Some people never get the motivation to even try. There's no "easy" way.

For me? I'm sick of being fat. I've always been overweight. I had my son 13 months ago... and I want him to grow up with a mom who has energy. I want more kids, and I don't want to get deeper and deeper into being overweight with each pregnancy... so deep that I can't dig myself out. I want to look back at pictures and smile, not cringe. I want to walk around the zoo without needing to take a break.

I've got my motivation. But I can't give you yours. You have to decide that you're fed up, that you're done, and you have to commit. When you reach your goal - celebrate... but don't quit. If you revert back to your former ways, you'll become the former you.

Thank you so much for your responses. They are making me think about a lot of things.

I've been overweight since about fifth grade. It is ironic, because I remember kids calling me fat back then but I wasn't. Not until I self medicated with food that did make me fat. Then sometime in my teens PCOS developed. I've spent the vast majority of my life overweight. The smallest I've ever been in a size 16 (maybe a 14 these days with size changes).

My weight has held me back from so many things. I always got the supporting roles in musicals and theater because I didn't fit the body type of a pretty young lead. I became a music performance major in college, but one of the reasons I quit was that my weight was going to be a hurdle for any performance career. I've never worn a bikini. I've very rarely been able to shop in the "normal" shopping sections of stores. I started date late because guys weren't interested in me, because of my looks and/or my lack of confidence because of my weight.

I've never been happy with being overweight, but it is something I've resigned myself to over the years. I've proven to myself that I can lose weight if I'm incredibly dedicated, but I can't seem to keep that dedication up long term. I know I would HAVE to keep it up because I have PCOS and my body is used to being overweight. I gain weight back quickly when I let things slide.

Honestly, I don't even want to be really skinny. Unless I kept up an anorexia type obsession I couldn't be. If I could just get down to a size 14/16 and maintain I would be beyond ecstatic and happy with the way I looked. My hope is as well that that it would improve all my health issues (I don't even want to think about the fact it might not.)

I've lost and gained weight multiple times over the years. My triggers? If I think about it among all the reasons I've mentioned having to buy new LARGER clothing has been a common trigger for me. I'd gain weight and just refuse to buy larger clothes and start dieting. But this year? I gave up and bought clothes. It almost felt like a defeat. With clothing sizes 14 to 24 in my closet, the clothing thing won't sustain me long term.

I know I'm self medicating with food. I have for a very long time. I can feel physiological cravings beyond hunger. This is going to sound horrible, but do any of you ever wish you had a drug problem instead? I can't just go cold turkey on food. I have to eat to live. Repairing a broken food relationship is a lot tougher than having to give something up entirely.

I've been up and down all my life. I'll lose 50 pounds and gain 60. My last effort I lost 110 pounds and gained 140. Heck, I was BORN over 10 pounds!

I think I'm just a fat girl at heart. We all have battles in life... and this is mine. <wry smile>

there arnt many threads that i will read every single reply too but this one i have. mainly because its making me feel better about my regain lol.
growing up i saw always the 'skinny' one, the one everyone else was jealous of, the one the boys fancied.....all that changed when i had my 1st son aged 17 and moed out of my parents house in 2005. i ballooned from 8 stone to 14 stone in a matter of months. it was all so quick i didnt see it going on!
since then ive been dieting. 'yeah ill loose wight and be the confident girl i used to be'....im still waiting
weight watchers, slimming world. you name it ive done it. it wasnt until aug 2010 that somthing clicked. i was in my 20's, my hayday...what was i doing! i joined the gym and cut back (mainly living on soups) and went from 15 stone 10lbs (highest ever) to 12 stone 6lbs and was feeling pretty good about myself. so much so i thought i deserved a treat, a cream cake, a pizza, a chinese.....fastforward to dec 2012 and i was back up to 13 stone 12lbs....gutted
reading this has made me realise that im not the only one. yeah maybe i havnt regained a whole lot but im still just as gutted.
ive lost 3lbs so far this year and i plan to loose another 20

we can do it!!

