Why did you gain the weight?

Meggy247

Lack of exercise, stress and emotional eater (stuffing my feelings) and thinking food=love (DUH, it doesn't!).

justaxletdown

I fell into a really deep pit of depression that I'm truly just breaking out of

mrsmellymac

I got depressed when my husband deployed and gained a LOT of weight in a year. When he got home, I got pregnant and couldn't do anything but try to eat healthy and walk a bit.

secostley

Stress was the big reason behind my weight gain. I learned to better handle life, got a grip on things, repriortized and went to work on bringing order to this temple. Almost a year later, I'm doing well.

Shannonigans84

I loathe exercise and enjoy a variety of tasty cuisine. Losing weight is a challenge because I resent that I have to work a lot harder than most people I know. That's why I've been gaining and losing the same 30 pounds since college. I'm starting to accept that this sucks and I just have to put on my big girl panties and deal with it.

KettyLan

I'm an emotional eater...imagine that in combination of stress, depression and loneliness.....right now I'm fighting back! I won't let me, defeats ME!

Lisa_222

I'm addicted to food Addicts don't need a reason. They will abuse their substance of choice at all costs and in spite of any infromation they have about how baqd it its for you.

cofakid

Bordem/Procrastination/emotional eating. I use to think i was soo horribly fat and hated my body and instead of trying to loose weight i ate more. Now id KILL to be that skinny again. And then with university work i was constantly going hmmm need to write this essay but dont want to... oh look im hungry lets watch a movie and chow down. But i know the stress of my last job really did it. I gained 10kg(22lb) in 6 months from eating due to the stress of that job. and i LIKE food, i really do. In the past i so often would eat almost to the point of throwing up wen we were our at resturants cause the food was just soooo good i wanted more even if my body couldnt take it. and we'd come home from groccery shopping with all this stuff that looked soo good i just wanted to eat it all right there right then even if i wasnt hungry. when i was dealing with the bad stress of my last job id find everyone else was full from dinner but i wasnt, i needed more. i pushed my stomach so much that i needed more to feel full than my body really needed. Now i only have that if ive had very little to eat the rest of the day (eg skipped breakfast, smaller lunch than usual).

My biggest problem is fighting cravings for the foods i loved that i cant afford to gorge out on. and i do get the occasionaly urge to just sit ad eat and watch tv and eat till im sick. i know i can ave those foods in small amounts and a lot of the time i am totally cool with that. but wen i have bad cravings and the small amounts just dont seem to satisfy thats wen i start to falter.

And i have NEVER been a fan of exercise or sport. i was a pretty chubby kid, and i had a lot of health issues and a lot of bad accidents that stopped me exercising (broke my arm 3 different times across a few years, 2 broken ribs as an 8 yr old, many more). and as i got older my dislike of sport never really changed. im not very coordinated either so sport was never really fun. and with bad asthma it was always pretty painfull to get into sport. My anemia meant i spent alot of childhood sick and in hospital, and even older i get sick easily. as a teenager i had lots of problems pop up that also got in the way of exercise and sport. And since then i just havent developed a taste for it. The only sport i really love is skiing, and since i can only do that once a year it doesnt help my weightloss much. i like soccer a bit, i tried zumba and thought it was cool but im so uncoordianted and got sick of doing it all wrong. i dont like gyms i dont feel comfortable in that environment nor do i like the idea of spending time to get to the gym or at the gym. i like swimming and walking. thats about it. i have fun cycling but i got a big butt and it hurts alot which turned me off it (then my bike got thrown out by family).

MzMiller1215

I gained weight because my family expressed that they thought I was too skinny. Then, after my third pregnancy, I became a stay-at-home Mom. A combination of bad eating and lack of exercise were my main contributors.

Suziq2you

I ate every bad feeling I ever had. Now I voice them. Some people don't like me much anymore. And I'm okay with that. I like me now.

