I have freaky weight gain with pregnancy. 120 to 200! Happened both times. I'm not usually a heavy person, and to have 80 pounds pack on, in about 5 months, is the craziest thing. Its like I was skinny me, trapped inside a huge body. I went to dash across a street, and about freaked when I could feel my own ***, literally clapping behind me. lol!
Because I ask myself is this how I want to live? I got down to business losing it. After my first baby, I did weight watchers and got back down to 125. After my second baby (back up to 200), I tried WW again, but wasn't into the meetings. I turned to Fitday and exercise, and got down to 150, got distracted and now I'm working on the rest.
Pregnancy has changed my relationship with food forever. I am an addict!
And now I'm too scared to have another baby. The hormones make me feel starving 24/7. I'd wake up in the middle of the night to go eat. I obsessed about food. I tried to watch my calories for a while but the hunger would overwhelm me.
I was overweight as a kid.
Lost weight as a older teen although I didn't try... it just happened dueto 3 factors..1. I started smoking. 2. I was active. 3. I had jaw surgery. You don't eat when you can't.
As an adult I gained weight after quitting smoking and then lots more after my second child. Then year by year.... more here and there.
I played at weight games a little.. not seriously... one week I tried the cabbage diet.. another week some herbal supplements ... but it was far from a serious attempt.
1st real attempt... I lost about 50 pounds. Then began putting it right back on due to not exercising.
This new go around is not an attempt. It is the beginning of a successful journey.
Because this is my first time at trying to burn up these stored calories through exercise and eating right to prevent the storage of a fresh supply. I am doing it.
I will NOT be above 200 again. That much I know for sure.. the rest I will take one day at a time.
Like ~Zoë, I gained like crazy with all three of my pregnancies. I mean... from 130 to 190 each and every time. Never did anything about trying to lose it, though, because nursing seemed to do the trick and I'd be back to my normal weight within 6 months (we called nursing lip-o-suction, for just that reason!).
But that was then... (youngest is going on 15)... and I've packed weight on for other reasons... and getting it off meant reducing calories. I'm hoping this will be my first and only attempt, though I know it doesn't end. Maintaining it will be forever.
at age 17, lost 100 on WW, got to 200 lbs, gained up to 240 by the time I left college.
Went up to about 280, did WW again, losing another 20 to 30 lbs.
Went back to horrible habits, gained up to 330, my highest, joined Jenny Craig, lost about 50. Moved for 6 months (a very stressful time of my life) and ending up gaining about 30 to 40 of that back.
Started on my own eating plan based on JC, and am in the 250s now. I've added real, consistent exercise for the first time this time around, and I consider this a life plan, not a diet until, which seemed to always screw me up before.
My eating was so bad, with the high cal, big meals and junk food, that I don't see myself going back to those habits. I do struggle keeping my cals low enough to consistently lose, at my age (42) I've noticed it's harder to lose the lbs than when I was younger.
It feels so much better to eat reasonably consistently, then that "pig out" to salads yo-yoing I constantly was doing. I followed a real all or nothing way of thinking. Now, I plan for days off where I can eat a treat or off plan meal. I feel much healthier, mentally and physically.
I weighed 135 and was 5'7 when I graduated high school. By my sophomore year in college I weighed 182 and went to WW and lost down to 151. After my second child was born I weighed 237 and went on FEN/FEN and lost down to 149. This weight gradually came back on. In 1999 I went to diet doctor and lost about 30 lbs, down to 190. Hadn't really tried again til 2005 and am still trying. 87 lbs. gone with 2 lbs. left to meet my goal of 145. I am 46 yrs. old and most of my adult life has been spent being over-weight.
I've tried, and succeeded many times. BUT...I always failed in the end as I gained back all I'd lost plus more within the year of ending my diet. This time, I've kept it off for 3 years and have no intentions of "ending" the diet. This is my DAILY diet for life. I just eat healthy and realized that's what a real diet is all about.
This is earnest attempt numero uno for me. In high school I was around 175 – 180 and so mortified by my weight that I would occasionally do crazy things like liquid diets for short periods of time (like maybe 2 days) but of course that never resulted in weight loss. I was just so ignorant of proper nutrition, and my family was certainly no help. I was going it alone as a vegetarian in a pretty carnivorous household, so you know, carbs and cheese. I remember the low-fat craze of the 90s. I was like awesome, these twizzlers are fat free! I can eat the whole bag!
