I was a thin kid. Like many I went through a pudgy stage when I hit puberty but slimmed down in high school. I was 5'6" and 135 and 'thought' I was enormous. All my friends were shorter and thought the world was ending when they went over 100 lbs so I can remember thinking that was what a teenager should weigh. I spent my teen years binging and purging and obsessively excercising trying to lose that horrible 35 lbs. I really think this set me up for failure down the road. In college I yo-yo'd between 155-190, but I was still always dieting and excercising. In grad school I blew out my knee and broke my ankle (fell down some stairs). I spent 3-4 months on crutches, 6 months in PT and then another 3 months in pt to relearn how to walk without a limp. I made a full recovery, but I gained 75 lbs in 9 months. Looking back on it I can't believe it.

So the short answer is I thought I'd been fat since puberty, but I've really been truly overweight since I was about 22, so 12 years. of course in that time I've lost and gained back 50-100 lbs 5 times, so I guess there really is no short story.

Laura

I was probably 200 lbs at around age 10, at age 14 I was 300 lbs. There are pictures of me when I was 4 years old where I looked a quasi normal weight but after that I became chubby, then overweight, then obese then morbidly obese.

i was skinny ALL my life so skinny my mom was always worried when i hit puberty i wanted more "attention" so i started eating and eating and loving the attention.. untill i couldnt stop when i wanted to which was around age 18.

In Middle School and High School I probably average 10 lbs over. In my 20's I grew by about 20 up to 35 more. In my 30's that exploded through those years to over 100 more and my mid 40's I topped out at 140 over my true weight - topped out is 270. So been overweight for way toooooo long!

I weighed 155 throughout high school and until I had my first baby in my mid-twenties. I gained 60 pounds with that baby, lost all but 10. Had another baby, gained 50 pounds while pregnant with him and lost all but 10, so now I was a good 20 pounds overweight. It all went to pot after that. So I've been overweight about half my life now. Wow. I never really thought of it that way!

When I was younger I was so active and had a good metabolism. What the heck happened!???

For me, it's been about 9 years. It started when I was taking Depo, the birth control shot. (Don't EVER take it!!) I gained 30lbs in a month. It just went up from there.

VALady, i'd say just the same thing about the implant (implanon) too! but 30lbs in a month... wowo

I first became aware of my weight when I was about 14 or 15 in high school, Looking back, i was probably a perfectly normal weight for my height and build but felt enormous compared to some of my class-mates. i think I developed an unhealthy relationship with food when my dad left us when I was about ten. Seriously, I started eating like it was going out of fashion.

When I went to university and started working unsociable hours at the weekends, my eating got really out of control and I just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Ironically, i would love to weigh now what I did when I was 15 and there was me so down on myself at that time!

Depo worked great for me. Completely killed my libido!!!:mad: Guess you won't get pregnant if you don't wanna "get some".:dz: Wasn't till after I was on it that I found out it is used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Looking back, I think it began the downfall of my marriage.:cry:

I was athletic as a kid/teenager, I was a swimmer from 10 to 18 yrs old. I was around 140-150. I put on 20 lbs after HS and when I joined the Army in 1997 I had to lose weight in order for me to get in. I want to guess that I was in the 170's and when I started boot camp I was 160. While I was in the service my lowest was 150 right out of boot camp and 170 when I got out 4 yrs later. I slowly gained 70 lbs from 2001 - 2008. I gained because I stopped working out 100% and still ate whatever I wanted. I never paid attention to my diet since I was always active. LOL funny what aging and no excercise does to a body.

From birth. My mother said when I was an infant I would squall if she didn't give me a second bottle immediately after the first . . . and it was all downhill from there. I remember having to go through a fasting blood sugar test in the 3rd grade because they were trying to determine why I was so overweight. In retrospect, I was chubby but certainly not obese. I stayed chubby until puberty hit then my weight went way up--I was probably around 250 lbs for 9th, 10th and 11th grades. I began dating my ex-husband as a senior in high school and starved down from a size 22 to about a size 12 that year, then continued starving all the way through college, staying at about a size 12/14 until 1992 or so, when I just couldn't stand starving any longer and began putting weight on, until I hit about 300 lbs. Lost 100 of that ten years later, gained it back plus fifty, now I'm going to get rid of all 200 excess pounds and NEVER EVER put them on again. I am so done with them. Clearly I'm allergic to sugar or whatever ~ my body can't process sugar and starch so no more bad carbs for me, ever.

I have been heavy my whole life. I have been at my heaviest the last couple of years, though. I think it is time to change.

I would say I've only been overweight while in college, and I'm now in my last year. However, if you would have asked me this question in high school I would have told you I was a fat cow. I was/am so much taller than my friends and that just makes you feel bigger in general and less feminine (at least then it did. I could care less now).

Its funny how we all have similar thoughts...that our images of ourselves were so distorted back when we were thinner. It sucks. I want to go back in time and tell myself that I'm hot!