We all have our "fat stories" and most of us tend to blame it on ourselves, but often, we can single out a few things that played significant roles in making us fat.

What are yours?

Mine are:
-Eating a 2,000-2,500 (and perhaps even 3,000 if I ate a lot of fast food) calorie diet with very little exercise - I'd work out maaaaybe twice a week, then that twice a week turned into twice a month.

-Then, I started riding my bike ten miles a day, but I still kept eating 2,000-2,500 calories of pure crap.

-Being under a lot of stress: I was working something like 60 hours a week for VERY meager pay (only a little more than I'd get working at McDonalds, for a WHOLE lot more work and brain power) and the promise of commission and a raise (neither happened, I was just suckered into working for a shady boss and afraid to leave because the job market here is beyond awful). I gained a majority of my weight (around 80%) at that job.

-Depression. My depression was very situational (some people are clinically depressed, I'm not), but I blame it because it made me ungodly sluggish.

-Quitting eating disorders. I know it's paradoxical to quit one unhealthy habit and begin another, but I've been told that once you stop eating disordered behavior, you gain weight very quickly, and that it actually can mess up your metabolism (though in a minor sense).

Then, I stopped eating fast food entirely and quit that job, but I still didn't lose that weight because my lifestyle was relatively sedentary.

Well lets see, got married... got comfortable gained 40 lbs..... then got pregnant and gained 40 more.... stay at home mom on night shift for 4 years, didnt even try to loose..... then when my son went to preschool i got a part time office job in town..... my mother lives in town, so i would go to her house for lunch..... Kentucky fried everything!... that didnt help the weight! I wanted it off but it hurt her feelings when i didnt eat her heart attack in a bowl ( she should know she had one).

Now im a wahm, homeschooling... and i got my head on straight.... i have lost 30lbs... but i realy need to up the exersice, its already hot and sweaty out and sometimes i just dont want to do it! But doing good on cals!

I blame it on alot of reasons....

1) pregnancy. 3 kids.
2) sedatary work places.
3) friends in the office who love to go out to eat instead of eating in.
4) (ex) husband who didn't want to babysit while i went to the gym.
5) and just plain out being clueless about how much to eat, what not to eat and just plain out being clueless about my weight.

I think with me it's definitely emotional eating.
I gain when I'm unhappy or stressed.
I eat to calm down and feel fulfilled.
And when I'm unhappy I don't have the energy to do sports or even go out for a walk.
Alcohol and potato chips are my best friends when I feel down...
And putting on weight just makes me feel unhappier.
So I'm working on breaking the vicious circle

I have to put mine on how I was raised and stress. I wasn't allowed to do anything strenuous as a child because it scared my mom, being that I was born with heart problems which required surgery when I was a child. She wouldn't let me lift things, would yell at me actually if I did. Wouldn't let me do anything if she saw my face get red. Heck, even the phys ed teacher made me sit down if my really really light fair complexion face started going red from a little exercise. ::sigh::

Add to that, my family loves eating out...A LOT. And they believe in their money's worth. So buffets are the usual meal. Plus, the cooking alone. Mom does just as she was taught...a stick of butter in everything. Half a stick to one can of peas is her motto. They can't just eat the food, they have to "doctor it up" first. They have to dump in as many high calorie laden junk items as they can. Can't just make a can of buttered biscuits. Nooooo. Gotta put another huge pat of butter on top of all of them...they're not buttery enough.

Add to that some major problems with my family dynamics. Then I went through abandonment and divorce right after having my daughter and ended up with nowhere to go but staying with my parents til I could get on my feet. So the pregnancy pounds found some company.

Then it was working 40 hours a week and going to school 3 nights a week while raising a daughter alone. I didn't take any time out for me.

I made a lot of excuses over the years, but ultimately it is very simple: I was a heavy person because I made really bad food choices, every day.