I always dropped weight during swim season, I remember getting as low and the mid 150s one year. But I would be so thankful when the grueling daily 3 hour workouts were over that I would just go back to my slothful self right after season and gain all the weight back.
In college I sort of gave it up. I was too busy having a good time to worry about things like diet and exercise. My freshman year I maintained around the 170s – 180s range, but after that I lost track and really just let things get away from me. I never owned a car and walked around campus and to work, which probably kept me from ballooning to 300 or something, but at some point in my senior year I was nearly 220.
After college my weight dropped by itself to around 200 – 205 where it seemed to stay with no effort on my part. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was just because I stopped drinking quite as much beer.
3 ˝ years post college now and I am slowly getting it together. I finally feel like I have the resources and energy to devote to this, and I’ve taken the time to educate myself a bit. I will not be young forever and this will not get any easier, the time to do it is now.
when I was in highschool I never really realized how much I weighed. It wasn't until I started college and lived with 4 really thin girls that I realized that I was overweight. It wasn't that they were flaunting their thinness...it was just at that point that I realized how unhealthy I was. My roommates and I began going on long walks almost everyday, and by the end of the year I have lost 30 pounds, and I kept that off for a while...when I began my second year of college I let myself go a bit, I don;t really know what happend...I walked less, but still walked, and I ate decently, by the end of the year I had probably gained 15 pounds back...not much, but very noticeable. That summer I worked at a factory to earn money to get me through my final year at college, and I lost my weight again, getting down to 167 at one point, which was quite a feat for me. I kept this weight off for a bit, and then over the winter I gained it back again. My friend and I decided to join a gym that may (2005), and I did really well. ThenI got engaged in June and from there I dont know what happened. It became so hard for me to lose wieght after that. I had a goal to look really good at my wedding, so I ate healthy and went to the gym alot. When I went for my physical last April before my wedding I was down to 176 pounds, It didn't feel like much of a feat because in 11 months I only lost 10 pounds, even though I tried really hard. After I got married in May (2006) I just gained all of the weight back that I had lost..so now here I am weighing the same amount as I did in highschool.
I have tried many times, it almost seems the more motivated I am to lose weight, the harder it is to lose it. While in college I wasn't trying to lose weight..I realized I was losing weight, but I wasn;t trying. I know that I need to lose this weight, and I have to do it, no matter how hard it is.
I flirted with exercise and dieting my freshman year of college because one of my roommates was completely obsessed with it. Convinced that she would never get married if she wasn't super thin and that if she didn't get married she was a total failure. There were three of us living together and her constant diatribes about herself infected the other two of us as well. None of us was overweight and even she wasn't really serious about losing weight. We all drank a lot, ate salads for lunch and dinner, and then ate tons of junk. So I don't really count that as a diet.
After my mother died (freshman year of college, two weeks before finals), I basically ate only one bowl of cereal a day for about three months. But I wasn't trying to lose weight. I was working crazy hours as a lifeguard and swim instructor (13 hours a day most days, 6 or 7 hours on my day off, in day after day of over 100 degree heat with 80% humidity). We weren't given breaks that were long enough to get food and there wasn't any place nearby to eat anyway, so it was easy not to eat. I remember that I would get home from work exhausted and absolutely ravenous but it didn't seem worth it to eat at that point, so I would just go to bed. I would get up 15 minutes before I needed to be at work the next day, eat my bowl of cereal and head back to the pool. Sometimes I would have nachos or popcorn in the afternoon. Looking back, I think my diet was more a symptom of how overwhelmed with grief I was than anything else--I certainly could have brought food to work with me if I had wanted to. But I did lose quite a bit of weight. When I started college again in the fall, I was living in the dorms on a regular meal plan and with friends who ate normally. At that point I realized how crazy my freshman year roommate had been and I started eating regularly again. We still drank lots and ate a fair amount of junk, but at least I ate regular meals. I probably gained around 5 to 10 pounds. After my freshman year experience, I decided that focusing on dieting just wasn't healthy and refused to think about it for literally years.
About eight years ago I joined a gym, but I didn't change my eating habits. I was hoping to lose weight without having to. The crazy thing is that it was working. I'm not sure I lost any weight, but after only a few months I had started to wear clothing in a smaller size. But for some reason, I just thought they were making the clothing bigger, I did not attribute it to my workouts. So I quit going after a few months.
