We are all doing so amazing and are all so focused on getting to our goals and learning to eat right again. Is it important though in this journey to understand how we got there. I think in part, there is a genetic factor to be predisposed to gaining weight easier than others, metabolism, etc.

My own self reflection, i think i have always treated food as a reward or treat or soothing for my emotions and also i would eat from boredom.

Food was like a friend, a comfort to me when i was depressed or alone. And after i would eat like 10 cookies, i would be upset with myself for doing it, but i would go eat something again. What is up with that!! I dont understand that.

I am almost finding it to easy to be on this diet, because of the prepackaged foods and having no carb addiction anymore, but i keep worrying about after....will i go back to reaching for food and finding comfort in it.

Does anyone feel the same. I tell myself all the right things now, like i will replace my cravings with exercise, but will i really do it. What about the maintainers, have you changed your eating habits forever. I havent even gotten to maintenance and in the back of my head, i keep thinking about it.

Kelly,

We must have been posting at the same time. I just posted in the The Maintainer's thread about this very thing.

Lynn

I am a emotional eater, I use food as a reward, stress relief etc, But I see now the food I used as a reward has caused me alot of stress about my weight. What a vicious cycle, what was I thinking

I think that most of mine is depression... I tend to pick some really crappy guys, but dont want to be alone so I choose to put up with the abuse... it kills my family to watch me go through all of this. but the last 8 years, I have really packed on the pounds, because I always went to food as comfort, probably because food never judged me! I remember I used to get a dozen of those sugar cookies with the huge globs of frosting. and used to eat almost all of them... I hope that I will never look back on what I was just 2-3 months ago.

I know for me it was definetly due to wanting to feel tat comfort you get from having something sweet and satisfying. When I was happy, I ate, when I was sad, I ate. But now I'm trying to learn how to replace food with something positive.

Oh my God! I can't find words to tell you how much I got emotional while reading this! It is the story of my life (before getting married), I used to be a magnet for all the bad guys, and I did not want to be alone, and I used to meet a loser after a loser, I started doubting myself and I thought that I was not meant for happiness....

Funny story: my old neighbour once wanted to introduce me to this guy whom she thought we'd hit it off, she made us a nice get together with dinner and drinks, once he showed, I was kind of not really attracted to him since he was as tall as he was wide with no conversation or etiquette skills at all. Two days after my neighbor's get together, I learnt from her, that this guy liked me, but thought I was too fat!!! I mean seriously... Doesn't he have a mirror in his place? He was huuuuuuuuuuuuuge....

So... Anyway... shortly after, I met my dear husband, he was (still is) this muscular guy with a face from heaven, a real Greek God! When he started showing interest in me, I was always skeptical, I was always thinking, yeah right, what can he see in me, I mean look at him, he is like a model on a cover of a magasine... I could not see myself pretty for him, nor sexy... But you know what, he saw all this in me, and he married me, he chose to be with me.

Seriously, we get so self-destructive to ourselves by our body image.

I hope you will reach a day where you see yourself as pretty and sexy as you really are and I hope that along the way your prince charming comes.

JellyMae - I just wanted to tell you that in both of your pictures...you are very pretty!!!

As to what made me fat? Hmmmm. I am a curvy girl. Even when thin, I am curvy and will never get rid of a double chin. It is how our family members are built. Some people are built lean, but not me.

Bad eating habits got me fat, also genetics to a degree, and health issues. I don't know that I will ever be under 160, but I am trying to get there and hopefully maintain.

I have struggled with food and weight my entire life. My mother was heavy and then lost a tremendous amount of weight by starving herself. She and my father would monitor everything I put in my mouth. The worst thing in my house was to be considered fat.

I really started packing on the pounds though after I lost my daughter. I gave myself permission to eat everything, because I felt I deserved it. And then I got pregnant with my son 6 months later and just kept packing it on.

Three years after giving birth to my son I was still the same weight I was 6 months postpartum.

Until IP I was an emotional eater. Now I have to deal with the emotions without any sort of cover -- very scary, but so worth it for my physical, emotional and mental health.

This is really changing my relationship with food -- it's been a long time coming and I don't think I will ever go back to the way things were.

For me there is definitely emotional eating, sad, bored, happy etc. My mother is also an emotional eater and I think i learned it from her. I have been big my whole life and was teased alot in school which just made me eat more. At around age 18 and 230lbs I got mad, real mad, and started walking alot. It also helped that there was alot of emotional drama going on at my house with my dad leaving us and my sister getting preg at age 15 in the same summer and constantly fighting with my mom and my mom emotionally shutting down unless it was to yell at me. I lived by a lake and walked a lot to get away from the chaos. I went down to 145 in 3mo by walking or bladeing up to 8 miles a day. I moved away from all that and maintained about 160 for a while until I met my now husband and since then I have been preg with 5 babies but have lost 3 to miscarriages and slowly the weight has crept back on with stress and emotionally eating.
I've also recently have discovered that there is a chance of abuse from males in my past. I do not have any memory from birth to age 12. I have discovered a few things about myself that lead to possible abuse. I have heard that abused girls sometimes put on weight to make themselves less desirable to men. I think that I have been doing this subconsciously before I realized I was probably abused. Now that I consciously know what I have been doing, I can try to prevent it.
I think it is a good idea to openly say how you got to this point. It is good to be accountable and aware.