To the original poster's question about addiction. I have said only half joking that work stress makes me it and if I was a drinker instead of eater I would have already been in rehab. Not really funny I guess, but either one is not a good way to deal with feelings. Alcohol seems to be a more socially acceptable vice from my experience. Recently i was with friends I had not seen for two years since they moved and they drank at lunch, stopped for a drink at a bar, and then drank again after our outing (no alcohol served there) and then had 2-3 more at dinner before we left them. Yet I wanted dessert but felt uncomfortable getting it because I was the only obese person. Then they continued their downtown pub crawl for a couple more hours before walking to their hotel. I'm not judging their wild night as much as I look back on it and it makes me angry that I felt I would be judged for eating sweets when the other 4 were drunk. And it was in my head, they never mentioned my weight. Why did I think being drunk was more acceptable than being fat? Sorry to vent so much on your post.
I hope you find your enough, I too am still looking.

You say you self-medicate with food. Have you worked on resolving the problems that inspire the urge to self-medicate?

In my experience, we have two choices:

1) wait for enough to be enough... i.e., hospital stay, heart attack, stuck in a wheelchair, can't fit in any clothes, etc. In the meantime, just eat and wait to feel like we are ready to start.

2) start anyway.

Today is all we've got. All we can do is put the food down right now and grab on right now.

I find that what I'm self medicating with food is actually the fact that I'm so overweight, along with the cravings and urges that arise as habit from so many years of overeating and binging.

I haven't got up and 'done it' as far as losing weight, but I'm always fighting it. I'm always learning and always trying. That says something at least, and I never lose hope that eventually I will be losing consistently and be able to keep it off. My goal is, in fact, to keep it off. I lost 60ish lbs in highschool by being anorexic. Ever since then my relationship with food has been crappy.

Today I have a much better knowledge of health and fitness, but there's something in me that's holding me back. Some things that have been helping have been spirituality, meditation, taking care of myself for reasons other than weight loss, trying new physical activities...

About two years ago I was a hollow shell. I was addicted to drugs and I had a drinking problem. I had been doing drugs since I was 13. When I finally pulled myself out of that dark place my weight was 220 and it kept climbing. I spent some time after getting clean trying to lose weight the wrong ways but what I didn't realize was that I was still a shell. I didn't know anything about myself. I was a stranger in my own body. My identity had always been drugs, alcohol and music. Those three things don't make a person.

So the last few years I've been doing the whole 'finding myself' thing that people scoff at. It sounds silly but I think, for me, it had to be done. Sure I gained weight while I did it but ultimately it's making my like more fufilling. Now I'm trying to get healthy because I love myself. Before I just thought it was something I had to do because girls are supposed to be thin.

I've grown so much in the last two years and I do hope this next year brings a loss but I absolutely do not regret these past two years. I feel I've found the strength in me to keep going and keep trying, even though I haven't lost.

Why would I sit there and not do anything? I wake up everyday and ask myself what do I need to do to be healthy today? Sometimes I am able to control myself and other times I'm not. I just hope that the more I do that the better at it I will get.

So maybe you need some soul-searching? Or maybe not.

Exactly one year ago, I was pregnant for the first time. It was already a stressful time after dealing with a death in the family along with some ongoing legal issues, and I wasn't handling the chaos very well. While I'd spent years either slowly losing or at least maintaining, I very quickly gained about 25 pounds.

Then I had a miscarriage.

I set some time aside to mourn, to heal. Then I put myself in the planning stages of mentally revamping my lifestyle. I already knew what to do, I was even working hard and lost a good amount that previous summer, but I felt I needed to give myself a lot of convincing before I officially started over. I planned ahead for my "reboot" to be on March 5th and started recording all my meals when that day arrived, stubbornly reminding myself that I need to eat right and take care of myself.

I do want to have a baby someday. And I need to have enough energy for all that comes with raising a family. I certainly didn't have that energy last year and it saddens me. There are so many other things (i.e. wanting to be smaller, wear nice clothes, feel confident) but wanting to be a mother will always be what keeps me going.

Yes, I have. The older I get the more I try to be self aware and tackle any issues I'm battling. Even with that we all encounter stress in our life and deal with that in different ways. Mine just happens to food.

From experience it also seems like the type of bad foods I had been eating seem to reinforce my cravings and bad habits. There seems to be more going on physically than me just turning to food because of stress. The wrong types of food seem to set off a horrible cycle. I don't have any scientific data on my own body to back this up, but I have plenty of personal observations of this.