• I was a boredom eater and I could eat when I wasn't hungry.
• I didn't have a good "stop" point and would eat to the point of being painfully full.
• Sugary/carby foods triggered me to eat more and more, making it difficult to eat a single serving of anything like chips, crackers, cookies, cake, baked goods, ice cream
• I was deliberately, purposefully blind to the calorie count of foods, I didn't want to know
• I wanted to "reward" myself - bad day at work? big dinner out. promotion at work? big dinner out. Had to work late? Taco Bell and ice cream.
• I always wanted the biggest size of everything.
• I ate in secret.
• I loved fast food, I loved to order pizza, I loved french fries.

After all those years of telling myself I was "big boned" or I was heavy because my dad was heavy and it was genetics and I was just a "big girl", it all turned out to be rubbish. I am a tiny person, not a big bone anywhere. Now that I don't eat junk and make reasonable food choices and I am unflinchingly honest about everything I eat (bad and good), I am a thin person. I know that I will remain a thin person as long as I make good decisions 90%+ of the time.

I did not have any problem maintaining a "normal" wt. through high school. I was very atheletic at that time. Once I went away to college and learned all about junk food, tons of pizza, beer, cheeseburgers, KFC, Taco Bell , donuts and such became my way of life. I became more and more sedentary and the lbs. packed on. Throw in the stress of getting my degree, bad relationships and having a couple kids to raise on my own and my wt. skyrocketed. I finally just totally quit weighing myself, I knew I was fat and didn't want to see the number. Finally, I became very sick and was put on Prednisone and eventually I landed at 234 lbs. I blame my wt. totally on me, even though I've had some rough times, I was never force fed.

Trying to remember everything in the right order...

- Latch-key kid, wasn't allowed to go out and play with other kids after school, therefore spent time in front of the TV or reading while eating pains au chocolat. (Way to build good habits, huh.)

- I lost weight in college (that was the freshman -15 in my case ), but slowly got it back when I met my ex: the insidious tendency to start eating the same quantities as him, of course. Fortunately, he was quite the sporty type, and he was the one who actually got me into lifting weights, playing squash and scuba-diving, so it contributed to me not gaining too much weight.

- Along the road, I got a job and had more money than your average student on a meager State grant, therefore could eat more often at McDonald's and the likes (in France, that food isn't very cheap). I also started working at home, which, all things considered, isn't my style at all; I would nibble all day long, and was also alone at home all day long, so I gained very unhealthy habits, such as eating a box of cookies instead of a normal lunch, eating two bowls of cereals instead of one, etc. (I still have to fight those bad habits at times nowadays, but fortunately it's not too often.)

- Exercise: I never was the very sporty type, but I remember that during my first years of college, I would walk every day (20 minutes just to go to school, twice or four times a day). Later on, when I still could, I would bike 20 minutes to work five days a week, four times a day (going home for lunch). Then we moved to the country and I was fully dependent on the car, so bleh. I would go to the gym at times with my BF, but he didn't have much time to do so due to his work, and I didn't have a car. Then finally I had a car as well, but driving 20 minutes to go to the gym was annoying. I never was very committed, plus I had odd reactions, like going to the weights room for one hour to work out, but refusing to eat 100m if I could avoid it. That was, uh, dumb, to say the least.

All in all, bad, unhealthy habits and a less-than-active life at time were very, very likely my downfalls. (I refuse to blame it on genes, because I honestly did 95% of the 'work' myself here. )

A nasty combination of being a binge eater, a boredom eater, and pretty much just lazy.

I'd love to be able to point to pregnancies, or traumatic life events but I'm pretty much just fat and lazy. Working on it, though.

I went to the grocery store and somehow cookies, pies , cakes, ice cream, candy bars and donuts happened to fall off the shelves into my grocery cart,not noticing they were in my cart when I went to the checkout stand I accidently paid for them and accidently took them home.Of course when I got home I didn't want to be wasteful so I had to eat this stuff. This happened many times. I was never able to understand how this happened.

Hmmm...lets see. I've always been "overweight" since about age 5. I attribute it to never having a limit on how much food I was eating, and what mom cooked wasn't "bad" but it also wasn't that healthy. We did eat our fruits and veggies though!