I guess for me it isn't as important for me to figure out why I became overweight, but rather why I regain it. It is always a struggle and difficult to lose weight, but I have always regained whatever I have lost and then some. Common sense tells me not to repeat behavior that is painful, but I continue to repeat that one. In 7 months I lost 120 pounds on this diet and loved doing it. It was a relief not to have to make too many decisions about food and not have the carbs call me from a dead sleep. In five months after stopping the diet, I had gained 35 pounds back. I followed my own rules and didn't phase off, but the end result was the same as always. Carbs calling me, eating whole packages of food I knew I shouldn't eat (I won't name them because I know it triggers me when I hear people talk about certain foods on here). I am back on plan, but I am not on the scale. Because this time it is not about the weight or food that I can or cannot eat, it is about my sanity and the way I feel about myself. I want to be able to know that I love myself enough to care for myself like I deserve. This time I came around a little quicker and I know that this really is the last time. I can NEVER go back to eating the way I have before - it has to be different for me to get different results. I can love food and know that it soothes me, but I don't have to eat it. I can do this One Day at a Time (ODAT).

I'm definitely a boredom eater. But I think it started by the environment I was raised in. My mom is a junk food addict (seriously, all she eats is chocolate/snacks) and my dad is a food lover. So while my dad would make us delicious, huge breakfasts, my mom would stock the pantry & fridge with horrible, crappy food. While my dad has been trying to diet with me (he works out of town and is gone 5 days a week), my mom has always been a negative force in my life. I remember being in 4th grade, and she would tell me I was fat (for the record, I wasn't, I didn't start getting fat until the end of high school). She would take a picture of my sister and me (who is 3 years younger and a stick) and point out how much bigger I was than her. In 6th grade I asked my doctor about Weight Watchers. I think it freaked her out and she talked to my mom about it at the end of the appointment. On the way home, my mom said "See, even the doctor knows you need to lose weight!". So as I went through high school and started to gain weight every year, I thought it was normal. When I got a letterman's jacket my mom bought me a men's x-large and said I'd grow into it. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized how much she'd screwed me up, mentally and emotionally. My weight was just one part of it (my general self-esteem and backbone was non-existant). As I got over it and became my own person I met my amazing boyfriend who told me from the start that I was beautiful. When I said I wanted to lose weight he did it with me and continues to support me. I still struggle when I visit my home, because there's literally nothing for me to eat there, and because my dad's out of town so much my mom can sometimes still get to me. I don't blame her for me being fat, I'm the one who ate the food, but she led me to it. In fact, when I started dieting she would slide chocolate bars under my bedroom door (I was staying home for the summer) and yell at me for being on "her" treadmill. Like she ever uses it....

That's really long. I'm sorry if you read that, haha. :P
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S/C/G: 230/194/145

My mom too loves junk food and chocolate and my father loves food. Actually my mom is pretty good motivation just by seeing how unhealthy she is due to her choices.
My mom was not quite as unsupportive as that but she did not make eating right very easy. She rarely bought healthy food and never encouraged me to change my eating habits. My guess is because if she did, she too would have to eat healthy too.

I just love food! I am Italian-American, my husband is French. We love to cook and we love to eat!.... happy or sad...busy or bored, it doesn't matter. Overindulgence it the issue for me- too much of many good things!

I am a snacker / picker / grazer, whatever you want to call it, and I definitely eat out of boredom. However, for me, I think the problem all along has been a sensitivity to carbs that I never knew about.

For the last 5-6 years, I have been exercising 5-6x per week and eating very healthy and have never been able to lose weight. Sure I would lose 5-10 pounds and then nothing. No matter what I did, no matter what I ate, no matter how many times a day I would exercise, I could NEVER LOSE WEIGHT or get to my goal. This lead to a cycle of frustration that kept me over weight because I would throw in the towel every once in a while. I would get in the mind set that since I wasn't losing anyway, I might as well go out for the pizza my husband suggested or get dessert.

Finding IP has been a life saver because what I have found out about myself is that I am sensitive to carbs. Even when I hit maintenance, I will forever be watching my carb intake. And that is ok with me. For once in my life I can taste the finish line and see my goal and me at my goal weight.

I also found that wheat, wheat gluten and flour in general do not agree with my sysytem. I get very bloated and sleepy (like I am drugged) whenever I eat bread or pasta or any kind of pastry. So even when I am on maintenance, these foods will not be a staple in my diet, and will be a total occasional food. I am ok with that because I know how it makes me feel (like garbage!).

I think the main thing that we have to remember is that after we lose weight and get on maintenance, we can't go back to what we used to do. I am naturally curvy (small waist, big hips) and will never be stick thin, but I know that I am also built that I will have to be careful about what I eat for my whole life. I also know that I will need to exercise almost daily to help me maintain my losses. It doesn't stop after phase 1. We all need to be cognisant of the fact that these are life long changes. While we won't be on packets for the rest of our lives, we will have to monitor what goes into our mouths.

I also want to put a little assuance out there that maintenance does work. I went on a vacation out of the country and had planned in advance to not be OP. I phased off as if I reached my goal and then went away for (11) days and ate and drank WHATEVER I wanted. Since we were in a foreign country, we were doing a lot of walking (roughly 8 miles a day), so that helped. However, I had no restrictions on myself and was fancy free in my eating for all 11 days. When I returned, my scale showed a gain of 5#, but my clothes fit exactly the same. Usually 5# would make my pants tight. After 3 days back on phase 1, my weight was right back to where it was before I left for vacation. This tells me 2 things, that the weight I gained was not real weight, just water weight and glycogen stores and the fact that this diet really works.

For me it was Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Post Partum depression all at the same time. I have a huge story but I won't go into details. Everything has turned out for the better and I wouldn't trade my life now for anything. I have just realized that I need to take care of me and that how I feel affects the ones I love around me.

On that being said, I now have normal cholesterol levels and I am no longer diabetic!