This is the first time I've tried dieting since my freshman year of college (I'm now 37). It turns out that, though it's certainly not easy by any means, it's also not as hard as I thought. I wish I had done it ten years ago. But I think I had to achieve a certain level of maturity before I could do this; I just don't think I had the presence of mind back then to stick with a regular diet and exercise program. I'm really impressed by some of the women (and men) who post here who are successfully dieting at young ages.
When i first started reading through this thread i thought to myself, sure i've tried a few times, but then i stopped for a minute and really thought about it. And here’s what I came up with:
Weight Watchers
I did WW in high school with my mom. I really don't remember going to meetings but we did go in and weigh in weekly. I think I lost about 15 lbs in the end and can't really remember why i stopped the program.
LA Weightloss
I stayed on the program just long enough to buy a lifetime supply of some awful snack bar that they use and then never went back. I did end up doing my own program instead and lost about 20 lbs the summer before my Junior Year of college. That year i studied abroad in Scotland and when i first got there i did so much walking that i ending up (for the first and only time in my life) “accidentally” losing weight without trying.
The Zone
My mom and i did "A Week in the Zone" until i ended up in the hospital with an allergic reaction to Cod Liver Oil. That was the end of the Zone.
Weightloss doctor
He prescribed an appetite suppressant and B12 shot weekly and told me to eat 2 meals a day. I lost about 35 lbs in 3 months and must have been eating between 500-800 calories a day. i didn't even have the strength to exercise. i can't believe it was a medically supervised plan!
Hypnosis
I almost forgot about his one but i actually paid to go to a Hypnosis for Weight Loss seminar and bought a hypnosis tape! Hey, it helped my grandparents quit smoking 40 years ago, why couldn't it help me lose weight! While i don't think that the hypnosis actually worked the tape actually had some benefits. It was a nice way for me to really relax and focus on my eating and exercise goals for the day. Really kept me focused, but not a magic pill unfortunately.
Body for Life
I did BFL for 9 weeks while i was in Scotland. It was great and i really worked hard. I never really lost the weight i was hoping for but i was super active and really proud of myself for doing it. Unfortunately when i moved back to the US i never really incorporated back into my life. Plus, i was used to tracking the weights in kilograms, so when i got back to the states and had to use pounds i was all thrown off.
Jenny Craig
I am currently on JC now and have been for a year. So far have lost 40 lbs. I like Jenny. I thought Jenny would teach me portion sizes and give me a break from having to be responsible for preparing my own food, and it has. But that's not really what i've taken away from Jenny. I like the structure of the plan and the 3 small meals and 3 snacks a day kind of approach. And while i like Jenny, it has really been my exercise that has given me the results this time. I started working out with a Trainer 2x a week and i have been pretty steady with my other cardio for about 4x a week. It's still hard sometimes but now my default is to healthy stuff instead of junk, and that's something.
All the others
You name it i've probably tried it: cabbage soup diet, SCAN diet shakes, atkins, various over the counter diet pills, etc.
All this and i'm only 25!! God, i look back over that list and i'm impressed and embarrassed all at the same time. This is genuinely sad. I have given away years to dieting and the saddest part is that i have failed over and over. But you know what; i have armed myself with the tools to be healthy. At least i know what i'm up against. This will never be easy for me. I'll never take my weight for granted. Hopefully, i'll never get complacent, because i know weight is an issue for me.
The big difference i feel in myself this time is that i'm no longer willing to do something that i couldn't possibly do for the long term in hopes that it might have some short term effect. Everything i'm doing is something that i can maintain. And i've lost my weight slower this time which has given my head a chance to catch up with my body.
Well, i'm not sure if the above qualifies me as a professional dieter or not. I'm pretty sure not, because if i was a pro i probably would have been a little better at it! hehe.
This is my second try, kinda. I guess it would technically be my third. I was trying to lose weight when i got pregnant with my first daughter, but at that time I was at my current goal weight. I gained a lot of weight during my first pregnancy. I got pregnant with #2 in the beginning of that 'try'. Now that #2 is out I'm ready to give it a go again . . . and SUCCEED!!!
that made me laugh. Maybe your butt was just cheering you on! 
