Why did you let yourself go?...

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Replies

  • awolf2011
    awolf2011 Posts: 265 Member
    I have a love for anything sweet....plain and simple. I've had 3 beautiful boys and I weighed much, much less before my first was born. I used him as an excuse and then the second and then the third. After my mother-in-law died at the age of 63 from diabetes last year, I realized that I don't want that to happen to me. I'm also trying to lose weight before I get pregnant as well. It is a nasty cycle....
  • MaraDiaz
    MaraDiaz Posts: 4,604 Member
    I stopped believing in myself.
  • Seaglass1123
    Seaglass1123 Posts: 500 Member
    Depression and eating my feelings.
  • watchhillgirl
    watchhillgirl Posts: 597 Member
    This is going to sound crazy...but it was Cancer. I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. The chemo actually caused me to gain weight and go thru menopause. I had multiple surgeries, and finally feel like a woman again. When I finished all that, I made goals for myself. 1. Get my MBA- Done! 2. Run a 5K- Done 3. Lose this weight- Working on it. 4. Run a 1/2 marathon - signed up for November race. And many more goals

    If I can get thru 19 months of chemo, multiple surgeries, get my MBA and run 5K's.....I know I have the stuff to make this stick and lose this weight. I just need some friends to help me along the way.
  • beckieboomoo
    beckieboomoo Posts: 590 Member
    never been super skinny, but when i got with my Mr (been together 2 and half years) and we would just sit with a movie and junk food could we could never afford to do much else and i didn't realise how much weight i had put on :/ i did try to do diet and exercise but i always failed :/ but am just sick of seeing a fatty in the mirror and sick of feeling ugly! so begin of this year i decided enough is enough and i bought a exercise bike a cut out the crap! and i eat a reasonable healthy amount :) and now am doing 30 day shred and starting lifting weights when ive done 30 day shred! :)
  • oh_em_gee
    oh_em_gee Posts: 887 Member
    It was a process. I was 135 after losing the freshman 15, and I loved the way I looked. Then a year later I was at 145. Then 150. Then 155 at graduation. Then 170 a year later. Then 205 last Christmas. Each time I told myself, ok, this is it. I'll accept this weight, but it won't get any higher. And then it would, because I didn't change what I was eating or doing. I was clueless about just how much I ate and how little I burned. I'm still not the best with exercise, but I know how many calories I need, and how many calories I'm getting. I've said to myself, this weight is not acceptable and I will change it, and I'm acting on that.
  • MaraDiaz
    MaraDiaz Posts: 4,604 Member
    About that expression, 'let yourself go'. Come to think of it, I never liked it. It implies that I have a white-knuckled death grip on myself to keep from gaining weight and you know what, that used to be true.

    So part of the reason I 'let myself go' is that I'd always done it wrong, always done it the hard way, crash dieted, ate foods that triggered hunger and binges, and neglected exercise most of the time.

    If I had known then what I know now, maybe I wouldn't have gotten quite so fat anyway.
  • ThatSoundsHard
    ThatSoundsHard Posts: 475 Member
    Well,
    Lots of reasons, really.
    I have always had **** metabolism and can be pretty GD lazy when I want to be.
    I grew up in an extremely low income household. So the food we could afford wasn't always the best, just something to fill bellies it not always with nutrition. This didn't really help with being the fat kid.
    As I grew into my early teens I developed a pretty gnarly eating disorder (as in I didn't) which kept me dangerously underweight for close to 10 years.
    Enter pregnancy at 19. I gave up the not eating and ate everything. I had a lot of problems with weak joints and bones (from being malnourished) and was ordered on bed rest for a decent chunk of it and gained about 100lbs.
    The first was born and I was lazy, I ate better but didn't step up the exercise for the first couple of years and I still didn't eat that much better. Then there is the regular depression coupled with the post partum that almost make it impossible to get out of bed some days, let alone find the motivation to even clean the house. Forget about exercise.
    I started dropping down a bit after she hit her second birthday then about 6 months later, found out I was pregnant again. This time I ate better, moved more but still had hip displacement and couldn't get as much exercise as I wanted or needed to.
    Now, my second is 2, I find it extremely hard to lose any weight while breast feeding but I'm still sitting at damn near 200lbs and am fairly and doughy. I can't stand it. My kids deserve better than this and so do I.

    So I guess the short answer would be: Lack of self moderation. I go too far into extremes. Either I don't eat anything or I eat all the things.
  • BuffyEat2Live
    BuffyEat2Live Posts: 327 Member
    Eating disordered thinking, including have a very emotional attachment to food and using eating, exercising, and dieting as ways to have control in a world full of chaos and as a way to suppress emotions...

    I think that I'm finally over my emotional attachment to food, which is an amazing thing.

