Why did you let yourself go?...

awolf2011

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

I stopped believing in myself.

Seaglass1123

Depression and eating my feelings.

watchhillgirl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I let myself go so I could join MFP and meet great and beautiful people!!!

RandiLandCHANGED

Getting pregnant....3 times. Every time I gained too much weight and used it as an excuse to get fat, end of story.

NRLMMeynendonckx

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

I got married, gave up on everything, and discovered pizza.

970Mikaela1

Well, because I greatly enjoy

Soda
Fast Food
Pizza
Candy
Salty Snacks
Fried Chicken
etc

and BEER

GeneaSwan

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_

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

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

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.