I always had a weight problem, but I didn't care that much. There were too many other self-esteem issues that took precedence. Oddly enough, I was always strong and mostly healthy other than blood pressure problems. I think I was healthier at 270 than I am now. I get winded easily and I can't lift nearly as much as I used to. Guess I lost too much muscle the first time around!
I didn't care when I was at my peak at 287, but I started working on it anyway for other people. Now I'm around 200 and I do care about it. I feel it more now than I did before. Not just emotionally. I can feel the weight on me like I couldn't before.
I don't really indulge. I just don't seem to have any metabolism at all. A couple months of not weighing and counting, and I'll pack on 20 pounds before I know it. No cakes, no candies. It's like a ninja's sneaking in my room and slipping Skittles in my mouth while I sleep.
I was thinking about it yesterday while my internet was not working but a post about focus this morning reminded me ...
I can remember fussing about clothing and fit and how I looked when I was in my teens and early twenties. I always was just soft ... you know ... control top hose pretty much did the trick.
I can remember making a two piece dress for Christmas after my youngest was born in October. Someone mentioned how good I looked for having three small children.
I don't think I remember ever weighing 140 something, nor 150 something. But I do remember 165! By then I had three teenagers.
I think I just lost focus or was busy with other things.
I overeat and not active...Food is everywhere and no escape of it.There are so many food places to dine,bakeries,and not one soul of a weight loss center in my area.
I live in a new neighborhood and most of the people are heavy set. I got heavy from eating junk foods and not staying active. Never been married or had kids. I'm in my 40s and tackle this weight in my teens years.
It's a constant battle, my weight caused me nothing but grief and now I am ready to change my shape and be happy for once in my life.
There are so many factors that contributed to my weight problems. I was always a fat kid (not just chubby, mind you, but fat) and had problems with compulsive eating at a young age. I remember sneaking food even before I started kindergarden. When I was young I ate as though I had no "off" button... if I was at my relatives' house and they set out cookies or cheese, I would keep eating until it was gone. Even though I was a fairly active child who loved to play outside I reached 200 pounds well before I started high school. I only kept gaining from there. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I think all of these things contributed to my weight:
Developing a taste for junk food at a young age
Learning to cope emotionally with food
Being exceptionally picky about fruits and vegetables
Having junk food around all the time
Coming from an overweight family
Being sensitive to stimuli for junk food
Normalizing big portions
Not realizing how nutritionally empty the foods I ate were
Eating lots of fried things and white bread, adding oil to everything
Being clueless about calories
Frequent crash dieting and following all of the fads
And other things...
Oh, Drina, I followed your link and am in awe of your progress pics! Such an inspiration to me, because I feel we are similar in starting stats/appearance. I can't wait to drop more sizes and look that good.
/Procrasting about sticking to a plan.Ex.I will start my diet tomorrow,or after a certain occassion.
/Not realizing WHY we are overeating,sometimes it is just about the food,but I
think there are usually other issues,and that is how we learned to cope.
I have been overweight most of my life. I actually was thinking about this very thing today. 200 was my wake-up call many times. My weight would creep up to 200, I would freak out, get my act together, get my weight back down to 165-170. Still not where I wanted to be, but I would get lax around 165-170 and go back to my old ways. Along with being overweight, I have battled depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember but I managed to keep both in check. Several years ago, between working at a job I HATED, a ton of stress from work, going to school full time, my anxiety and depression sent me into a tailspin. Instead of freaking out when my weight got close to 200lbs, I just stopped weighing myself. I couldn't handle my weight gain with everything else, so I choose to ignore it. I worked with 160 people in which 80-90% were overweight, most obsese, so no one really noticed. I went from 165 to 240 in 9-12 months. I panic sometimes thinking what gaining 85lbs in less than a year did to my body. It scares me...the huge stress that I'm sure that put on my heart, my lungs, my liver, kidneys...I just hope my work now will help reverse the damage I have done. As terrified and ashamed as I was to weight 240lbs, it didn't stop there. I continued to gain another 15lbs on top of that to reach my highest weight of 255lbs.
I still battle depression and anxiety, along with many, many other health problems on a daily basis. I have made countless attempts to fix what I have done in the past...this time I will succeed.
your story sounds exactly like mine. i think that i have been in denial for a long time. i gained that much weight in a year also. the thing is i think i pacified my depression with food. but it wasnt like i ate at a buffet or ate fast food everyday..i would munch.. a bag a chips here or a candy bar there. i was soo busy with school and work and being a single mom raising 4 kids that i didnt stop to realize anything. this is the largest i have ever been. was i a fat kid? no..but as a teenager i struggled. my mother and sister have anorexia. i on the other hand am a food addict. the word diet makes me hungry.your story touched me. thanks for sharing
I was thin/fit as a child but in my culture the like chubby babies and I guess the fact of my mother and grandparents not knowing about over feeding kids was a total chaos. My mother says that I used to wait for my granpfather and eat again out of his plate (late at night!). When I reached 10 I was looking chubbier, but since I was always active I developed into a fit teen (not skinny like a model but around 110 pound well proportioned). I remember my wardrobe when I was a teen hehehehe. All my college years were fine but I used to eat and eat and think that it would never affect me.