    The most recent time that I gained all the weight back was because of grief eating. I ate my feelings when my mom died last year, and sat around a lot, too.
  • Linli_Anne
    Linli_Anne Posts: 1,360 Member
    I never learned how to take care of myself properly in the first place.

    Not to say that my choices over the course of my life have been anyone's but my own, but I didn't have a very good foundation.

    My family are social eaters. Someone has a baby, we eat. Someone drops by to say hello, out come the tables of food. Someone gets married, we eat. Familiy supper - restaurant! Get the idea? Everything positive in my life revolved around food. So, naturally I easily associate eating with good feelings. Add on top of that being busy in activities etc. and it leads to a lot of convenience foods.

    So, I was always heavy. It was the year I got engaged that I decided to do something about it. Went on a ridiculous low cal diet (think 800-100 calories a day) and lost about 60 pounds in about 5 months. You can bet that weight didn't stay off. . .when I got married the following year, I was 15-20 pounds heavier, but still not as heavy as I had been. I gained a lot while pregnant, and joined weight watchers after my first to lose it all plus the extra 20 pounds I'd been carrying around for the last 3 years. Repeat after baby #2 was born, only without weight watchers this time.

    Through all of that I have learned very real, very healthy, very good habits in my eating. Yes, I'm still trying to drop some of the weight, and yes I don't always make the best choices, but this is a lifelong change, not a quick fix and then boom, I'll be cured from ever being fat again.

    So, I don't think I let myself go because I didn't know how to control myself in the first place and how to properly make good choices for me and my body.
  • kjohnson754
    kjohnson754 Posts: 54 Member
    I've never let myself go. I was blessed with a slim figure my whole life. I was literally TRYING to gain weight. At 6' 135lbs people always told me to "eat a burger" (I love the double standard when it comes to slim women. Tell them to eat but if a slim woman tells a bigger woman to put the food down, people want to fight). I gained a lot of work after getting off the Depo shot. I am currently 197 lbs at 6'. I still look great and don't gross myself out. I pretty much now work out just to work out and keep myself in shape. If the pounds come off, that's a plus but I do watch what I eat as well. I like wearing bikinis in the summer so I'm pretty much trying to get my six pack back but never have I actually let myself go. I've been working out since a very young age. It's who I am and what I do. My daughter is learning to do the same thing and she's only 7.
  • harvo
    harvo Posts: 4,676 Member
    I let myself go so I could join MFP and meet great and beautiful people!!!
  • RandiLandCHANGED
    RandiLandCHANGED Posts: 630 Member
    Getting pregnant....3 times. Every time I gained too much weight and used it as an excuse to get fat, end of story.
  • NRLMMeynendonckx
    NRLMMeynendonckx Posts: 21
    I just didn't care enough about myself

    this I didn't care enough about my body. I hated myself. And I eat away all the hate and pain.
  • zingaravh
    zingaravh Posts: 14
    I got married, gave up on everything, and discovered pizza.
  • 970Mikaela1
    970Mikaela1 Posts: 2,013 Member
    Well, because I greatly enjoy

    Soda
    Fast Food
    Pizza
    Candy
    Salty Snacks
    Fried Chicken
    etc


    and BEER
  • GeneaSwan
    GeneaSwan Posts: 4 Member
    Complacency and denial.

    It's depressingly sadly funny how true that is. I would tell people, "You know MY BMI says I am almost OBESE." And they would be like, "No you're not. whatever." Like it was the craziest thing in the world. Impossible, even. But now, 40 pounds lighter, I realize that the scale wasn't lying. I was lying to MYSELF that things had gotten that bad. I look at people now and I KNOW they don't know how unhealthy/overweight they look, because I couldn't see it for myself.

    I KNEW I was heavy. I KNEW I wanted to be at the back of every picture, I just didn't realize what I REALLY looked like. Partly because I didn't want to look. Did I want to see myself in the mirror?? Nope. Did I hide in pictures or just be in charge of taking them? Yup. And weight loss is a long, hard road. Not many have the nerve to walk it and stay on it.
  • _Witsy_
    _Witsy_ Posts: 609 Member
    My main issue was Emotional/Verbal abuse....food became my "safe haven". The weight gain turned into shame, self hate, and not giving two sh#ts about anything.

    At the end of the day, I had given up on myself. Plain and simple.

    Never again.
  • TxcMommaHays
    TxcMommaHays Posts: 5
    I have yo yo dieted for years. And I do real well until a man tells me how good I look. :( I have done this since I was 17. I don't like talking about it...but I know the reasons behind it ... just don't know how to get over it. Hoping this will help. I am now 43 and about 15 years ago I lost about 45 pounds...doing real well and a neighbor man told me that I was looking good...gained weight the next week and stopped trying. :(
  • Emma_Problema
    Emma_Problema Posts: 422 Member
    I never did. I'm a constant yo-yo dieter with a history of disordered eating. I'm just trying to focus on losing weight in a sane and manageable way now. Oh and focusing on getting strong and fast and awesome rather than skinny and weak and tired.
  • PapaverSomniferum
    PapaverSomniferum Posts: 2,670 Member
    I stopped watching my eating and started eating what the people around me told me to.

