How did you gain weight in the first place

Pamella924

How did I gain all this weight? Simply: I ate junk and I ate a lot of it.

I have depression, OCD and post-traumatic stress disorder. I also have chronic migraines. I'm on all kinds of lovely pills from my pharmacist. I could blame my weight gain on all of that.....but I'm not going to. There are healthy people who have all those same issues.

I have a husband, two teenagers, two crazy dogs and I work in a criminal court - all of which can be rather stressful. Those aren't to blame either. Healthy people are married with children and have insane jobs.

Plain and simple: I ate junk and I ate a lot of it. I didn't care. I didn't pay attention and I didn't exercise. All my fault.

heybales

Injury from a race due to under-training during the summer of my wedding, and then subsequent married eating during much less activity.

aedreana

At age 12 and 13, I stayed at 112-113 pounds without dieting. I was one inch shorter than I am now. I was 5' 2 1/2" back then. I ate one meal a day, in the evening. Then at 13, I started eating lunch in high school. Then, I added breakfast too. So at 13, I steadily gained weight till I was close to 130 pounds! So a few days after I turned 14, I went on the very first diet of my life. I obviously should have stuck with just dinner and no lunch or breakfast! I probably would have remained at 112-113 and never had to diet.

janatarnhem

Steroid medication and not coping with the impact of illness. Let it happen!

Chibukalu908

Yaaa, no. You're eating more.

See what I mean?! :frown:

Nobody believe me.

Well I heard that smoking decreases your appetite so you don't eat as much and when you quit you start eating more than you realize.I have never been a smoker so I am not sure if this is a fact

rosebette

I broke my foot in 2007. Before that, I was around 120 most of the time. But after the break, I was sedentary, didn't watch what I ate, and went up to 145 (I'm a shortie, so that's high for me). Also, I was in the last year of a graduate program, and my daughter was graduating from high school, so lots of parties, social functions etc. in the spring and early summer, when I still hadn't lost my weight from the sedentary period. The wake-up call was when my husband and I decided to do an impromptu week-end beach vacation and none of my capris, shorts, etc. fit! I managed to lose the weight in about 6 months following South Beach, Phase II. Recently, I have found I'm tending to gain between 6-8 lbs. over the winter months, especially after vacations, so I'm trying to stay on track and even lose a bit.

DaisyJane82

yes it is ,its so hard to loose weight.i wish you goodluck with your jorney

Thanks Belly272! Good luck to you too! It sounds like you're on the right track!

navygrrl

I'm lazy and food is delicious. :laugh:

lenarashminraj

I am a food blogger at 'Lemon n Spice'. When i started my food blog on march 2009, i never imagined that i will get hooked so bad. Pretty soon every weekend i started making romantic 5 course dinner just for my husband and he loved it. He used to cycle to work and walk in the evenings, which helped him maintaining his weight. Me on the other hand started putting on weight like crazy. After 3 yrs of marriage i started noticing visible change in me. Eating late at night, having junk food, carbonized drinks, no-exercise and having more food was the order of my life. Then i got baby and after that it became worse.. i was finding excuses to skip exercise and day by day i got addicted to food. i was 135lbs before i started my blog and later i became 180..How ever hard i tried I was not able to stick to a regular workout schedule or diet for more than 3 weeks.
After joining in MFP , im able to record what i eat, and when i read the food diary of my friends i feel to follow it.. now im 169 and im sure i will get rid of my extra fat soon

DaisyJane82

Yaaa, no. You're eating more.

See what I mean?! :frown:

Nobody believe me.

Because you don't magically gain 30 pounds without eating more calories than you burn

Actually, you don’t have to eat more calories in order to gain weight after quitting smoking. They’ve done studies on this and have evidence that supports the fact that you WILL gain weight after quitting even if your diet remains exactly the same. 80% of smokers that quit will experience this weight gain.

“Most smokers put on a couple of kilos when they quit smoking. This is not due to an increased calorie intake, but to a change in the composition of the intestinal flora after quitting smoking, as a study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) suggests.When smokers wave goodbye to their cigarettes, eighty per cent of them put on seven kilos on average. Their weight increases even if their calorie intake remains the same or even falls compared to the level before quitting smoking. What is the reason for this weight gain?

Researchers working with Gerhard Rogler of Zurich University Hospital attribute the cause to a changed composition of the bacterial diversity in the intestine. As they recently showed in a study in PLoS One, the bacterial strains that also prevail in the intestinal flora of obese persons take the upper hand in people giving up smoking.”

You can read the rest of the article here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130829093032.htm

While it’s true that smoking inhibits your appetite and when you quit you’re prone to eat more. This exacerbates the situation, but even if you don’t eat more you will still most likely gain at least 10-15 lbs. The only way you can avoid this is to decrease your caloric intake when you quit.

The other way to avoid weight gain is to use nicotine replacement therapy (the patch, e-cig, gum) I didn’t use that. I quit cold turkey and I gained weight. I didn’t change my diet. This is the honest to god truth. I’m not saying I ate healthy every day while I was a smoker, I most certainly did not.

I just didn’t change anything about my diet when I quit. The only change I made was that I stopped drinking beers when I went out for happy hour with friends after work, I switched to Vodka/Club soda.