I moved from my country in 2004 and I was in a 120-125 weight by then, got into a terrible relationship and I started eating and getting more and more isolated, my weight started creeping up. My friends would not recognize me, I would not recognize myself and I couldn't believe that me the one that had always been a strong woman was in the darkest hole ever. I ended up the relationship and move on but by then I was overweight.
After that I started dating my husband and in 2007 we decided to get pregnant (I was overweight). During my pregnancy they diagnosed me with diabetes and I got really strict about my diet since I didn't want to cause any harm to my baby. I didn't gained a lot of weight and I was being so diligent that my doctor was very proud of me. When I was around 19 weeks into my pregnancy we were told that our son was coming with a congenital heart defect known as TOF, that was devastating but I continued taking care of my diet. The problem started once I gave birth, I started eating everything and ignoring the fact that I'm a diabetic. I have never been depressed in my life and I think I was facing a post-partum depression but would not recognize it. My son had open heart surgery when he was 3 1/2 month, it was a success. After that I noticed that something was wrong with his back and he was diagnosed with congenital scoliosis and right kidney hydronephrosis, that was another blow for me and I turned to my shelter -food-. I would not take care of myself, I would not look myself in the mirror, I was letting myself go -Me, the once popular girl, the trendsetter was now a total disaster. One night I was feeling so sad that I opened up to my husband, my body was feeling the consecuences and I was feeling sick. My husband told me about WW and their program...I can't be more grateful for having him as my husband. I've being 4 weeks into the program and I'm feeling much better, down 7.4 pounds and got me a new haircut. I'm feeling like I'm finding myself again and nothing it's going to stop me, my beautiful son needs his mommy.
Thanks for reading and I apologize if it was long, I needed to express all my feelings.
A lot of who are/were overweight are waiting for something to help change us. I know I did. I waited for "tomorrow" so start my diet, and each day I blew it and started over I just got fatter and fatter. I remember looking at a month's calendar one day and there was "start diet" marked every day - and every day it was scratched off, in favor of a another tomorrow. Below I have copied and pasted my blog entry on "waiting for tomorrow," in hopes it will help shed some light on why we do what we do.
--
"Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life."
I just read a post with that title. The poster talks about being fat, how disgusted she is with her weight, and gives people her diet plan for “tomorrow.”
Will she make it? Probably not.
Because planning to lose weight tomorrow doesn’t ensure success - it ensures failure. Waiting for tomorrow is how I gained almost 90 pounds. Because every day I waited for tomorrow gave me a whole extra day to eat whatever I wanted…license to eat everything that was not nailed down. Eat, eat, eat, gorge, gorge, gorge. Because tomorrow - that magical tomorrow - I would start my diet. Finally be thin. The following day, when I “blew it” and hated myself bitterly, I would plan to start the next tomorrow. And so on. Day after day. Year after year. Pound after pound. Tomorrow after tomorrow.
How did I finally change? How did I finally succeed? By starting today. This minute. This meal. NOW. Not tomorrow. It was difficult. I would rather have waited for yet another tomorrow, one full of empty promises to myself. But the tomorrows had never materialized, so I forced my tomorrow to start today. Finally took control of my own life - and succeeded.
I think this is amazing, to be able to sit hear and read all the many different reasons that we all got this big.
I think the one factor that drew me to junk food as a kid was- i was NEVER allowed any!
My mum is really healthy..and as kids we were rarely allowed treats. I mean we would go to school with fruit and a sandwhich and maybe a cheese stick. It made me so angry to see my friends eating all this delicious food that i had never got the chance to have before. So when i was old enough..i started bringing money to school so i could buy some junk food. I didnt want my healthy sandwhich and fruit..i wanted a sausage roll and a huge chocolate brownie and a chocolate milk!
Im not blaming my parents here...but being deprived of treats made me binge on them even more!
I have been a little over weight my whole life..not huge..but always a little chubby, i rember always thinking if only i could look like my friends!
It wasnt until i met my current bf that i really ballooned. I just thought i could eat whatever, until i realise our relatiuonship was no longer as great as it used to be, due to the fact that subconsiously i new i looked horrible and never wanted to go anywehre or do anything because i was embaressed by myself!
Argh i just dont ever want to feel like that again!
I guess it just seems like it would be hard to get to 250-300+ pounds without that AHA moment.
As someone who's heaviest weight was 345lbs it's not really all that hard to do as evidenced by the millions of people who are morbidly obese around the world.
I was around 200 for a long time and then I remeber creeping up to 220 and I was not all that worried, I was still strong I could still move quickly I was still fairly young around 35 or so.
