame the adults in my life - parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, family friends - for allowing me to become obese. I now look at obesity in children as a form of child abuse (unless of course there is some actual medical cause and the parents are doing all they can to fight it). I remember in 3rd grade being weighed by the nurse and then lying to all of my classmates about the results. They had all been in the 70s and 80s. I was 117. I told them I weighed 99 pounds. I also remember at 10 years old having to buy double digit size jeans. There was one brand I could fit into a 7 in, so I mostly wore that brand, but that didn't make me feel any better.

As a teen - I'm still blaming my mother at this point. Once I was old enough to want to lose weight and ask for help, she started helping me by getting me onto fad diets and forcing me to walk circles around the outside of the house. No nutritionist, no healthy food plans, no unembarrassing exercise (can you imagine a 13 year old with the neighbors watching her walk her chubby self around the house 100 times?), no common sense. There were a couple times that she even allowed and encouraged me to go on meal replacement plans as a teen. I began high school in a size 14, I don't know what my weight was. I managed through the use of fad diets and bad plans to keep between a 14 and a 16 through high school, mostly the 14s. I don't know what my weight was.
At 13 I was raped, I also think of that as a contributing factor to my weight through my teens. My mother did not react well to it (called me a slut, said I was lying, it was horrible) and I didn't get any therapy for it at all until I was 15 and then not much and that wasn't her reason for taking me anyhow. I had gotten my period while at school and called her to ask her to bring me tampons. She got angry at me for not being prepared. I had nothing with me because I had just stopped a period less than a week before and had no reason to think I would need anything (I later discovered that the crazy periods were part of my PCOS). She put me in the psych ward and told them I was threatening suicide. I had to stay for 3 days. During those 3 days I finally got a little bit of therapy about the rape and I was basically told that my mom was crazy, not me. At 17 I made a friend whose father was a psychiatrist. At that point I actually got therapy for lots of the things that had happened to me, including the rape at 13.

As an adult - I was a spoiled brat. I knew what to do to lose weight. I had learned about proper nutrition and exercise by then, but I was spoiled and didn't want to. My mother died from lung cancer when I was 21. I married my best friend the next month, big mistake. We were both grieving and we were better off as friends, the divorce was final 9 months to the day after we got married. Can you say stress eating? I was firmly in the 16s by the end of all that. I then ended up in an abusive relationship with a guy who likes his women fat, so I got even larger. I got up to 205 and a tight size 18 by the time I was 25. After I left him I finally ended up with a decent guy (my ex-husband). He helped me get over the issues from the abusive guy and some of the things I was still dealing with from childhood. He also didn't care whether I was fat or thin. I was able to lose a little bit of weight, but it was hard. I was then diagnosed with PCOS which explained why it was hard. My spoiled brat kicked in again and I let PCOS become an excuse. My ex and I became ex (we wanted different things in life, but I still consider him a wonderful man and we are still friendly) and I began a relationship with my current husband. He has his own issues with food due to a hungry childhood and I allowed him to overfeed me for a while. I put back on the weight I had lost with the ex plus 40 new pounds to reach a new high of 245 and size 22 jeans.

On February 17, 2009 I started again trying to lose weight. I was doing really well and had lost 25 pounds by April 8. I decided to take a break for Easter because I love Cadbury eggs. Well, my one day break turned into 2, which turned into another visit with my spoiled brat side, which turned into an emergency room trip at the beginning of July because I suddenly couldn't hear. The hospital found sugar in my urine during that trip. On July 3 I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. That was it. I finally grew up and told the spoiled brat to take a hike. July 3, 2009 I was 230.6 pounds and a size 20 jeans. Today I am sitting at 166.6 due to TOM and a size 9/10 and I see no reason why I won't reach my goal of size 4 jeans. It is horrible that it took being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and being scared I would die to make me do something about it, but I am glad something finally woke me up. As an added bonus, my husband is also learning a healthier attitude toward food.