I do want to thank everyone who responded for their comments, commiseration, and/or support. I really needed to get all of that out and take time to evaluate myself and what I have and haven't been doing.

I'm happy to say that I did start making some positive changes in my life. I've lost 12 pounds already. Yay! (If only weight came off as quickly all along as it can in the beginning!)

Reaching out to others even when you aren't ready to change yet does help. I'm very thankful for this community and your personal support.


This time I'm not being as strict about counting every calorie exactly, but I'm being very mindful of what I'm eating and the caloric value of foods. The time that I spent with strict calorie counting has helped me sooooooo much. It helps me to make better choices without as much effort. Even though I'm sorry that I gained back the weight I lost (and a bit more), I still learned a lot from the experience of me being so disciplined while getting rid of the weight the last time. I'm surrounding myself with lower calorie options, searching for lower calorie swaps, trying out new recipes, and injecting a bit of exercise into my life. I'm trying to find a way to just live my life in a better, healthier way without becoming obsessed with results. I know I likely won't lose the weight as quickly, but finding a better way to live my life in the long term is the true goal.

Love it... Gonna do the spa treatment thing for myself! And something extra special if I can meet my summer challenge

I agree I just started (again) but this time I am keeping track of what I am eating online and seeing it in black and white makes a huge difference. Like for me I noticed that planning ahead makes a impact in how many calories (as much as 500) I eat in a day.

This is such a great thread. I just read through it and found myself nodding to a lot of the responses. Wonderful insights from everyone, and you can see that what is "enough" is different for each of us.

Renwomin, it sounds like you're of to a great start. Just being mindful is a huge step..I know for me the times when I get in trouble are when I stop paying attention.

Try to post on 3fc daily, even if you have a bad day. It's another thing that keeps me mindful, and there is incredible support here, and a lot of wisdom.

I did not read but just the first few posts, so forgive me if I'm repeating things that have already been mentioned. I have been as discouraged as you seem in your first post. I had gained and lost so many times that the last time I re-gained I just let myself stay fat (or get fatter) for a few years. I didn't have the energy or motivation to do anything about my weight. In a sense, I just wanted to hide in the house, eat, and read.

But one day as I was on the computer doing work (I do a lot of my work from the computer), I realized that I would grow old and probably hunched sitting in a chair in front of my computer screen. I didn't want to deteriorate like that, and lo and behold, I read this thing on the Internet about the "tread desk," created by a doctor from the Mayo clinic (Google it). I got so excited about it because I am a born multi-tasker, and I am short on time, so to have to devote 1 hour plus a day to exercise ultimately never worked out for me. The tread-desk, though, held the promise of killing two birds w/ one stone: I could do my work AND work out,too. I couldn't afford the actual Tread-desk, so I bought a treadmill off Craigslist and coaxed my husband into making a tread-desk for me (and it did take some coaxing; he thought it was crazy).

I go into such detail to explain the above because that was the first step into my road to losing all the weight I wanted to and then some. Of course, the tread desk was only the first component to my changes, but what I discovered is something that I had read numerous times but that had never seemed to sink into my thick skull until that point: We must all find what works FOR US. I can read all the forums I want about what worked for someone else and that will help to a point as I may try something that seems interesting/promising. But the reason all those previous times failed and this time didn't is that I found something that works for me. And the same goes for my diet plan. I found something that works FOR ME.

I really believe that so many of us re-gain weight because we are trying to fit our unique personalities into a plan that works for someone with a different personality/lifestyle. By doing that, the plan we choose will always be uncomfortable, and we're likely to quit it and regain the weight.

It may help to take stock of what changes you can live with and what changes you cannot. Don't judge yourself as you're making your list. For instance, I cannot live with the thought of just eating sweets on weekends or on special occasions, so I had to find a way to be able to eat treats like that regularly and still keep off my weight. Others might frown on that or tell me that I have a problem or say that I'm not eating healthy or whatever. That's okay; that's their opinion. I'm the one that has to live my plan, so I'm going to do what works for me.

Sorry to be so long-winded. I wish you the best in whatever you decide.

Yay indeed!