2stepz

I come from a family where generations tend to run close together... by that I mean teenage pregnancy is prevalent. My parents took an approach that left me emotionally and socially crippled. From a very young age, I was told time after time after time that I wasn't allowed to date until I was thirty, and that school and college comes before love. All that taught me was that I wasn't good enough, pretty enough... I wasn't loveable. I was also taught not to defend myself or my opinions; that was considered back-talk and was a punishable offense. Now - I recognize that these weren't the lessons my parents intended me to learn, but that is the message that was deeply ingrained by these oft repeated scoldings.

Where this transitions to weight gain is... complicated. I don't take care of myself. I often eat only one meal a day, which kills my metabolism. When I do eat, it has often been fast food. Not that I can't cook, but cooking for one tends to be wasteful, and waste is another lesson that reinforces the "Bad Lori" reaction. It goes farther than food, though. My hygiene is questionable, because I don't care about myself. I live a high-stress life. My degrees are in Engineering, and the doctors tell me the job is killing me. I did walk away from the high-stress job - but I jumped straight into the high-stress environment of graduate school. Life is BETTER, but it's still not good.

I don't know how to begin making me a priority in my life. I'm working on that here... trying to make myself eat healthier food more often. Going on long walks several times a week that help me reflect on what's broken and why it's broken... trying to figure out where _I_ want to go next, instead of where I'm expected to go next. It's not pretty... I turn thirty in six months... I have nothing to show for my life but some impressive frameable pieces of paper, a run down body, and a struggling soul. I'm a work in progress.

LoveMyFour

Pregnancy x4 lol.

Scorpioangel

I gained it I think because I lost confidence in myself and the workouts that I was doing were not producing the results that I wanted. I got lazy.. I didn't want to watch what I ate because no one else did. I started to hate getting up to work out and would make excuses not to work out after work. For me I put on the weight because I simply lost faith in myself.

carolineb81

2 pregnancies pretty much one after another so not losing baby weight before getting pregnant again. Eating far too much each time I was pregnant - too big portion sizes and basically using pregnancy as an excuse to eat everything and anything!

adalton6

Laziness and love of cake and cheetoes....

I literally would buy a box of my favorite cake (rainbow chip!) and the frosting to go with, come home, bake it, cool it, frost it and eat the WHOLE THING BY MYSELF in 4 days or less. Also I'd eat a whole bag of cheetoes in a day. Not good. I've not bought cake since I started using MFP and the gym. I just had cheetoes for the first time in months this week, and they were not as good as I remember so it's as though I'm not missing anything.

I tend to sit on my *kitten* in front of the tv and/or computer for HOURS. I'm still not that big on getting off my butt, but I do go to the gym 3 days a week and I've lost 21lbs so I'm doing something right!

I'm still missing the cake though...

Heres a way to get to eat some cake and not feel that guilty. Get your favorite cak and a diet soda to go with it. I like using diet coke with chocolate cake. Instead of using the oil and eggs or water just substitute the amount of liquid with the diet soda. So if it calls for 1 & 1/2 cups of water and a 1/2 cup of oil then use 2 cups of diet soda. I also like to use fat free cool whip and fresh fruit on top.

Elixandra

Pregnancy was my biggest one. When I had my last baby is when I gained the most. I was unable to take care of him or myself for around 2 weeks. <due to a nasty injury during child birth> I was not aloud to do much of anything for a month and had to rely on my hubby for everything. Then the stress of no money coming in because of him having to stay home to take care of me and the boys. Not being able to walk unassisted and unable to get up to get my new little guy was making me crazy. The 3 days at the hospital alone didnt help eather because they wouldn't let the baby to come see me eather. But im basically recovered and things are better

elizarae11

my dad was abusive and it caused me to become very depressed and i turned to food for comfort.

shoelady9

Laziness and depression. It's a bad cycle, one creates the other. Quitting smoking 16 months ago helped add on about 30 lbs but I already had about 50 to lose at that point.
I'm tired of being too tired to take part in my own life........