What caused you to get fat?

LaurieEReid

Sitting on the couch too much.
Portion sizes.
Loving sweet and/or fatty things (chocolate, cheesecake, icecream, cake.....)
Stealth calories (that pumpkin scone I'd get when I skipped breakfast has 500 cal?)

:ohwell:

amarie36

My weight gain started after the birth of my kids. I wasnt used to having to watch what I ate or workout before pregnancy...I only did it in fun when I felt like it and I played sports. My transition from school to being a wife, mom, and working full time has been rough on my weight because of mine and my husband's hectic schedules..I found myself doing what was easy and fast which meant eating out or cooking, but going to bed after dinner because I was "tired". EXCUSES and being LAZY! LOL I can admit it! Although....after the birth of my second child I got majority of the weight off. I was 15lbs away from my goal AND in school fulltime in addition to everything else. My downfall came at the death of my grandfather and then exactly 3 months later the death of my other grandfather. Having been the first time that I had to deal with the death of people close to me....I took it pretty hard, got depressed and the only exercise I did was walking back and forth to the refrigerator and opening and closing the door. LOL Needless to say I'm done with the excuses.

wewon

Sitting on the couch too much.
Portion sizes.
Loving sweet and/or fatty things (chocolate, cheesecake, icecream, cake.....)
Stealth calories (that pumpkin scone I'd get when I skipped breakfast has 500 cal?)

:ohwell:

Stealth calories will do it every time.

It really was a wake up call to see what the culprits were.

aaddaammggoolleeaaffss

Working from home for 5 years! I recently left that job and am going back to school to be a paramedic so now I have a few months to concentrate just on my health

bmmiller4

I never was one to watch what I ate. To much fast food and soda...Large McDonalds coke is still a huge weakness for me. We moved back to Indiana when I was 6 months pregnant with my second child and I became a stay at home mom. Now I could eat whenever I wanted not just on my lunch hour from work! I had a 27 month old and a colicky newborn and a husband with a sales job that was rarely home for dinner. I only cooked proper meals when he was home for dinner and then only if it had been a good day with the kids. Almost 5 years later and that is still the case. I fixed meals for the kids but didn't really make myself anything. So I would pick/graze all day long. Eat what was left on their plate and fill in the gaps with chips/snack foods. And lets not for get the soda...got to have Coke Classic and Mt. Dew! Coke Classic has now been replaced with Coke Zero (I can not stand diet soda) and the occasional Mt. Dew. I try to fix more proper meals. I could never justify cooking an entire meal for basically me (the kids didn't eat enough to make a difference) since I was never big on eating leftovers and DH was eating out because of his job. Now that the kids are older, 4 & 6, they eat more and DH has changed jobs...still only home for dinner a few nights a week, but he now takes leftovers for his lunch so it doesn't seem like so much of a waste.

Keeping the food diary has really shown me how the grazing can add up. I still eat some of the bad stuff but I portion it out (a bowl of chips, not the bag!) and I am more cautious. I joined a gym last fall and was doing really well going consistently but still wasn't watching what I ate. I made it through the holidays without really gaining anything but then my workout buddy got busy at work (she is a tax accountant) so I lost some motivation to go. It is also hard to find the time since I still have one child at home and hubby works so many hours. But I am hoping once her busy season is over we can get back at it. I am walking on the treadmill at home and have been on MFP for a week and lost 1.5 pounds so I am excited to see where things are going!

Plus I have my 25 year class reunion...can't show up looking like I do! That is fantastic motivation!

neelia

Desk job. ' nuff said.

tami05

I had my first child, I put on 70lb, all my fault because I was studying and just ate what I wanted, the baby came out 11lb 13oz! I then had another one and another until I now have 5 children! I stayed overweight for about ten years in all!

Recently I have discovered that I am Intolerant to dairy products and using calories and excluding dairy I have now lost 63lb and I am slimmer than I ever was before I was pregnant to start with!

With my own children now, I want them to learn healthy nutrition and be able to control there own diet, I was never taught this as a child and was always able to eat what ever I fancied! hence being over weight for as long as I can remember!

EDUCATION is what is need through my whole family as all my siblings and older relatives are very weight. I am proud to say that none of my children are overweight now, (they were heading that way)!!

rileamoyer

I had 3 kids 2 years apart in the early years. That accounted for most of it. I was too busy changing diapers to worry about exercise or anything like that. Never lost the baby weight from 1 before getting pg with the next.

Pretty much just continued to eat what I wanted WHEN I wanted like I did when I was a teenager. . . guess what-and adult body can't handle that!

Then instead of focusing on getting healthy - I lost 20 lbs and got pg at the age of 29. Apparently my subconscious thought that would keep me from turning 30? YEESH! Talk about TIRED! Teenagers reeking havoc, raising a baby AND we took in a teenage niece!