And as I got older I guess my metabolism started slowing down, I crept up to around 240 and still I was not worried. I never really weighed myself and I still felt strong and healthy abeit a little chunky but hey who couldn't afford to lose a few pounds right!
Then I didn't think about my weight or weigh myself for a long time and one day I stepped on a friend's scale and I was SHOCKED to see I weight 270 pounds! I started to get worried then. I made a few few lazy attempts to lose weight. I joined a gym and started working out. I didn't really know what I was doing and soon lost interest. And my idea of cutting back the food was I would only eat one burger when I went to Wendy's.
It was about this time my blood pressure started to rise. It was for the first time in my life borderline high! And I became scared. I started taking medication and soon I weighed 290.
Now I realized I was FAT! I felt disgusting. I felt like I looked ugly. I compensated for this by making fat jokes about myself to my friends and family. By now I weight 300 and I didn't even care. I was depressed and I knew it. In my dispair I turned to the one thing that always was there for me to comfort me ... FOOD!
Then the day came and I was at the VA Hospital getting tests and my doc asked me to just carry my files to my next appointment and I peeked into my folder and my eyes instantly riveted to something my doctor had written about me.... "the morbidly obese patient ..."
ME? morbidly obese? I mean I knew I was fat but MORBID? I almost sank to the floor of that elevator I was in.
By then I weighed 345 pounds and that when I knew I HAD to do something or I would die.
So for me my AHA moment was when I decided to lose weight and it was a slow transformation of not just my body but also of my mind.
I was in denial and it wasn't until I had knee and ankle problems, high blood pressure, lower back pain and lower leg edema that I realized I could no longer not think about my health.
And thats when I REALLY decided to get serious and try and lose weight.
sorry so long but I am really passionate about this ... I have had so many people (not meaning you!) say to me ... "all you have to do is eat less thats all"
I believe everyone who attempts to lose weight successful or not has an "AHA" moment. And when they have it is when they start changing their lives whether it is when they are 25 pounds overweight or 500lbs overweight.
I mean think about it. We don't just eat less until we reach our goal weight and then go back to the way we used to eat.
It is a life change you literally change the way you eat and view food for the rest of your life. So it doesn't matter if you only need to lose 40 lbs or 240lbs because you are going to keep this life change for the rest of your life!
I don't think I've ever had an AHA moment, in the sense that it is usually talked about. I've been dieting since my parents put me on my first diet in kindergarten. As I've said, I suspect a genetic component, as my food and weight issues are much different than anyone in my adoptive family. I am the only person in the family, to have been overweight before adulthood, and I don't remember ever having an "off" switch to my hunger, as long as I could eat, I would eat if allowed to.
I was a very bright kid, and was calorie counting by 7 or 8. I always understood the mechanics of weight gain, but I couldn't control my appetite. Dieting was always torture, because I literally felt like I was starving to death - hungry and food obsessed 24/7.
It took me more than three decades to find my successful combination, largely because the two largest components of my success are somewhat unconventional and/or even controversial. I stack birth control to eliminate periods (and stabilize my hormonal issues including hormonal hunger). I've been asking doctors since my 20's about doing so, but was always discouraged. The second component being low carb, which is still being criticized for being difficult to follow and/or as unhealthy. It is difficult for me to follow, but the alternative is insane 24/7 hunger.
I can lose weight on higher carb, low calorie diets, but if I do, I feel starved all of the time (and usually end up bingeing in frustration). So losing weight hungry or not hungry - I'm going to prefer not hungry.
Personally, I think that much of my food issues are simple physiology and genetic programming. The natural world does not have large surpluses of calories lying around - animals and primitive societies of humans compete for food and overpopulation occurs before widespread obesity. Also, food doesn't come to you, you've got to go to it, even the easiest to gather foods require a decent amount of energy output to aquire.
We've turned the natural world on it's head, and so it's not particularly surprising to me, that otherwise very intelligent people can feel that the battle just isn't worth fighting. In my late 20's I decided for about two to three years I refused to diet, mostly out of fear that dieting had always resulted in more weight gain than loss. That my weight stabilized and I didn't lose or gain during those years, does make me think that for some folks traditional dieting is actually more a part of the problem, than the solution.
Weight gain and loss is theoretically simple (calories in, calories out - even if you acknowledge that some foods may change the rate of calories out), but in practice, quite complex because there are so many physiological, genetic, environmental, socio-cultural factors. Knowledge isn't enough.
your story sounds exactly like mine. i think that i have been in denial for a long time. i gained that much weight in a year also. the thing is i think i pacified my depression with food. but it wasnt like i ate at a buffet or ate fast food everyday..i would munch.. a bag a chips here or a candy bar there. i was soo busy with school and work and being a single mom raising 4 kids that i didnt stop to realize anything. this is the largest i have ever been. was i a fat kid? no..but as a teenager i struggled. my mother and sister have anorexia. i on the other hand am a food addict. the word diet makes me hungry.your story touched me. thanks for sharing