    I'm a very, very, VERY petite person. I gained a lot of weight eating what the average sized people around me told me was "normal" and "healthy".

    Now I've learned to respond to "is that all you're going to eat? just a salad? just one helping? only one twix out of the pack???"

    with a sound, "go fvck yourself"
  • never124get
    never124get Posts: 163
    Because our society allows mothers to use pregnancy and having children as a valid excuse to get fat and stay that way. Pure and simple. I used my children as an excuse to not work out.
    Isn't that the truth, I am actuallyl osing weight to hae a baby lol

    That's why I'm losing too!! But I just pretty much became lazy...I got a desk job where I sat for 12 hours and on top of that continued to eat junk and fast food...plain and simple, put bad stuff in your body on top of being lazy you're going to get big!
  • randomgyrl
    randomgyrl Posts: 111 Member
    I could give some long excuse about having PCOS, depression over not getting pregnant, emotional eating...blah blah blah....which may have played a roll, but in reality, I just simply love fried foods, eating out, and chocolate.
  • grimendale
    grimendale Posts: 2,153 Member
    I kept eating like I was playing and training for high school football, but I was neither training nor in possession of a high schooler's metabolism. Once the weight gain started, it was easier to go with it than to try and go healthy, particularly given the stress and poverty of college.
  • oh_em_gee
    oh_em_gee Posts: 887 Member
    Because our society allows mothers to use pregnancy and having children as a valid excuse to get fat and stay that way. Pure and simple. I used my children as an excuse to not work out.
    Isn't that the truth, I am actuallyl osing weight to hae a baby lol

    That's why I'm losing too!! But I just pretty much became lazy...I got a desk job where I sat for 12 hours and on top of that continued to eat junk and fast food...plain and simple, put bad stuff in your body on top of being lazy you're going to get big!

    It's pat of why I'm losing too. I'm not going to ttc for at least 2-3 years, but I want my health on track before then, so that, when the time comes, I don't have any added struggles. I'm already up against pcos, medicated depression, and arthritis, so I don't need anything else working against me
  • MamaBear57
    MamaBear57 Posts: 336 Member
    Depression, self loathing, and excussives like I am to busy to work out. Life is complicated and it is so easy to give up or loose sight of what is important. I know I did for a long time.
  • Alex_is_Hawks
    Alex_is_Hawks Posts: 3,499 Member
    i was raped. i needed to hide.

    it worked. until it didn't.
  • LadyZephyr
    LadyZephyr Posts: 286 Member
    I had severe depression and a mental disorder and was on a lot of medication as treatment, one of which was a major appetite increaser but I don't blame my weight gain on that, though it sure as hell didn't help.
    I ate food to try and fill the void and had no self control, nor any desire to work out. I didn't care about myself or my appearance.
    I first gained extra weight when I was 10/11 but lost it by the time I was 13. I was a little chunky but not overweight, I was an active kid.
    I gained a lot when I was 16/17 and later I also developed bulimia. I've been in recovery for a year but you gain a helluva lot of weight when you start eating healthily again, your body just latches onto any calories it can get and stores them as fat.
    Now, I'm trying to lose weight and keep it off, and get my dream body while fixing my attitude towards food.
    I've never been massively over weight, my highest weight was about 190lbs and I'm 5'8", but I used to maintain at around 140lbs before I gained weight. I'm 161lbs now and aiming for 135.
  • Zephaniah14
    Zephaniah14 Posts: 2
    Depression. Stopped caring about myself and also subconsciously used weight gain to ward off people from getting close to me or giving me too much attention.

    On the road to new hope though now :smile:
  • sigsby
    sigsby Posts: 220 Member
    Good question. When I was younger I was the skinnny kid. No matter what I did I could not gain weight. I always thought that if I could put on ten or fifteen pounds I would look better. I would order double meals and eat every bite and never gain a pound. Well eventually as you get a little older your metabolism slows down. I started to put on a pew pounds and thought it was great. So I just continued what I was doing. I got a little heavier and a little heavier. At some point I realized that I was out of shape. Then I was preocupied with life. It wasn't until I was in my late thirties that I decided to do anything about it. In a couple of months I will be 42 and I am still fighting the battle.

    This is the last time. I am going to destroy all of my demons. By the end of 2013 I will be living a healthy life.No more being overweight and no more smoking. I will have an active lifestyle and a healthy diet. No surrender!

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