What? I'm s'pose to watch what I eat? Being raised as a country gal - you don't waste food - so what the kids didn't eat - I did.

Yeah I watched myself hit 200 lbs. Then 210. Then 220. . . at 254 I decided the kids are grown - NO MORE EXCUSES. It's time for ME. It's coming off very slowly because I now in that fabulous time of life called mentalpause :laugh: BUT it IS coming off!

Three Cheers for Mentalpause

---

LoL

lisanxd

I forgot one. World of Warcraft!!

bmmiller4

That cleaning the plate thing will get you every time. I am constantly biting my tongue every time I start to tell my kids to clean their plates...hard to break the habits of our childhood!

TooFine4MFP

I know exactly what caused me to get fat:

-sedentary job where I'm sitting at a desk 90% of the day

-moving into a new apt when I was 22, and I was lonely, so I ate because of loneliness and boredom

-fast food every day of the week

-4-5 sodas a day

-eating late at night

-eating LARGE portions

-Ordering food out at work almost everyday, nothing healthy

-No water intake hardly at all

-No exercise

-Not monitoring my weight

The list goes on and on and I have lost 80 lbs, but I'm still battling some of the things on this list, but God is good and I will conquer this thing!

callipygianchronicle

I am fat for many reasons, but mostly because I have spent my life using food to do everything except what it was meant to do—sustain me. I have used it to celebrate. I have used it to reward. I have used it to titillate. I have used it to soothe. I have used it to fill loneliness. I have used it to show love. I have used it to show off. I have used it to punish. And I had made thousands of bad choices on what to eat because of bad habits I was taught and the convenience of eating things that were already prepared or took little effort during the many periods when I was depressed, overwhelmed, or chronically exhausted.

writtenINthestars

:laugh: Goblins snuck into my house at night with guns a forced me to eat twinkies

Oh thank God I'm not the only one this has happened to!!!

I could list a whole bunch of different things...but for me it just came down to that I was lazy, and didn't care enough about myself to stop the binging, emotional eating, or lack of exercise.

MissKim

I like to eat.

bahrainbel_2

Binging, that's the only thing that has made my weight fluctuate. My BMI and blood pressure are both in the normal/healthy range just now, so I'm going to use MFP to stop my massive binges, I do it when I'm tired, bored or upset.

Sara1978

I think 90% of my weight gain was mental.

I've struggled with clinical depression, OCD and social anxiety disorder from when I was about 12 years old on. I was a really intelligent, geeky little girl, and my peers made me miserable as a child. Even before I started gaining weight, I felt like there was something wrong with me, and that I was strange and ugly.

I became a vegetarian as a late teen. I had no idea how to do vegetarianism right, and when I got to college and was on the mandatory meal plan, the non-meat options were pretty much pasta, pasta, the wilted salad bar and-- oh yeah, more pasta. So I ate a lot of that stuff. I became very heavy in my freshman and sophomore years-- up to 155, which is quite big for a girl my height. I went on a very unhealthy, probably borderline anorexic diet junior year that dropped me to 110 in three months. I was running about five miles and eating less than 800 calories each day. I gave up on trying to be a vegetarian at about that time too. My food choices became extremely unhealthy, since I was mostly just looking for things that had a small amount of calories total. I defaulted to a kid's size McDonald's hamburger, a cucumber and half a bagel most days.

After graduation, I moved to Chicago to work, and a lot of depressing stuff happened in my life, including my dad being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Being alone in a city where I barely knew anyone, thinking all the time about my sick dad in Hawaii, and doing a difficult job where I felt as if I was being sabotaged every step of the way (I was teaching in an inner-city high school), just made the depression worse. I wound up on a bunch of meds, and I think those contributed to putting the weight back on-- they were supposed to even out my mood, but that equated to making me feel comfortably miserable all the time instead of alternating between days of a-okay and days of wanting to jump in front of a train. On a typical day, I'd wake up at 5AM, go to work, eat my 20 minute lunch in the cafeteria with the students because I wanted to protect "my kids" from bullies and gang recruiters, go home, lesson plan and grade papers until 8PM, grab a burger at McDonald's across the street at around 8PM,, then maybe play a video game for an hour or two. Sleep, repeat. No exercise, no time for myself-- just meds, horrible school cafeteria food, and McDonald's.