That, and I didn't want to be in sports so my mom didn't make me. In fact, in high school I knew I was fat and didn't want to do gym class because of it so my mom got me a doctors note for my migraines saying that physical stuff could give me a headache so I didn't have to do it if I felt I couldn't. Which, obviously, I never did anything. I didn't do much exercise in my childhood until I reached 13 and then I lost quite a bit of weight..like 50 lbs and looked pretty good, I was probably only overweight, not obese. But with highschool I gained a lot.

I HAVE to move a lot and eat right...there is no ifs ands or butts about it. This is the way I need to be for the rest of my life.

I was looking at a BMI chart and I could actually be 128 lbs and be healthy! I've always been told I had big bones...but I've never been small enough to really find that out....so that is something I'm looking forward to on this quest...if I do, then I'm looking at maybe 140 being my stopping point. If I have normal bone structure...I would REALLY like to at LEAST get down in the 130's if not 128. Wow...that's a long ways away. Oh well, 10 lbs at a time!

i've always been naturally slender, and before college i hadn't fully grown into a woman, and could eat ANYTHING i wanted without gaining weight. i gained weight in college, but managed to get it off.

however studying abroad in spain, living the spanish life style, of huge meals (my host mom served me a plate that could probably feed 3 people!), baguette bread at EVERY meal, drinking, going out, drunken munchies, taking the spanish "siesta" (nap) after lunch for 2-3 hours, laying out on the beach, drinking soda/coffee with sugar and whole milk (because i didn't want to pay 2 Euros for a tiny bottle of water) and not working out for 5 months did me in.


*hits head* i should've known better. lol. at least i'm fixing it now! heh

for me it was the computer.... i would sit and get adicted to the sims2 and play on it non stop and got my mother to bring up takeaways (chineese, idians, fish n chips, mc donalds... you name it anything prosessed and fatty... i ate it!).
its not as if i just got fat overnight ... the onl times ive ever been slim was wen i was a baby (i was quite small) and 3 years ago wen i was praciticaly anorexic weighing 50lbs but i soon gained the weight back... and more .
ive always been fat for my age and right now im just chillin being chubby and hopefully in a few months or how long it takes ill be slim and toned xxx

Wow, lots of reasons for me, too.

- I, too, also quit my eating disorder. I weighed 125 (mainly bulemic) and because I lost weight so quickly (went from 170 to 125 in four months), I developed gallstones and had to have my gallbladder taken out.

- Once I lost the ability to digest food like I used to from removing my gallbladder, I put on about 25 lbs. Also met my husband and got comfortable - we had a poor diet in the first few years we dated.

- Went on birth control and got depressed, stopped caring about myself.

- Commuted 2 hrs for work every day, so I spent at least 10 hours a day on my butt, then I would come home and veg out in front of the TV or computer until bedtime.

- I always choose convenience, such as having pizza delivered instead of picking it up or even cooking a healthy dinner for that matter. Wanting to hire movers instead of doing it myself. I pay extra to do WHATEVER instead of just doing it myself.

I hit 300 lbs at age 14 so actually I don't remember a lot about my weight gain other than I know I had an eating disorder (binger) from a very young age. I was always active in that I did a lot of activities as a young child but still was always chubby. I would walk, swim, run, dance, etc. My weight gain seemed to grow exponentially as I entered puberty and was 300 lbs before I entered high school. My mom was always dragging me to doctors about my weight, ever since age 5 but there was nothing they could really do other than tell her to watch my food and make sure I was active. I saw nutritionalists as well but still didn't help.

So, what happened beyond 300 lbs? I went to college, lost weight initially but then gained that weight back and more by not being as active and also just not watching what I ate. By the time I graduated from college, I was around 330-340.

Within 2 years, I went from 330 to 360 because I bought a car and no longer walked everywhere and also got a desk job and also didn't watch what I ate.

When I reached 360, I decided it was time to do something about my weight but unfortunately it took 4-5 years before I would actually successfully lose weight and maintain that loss.