I've struggled for months trying to lose the weight with a 1,300 calorie diet. Now I'm very very closely watching my calorie intake (900-1,200 a day) and cutting down on my carbs.(50 g on average) I've lost 4 lbs.

mom2_4gr8kids

I gained a little weight after getting married. I gained a little more having 4 babies in 4 1/2 years. After the last baby, I ate my way through post-partum depression, gained about 40 pounds in 4 months. I've kept it on for 6 years by eating through the stress of a special needs/medically complex child. With every diagnosis, every realization that the future is so very unsure for him, food was my comfort.

I say "food WAS my comfort", because it no longer is. I wish I had realized, years ago, that there are other ways of dealing with my emotional pain and stress. The stress will never go away, but this extra weight will be gone forever.

dawnmcneil10

I am the odd one out here, I gained because I didn't eat. I'd skip breakfast and lunch and eat dinner.

malibu927

Eating more than I burned (snacking, frozen pizza, 3-5 cans of pop a day) and never exercising, following my obese parents who did little to encourage me to be healthier as a child/teen

Serenitynow29

I like food. I like to cook. I ignored CICO.

Iwishyouwell

The first time?

A mother who fed us the "normal" American diet. She struggled with weight and had an enormous sweet tooth, so she worked to control our sweats. But we had a steady stream of near endless access to all the sugary breakfast cereals we wanted, delicious home cooked meals that were drowning in margarin, white bread, potato chips, the whole nine yards. We weren't devoid of veggies and always had fruit, but overall our diet had way too many calorie laden dishes and packaged food. We also weren't completely sedentary, but we were far from the most active kids.

Then lost most of the weight in my late teens and kept most of it off until I was 23. In my senior year at NYU I fell into a bad habit of eating a pint of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream almost every night, paired with a jumbo slice of iced lemon pound cake. I had been fighting my own sweet tooth for years and just fell into the sumptuousness of it all. I wasn't an over eater on anything else during the day, but a nightly infusion of an additional nearly 2000 calories lead, of course, to me gaining back everything I lost...and then some.

Eventually, over the next 8 years, I fluctuated but stayed well within the obese range. I finally topped off at 320lbs, mostly from overindulging in cookies, cakes, and ice cream.

I've never been a "eat everything in sight" person. Only a very small handful of sweet desserts were my major undoing after I lost weight the first time.

Iwishyouwell

I am the odd one out here, I gained because I didn't eat. I'd skip breakfast and lunch and eat dinner.

You didn't gain because you skipped breakfast and lunch. You gained because you ate too much at dinner.

laciemn

I don't usually give up any accountability for my weight,
however, I was always far outside the normal weight range, even as a child. Our family ate almost all fast food, all the time, big portions, and I drank lots of Coke and played on the computer all the time. Considering I drank like a 2 liter a day and ate only fast food until around 16 when I started cooking and dieting, it's no wonder the weight I got to, which I am ashamed of and won't usually admit even today.

At age 18, I got muscular dystrophy, which completely stole any fitness or strength I had. I could barely walk and fell down all the time from lack of strength. I did lose my appetite and had no energy for cooking. So I ate sometimes like 2 yogurts in a day. It was hell for a long time. It was like becoming super obese all at one time, that's how hard it was to lift my own body weight.

However, I started realizing the only way for me to be normal was to lose the excess fat. I knew my muscles were atrophied and somewhat destroyed, so I did what I could with my diet. Once I started getting better, my appetite came way back and I started cooking and exercising again.

I've now lost a lot of weight and most people think I'm normal now. I can do a lot more physically, although I still am way behind most average people who exercise regularly or are just naturally healthy in strength and fitness. Now I have to do modifications of most exercises to work up to a level of strength that approaches normal. After I am completely better, which I still hope I can be, I can get really serious about fitness!

orlandogirl97

Long multi bouts of depression. Depression medication. Low self esteem, bad food choices and not enough exercise----> Huge butt on a 5'1 female.


Seeking help dealing with depression and family issues, no medication, better food choices and more exercise

---

>slightly smaller butt on a 5'1 female!

aedreana

Re: smoking. I never smoked till 1996. I had spent 29 years constantly having to go on a diet, constantly starving. After I started smoking, I went for 14 years hardly ever having to diet! I had taken prescription diet pills in the past, but cigarettes cut my appetite even better! The only reason I had to return to dieting in 2010 is that menopause redistributed my weight and now I have to weigh less in order to have a waist. Menopause didn't change my weight, nor make it harder to lose weight. But it deleted all the weight from my hips/butt and pasted it onto my waist! Also, I knew someone who quit smoking in his late 20s. He was naturally thin, 5' 10" and 130 pounds. In fact, when I met him he was only 116 pounds at that same height. Never had a weight problem.After quitting smoking, his weight soared quickly to 190. He then had to diet to drop down to 150-something, and wasn't thrilled that he could no longer eat whatever he wanted and remain thin.

MucGay

Never learned how to cook while growing up so all I ate was processed/outside foods.
Only thing I "cooked" was ramen noodles (*shivers* I hate them now since I ate so much of it) and microwaved stuff.

Then got on the bandwagon and started cooking for myself and limiting junk/processed stuff and it really helped!

Teach your kids to cook good foods - it's one of life's important lessons.