I left Chicago after two years; my aunt basically came and brought me to her home in Michigan, because my family was worried that I was going to do something to hurt myself. Even though I got a new job and a cute little house of my own there, I had already hit a really low point that it was hard to break out of. My social anxiety was worse than it had ever, ever been, and my perception that I was unattractive just compounded it. I didn't want to leave my house. I would walk the half a mile to my workplace, work eight hours, and then walk home. I'd stop at the Dairy Queen along the way to get a mushroom burger most days just so I could avoid having to go to the grocery store, because there would be people at the grocery store and they would judge me and then something horrible would happen. Nuts, right? But that's how people with SAD think. That made the depression worse... and I don't think the meds ever really did anything to help me. I just never felt like *doing* anything, or putting my heart into *trying* something because of the pain that went along with failure, or the fear of looking awkward and failing in front of other people.

I moved out to Washington in 2008, and for a while things were really looking up. I made friends easily out here (I'm in a town with a very high geek population, so I fit in just great) and I was actually getting out of the house more. Then my dad passed away from cancer in the fall of 2008, and shortly thereafter, I hit my heaviest weight of just a little shy of 160 lbs. I lost a little bit of weight (about 15 lbs) for my wedding in September of 2009, but gained some back before I found MFP in May of 2010.

I'm not really sure why MFP "clicked" with me the way that it did, but it did click... Maybe it was the realization when I looked at the message boards that I wasn't the only person who had to deal with ****, and that some people had much, much worse things going on and yet were able to push past it. Or maybe it was just the fact that the OCD in me loves detailing my daily food intake, lol. The rest is history, I guess. Including the depression and the SAD... I haven't been on any antidepressants in the last year, and I have only had to take my SAD medication once in the last 12 months.

I really think that the weight gain was all in my head...

Shamrock40

In a nutshell, being married and pregnant made me fat! LOL, just kidding. I always seemed to be much thinner when I was single, though, I can tell you that much! I think when married, it is so much easier to take care of someone else and their needs, than deal with your own needs. My first husband was a complete and total drain on me emotionally, and when we purchased a business that I moved away from him to run (we were still married,) I was able to lead that "single" lifestyle again and put my attention on myself, and lost about 70 lbs. (From 205 down to 135). During that time, I lost my 16 year old nephew to bone cancer, and that really made me prioritize. I ended up leaving my husband and focusing on myself, and was able to stay at about 150-160 for a few years.

Then I got a job as a police dispatcher, and worked tons and tons of 12-hour shifts where I was literally plugged in (chained down) to a desk for hours at a time. Everyone there got what we called "the secretary spread" by sitting for years on end. I was there for 8 years and put on about 40 lbs. Yikes! During that time I met my husband, and we started "playing house" and we both packed on the pounds. I really love, love, love to cook and drink wine, and one of my favorite ways to show someone I love them is to cook for them. Coincidentally, his ex-wife never cooked a meal the entire time they were married. So he SAYS that he fell in love with me because of my personality ... but I know it's because I cooked anything he wanted.

I had one miscarriage,(early 2005,) which my husband and I both took pretty hard. I put on 25 lbs in about 4 months. Woah! But then my first pregnancy was great. I put on 10 lbs while pregnant, and by the time I went for my 6-week check-up, (July 2006,) I had lost 35 lbs. Sweet! I thought, hey, pregnancy is awesome, why not have another one. Little did I know, not all pregnancies (or babies) are the same! When my son arrived, (December 2007,) I had put on about 20 pregnancy pounds, then he was colicky, and I am pretty sure I suffered from a little PPD. I had two under age 2, my son slept erratically, nursed all the time and was a little beastie most of the time, and my husband was working nights. I was completely overwhelmed, and ate, literally, anything and everything! I was so strung out from lack of sleep, it was not a fun time.

I already weighed somewhere in the 230's last year, then I ended up with a surprise pregnancy (after my husband had the snip-snip) and that ended in another miscarriage, which threw me into a bit of a tailspin in October of last year. I went on a cruise with my 4 sisters in December and when I saw the pictures, I was absolutely horrified. I knew the pictures would be bad, I've been heavy for years, but this (247 lbs.) was the worst, and the heaviest I have ever been.

And the rest, as they say, is (and will continue to be) history!

butterflyinamber78

I forgot one. World of Warcraft!!

Oh my yes...Though now I play with a bottle of water, and all food in another room....Can't leave my cue might pop!

SyreetaJayne1

I used to have a really active job so I never had to watch what I ate as I always burned it off. But then I got a desk job, I used to eat the same amount of calories but with no physical activity and the pounds piled on!

I agree the nutrition info on this site is a real eye-opener as I would have never even thought about how mach fat and calories is in cheese and sauce and the little extras!

Best of luck on your journey

Ditto

Enigmatica

Stress from my narcissistic personality disordered ex-husband was the start of it all. The knee injury I got along the way didn't help. Oh and then the side effects of the anti-anxiety meds I went on (due to stress of same ex) included WEIGHT GAIN. And I went from working with horses day and night to being on a computer day and night. It just snowballed.